There was no fundamental limit to how many minutes of audio could be put on a tape, but longer tapes were necessarily thinner and more fragile. Commercially-produced read-only tapes would be however long was needed for their content.
Yes, CD players existed in the 90s. But why would you bother with one, when all your music is on tape? Even if you have one, your car is probably tape-only, and those audio-jack-to-tape converters were finicky, so you want to get music on tape.
If your tape player was fancy, it would be able to automatically start playing the back side. But this sometimes caused problems if you stopped it in the middle of the back side then wanted to start it again.
It was really annoying when you listened to an audiobook and somebody had left the tape in the middle. At least this was easier than VHS since playing the back side of the tape would take care of most of the "be kind, rewind".
If you wanted to listen to same song over and over and over again, you could record it on side A of a cassette, disassemble the cassette to remove the excess tape, reassemble it, and then record the same song in side B.
Oh, also, I forgot! Home taping (the piracy of the era) killed Music, which is why nobody makes music anymore and we all just have to listen to silence 24-7!
Heck, CD players were released in 1982! I got my first in 1986, when they began to get cheaper.
>But why would you bother with one, when all your music is on tape?
Because the audio quality was just that much better. It was like saying in the late 1990s/early 2000s "why get a DVD player when all your movies were on VHS tape?"
There was no fundamental limit to how many minutes of audio could be put on a tape, but longer tapes were necessarily thinner and more fragile. Commercially-produced read-only tapes would be however long was needed for their content.
Yes, CD players existed in the 90s. But why would you bother with one, when all your music is on tape? Even if you have one, your car is probably tape-only, and those audio-jack-to-tape converters were finicky, so you want to get music on tape.
If your tape player was fancy, it would be able to automatically start playing the back side. But this sometimes caused problems if you stopped it in the middle of the back side then wanted to start it again.
It was really annoying when you listened to an audiobook and somebody had left the tape in the middle. At least this was easier than VHS since playing the back side of the tape would take care of most of the "be kind, rewind".