- The Cassette app is a retro-themed video player for iOS
- It plays random videos from your past to help you rediscover old moments
- It features retro styling, with a CRT video player and VHS tape boxes
Back before digital videos and long before iPhones, people would capture videos on analog VHS cassette tapes. Video snippets would be captured in succession and bunched together on a single tape reel, meaning that when it came to watching back an old tape from years past, you never quite knew which clip was coming next.
That randomness and sense of discovery has been captured in a brand-new iOS app called Cassette, and it faithfully restores some of the fun of watching tapes on an old CRT TV. Whether you miss the old VHS days or never experienced them firsthand, it’s an enjoyable distraction and a new way to view – and rediscover – videos stashed away on your phone.
When you load up Cassette, you’ll see a small CRT-style TV at the top of the app window, with a bunch of cassette tape boxes beneath. Each one is labeled for a year or a collection that you’ve created in Apple’s Photos app. Select a box and a tape will emerge from it and insert itself into the TV, which then plays the video.
If you want to see a larger version of the video, all you need to do is tap it. When this happens, you’ll see it in full screen, with retro-style text noting the location, date and time of the video, all in a classic monospaced font. It’s a real throwback moment for anyone who experienced footage like this in years gone by.
Revisiting the past
A key aspect of Cassette is that the video selection is random. Tap a tape box and the app will pick a video from within that collection, and you can further lean into this idea by selecting the randomize button in the video player, or by pressing the Take Me Somewhere button, which loads a random video for your perusal.
You can pay ($0.99 a month, $5.99 a year, or $7.99 for a lifetime pass) to unlock the ability to choose which video plays, if you like. But that randomness is an intentional part of the app’s offering.
Writing in a blog post, Cassette’s developer explained the motivation behind creating the app: “Remember the magic days when we shot family events on a camcorder? Later when we put the VHS tape into the player, we’d get a random stream of snapshots through time, a quick clip of a birthday here, a mountain there, then 10 minutes of a 5-year-old pulling faces and pretending to walk down imaginary stairs. Cassette steals a little bit of your free will to choose and replaces it with these forgotten videos, just like the good old days.”
In other words, it’s about rediscovering old videos that you might not remember exist, just as watching a VHS tape surfaces clips from the past that would otherwise have been lost among all the others saved on a cassette sitting on a dusty shelf.
That all makes Cassette a fun little distraction. I’ve given it a go and have been presented with old Call of Duty highlights, videos of friends’ dogs misbehaving, timelapse shots of musicians in a recording studio, and much more. Without Cassette, these clips would likely have been lost to time among the thousands of others on my iPhone, never to see the light of day again. That makes Cassette an entertaining way to revisit the past, both in style and substance.
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