PocketDeck Tape Player

Your albums as cassettes on a shelf, played on a deck with real reels and auto-reverse. Read the liner notes and sleeve scans. Apple Music, Plex, Jellyfin. Week free.

Remember dubbing an album onto a blank tape and wearing it out on the bus? PocketDeck turns your music library into a shelf of cassettes and plays them on a brushed-aluminium personal stereo straight out of 1988.

A SHELF OF TAPES • Every album becomes a shop-bought cassette, its spine printed in colours taken from the cover art. • Flick through the stack and the tapes lean as they pass. Tap one and it swings out in its case; tap again to turn it over and read the tracklist for Side A and Side B. • Genre tabs sort the shelf for you: Rock, Pop, Hip-Hop, Jazz, Soul, Electronic and more. Missing or messy genres are filled in from Apple's music catalog, so 2Pac ends up under Hip-Hop where he belongs. • Mix tapes and soundtracks get shelves of their own, mixes with a felt-tip label on masking tape. Singles and EPs sit at the end, out of the way.

A DECK THAT BEHAVES LIKE ONE • Real reel physics: the tape winds from one reel to the other, and the reels speed up and slow down the way real ones do. • Mechanical keys: REW, PLAY, STOP and FF clunk down under your thumb, and PLAY stays latched while the tape runs. • A moment of leader hiss before the music starts, and the whir of fast-forward and rewind. • Auto-reverse: every album is split across Side A and Side B. At the end of Side A the deck clunks, the reels change direction and the arrow lights up. • A three-wheel tape counter and a battery light. • Your tape stays in the deck. Close the app, come back, and it's waiting at the song you were on.

LINER NOTES • Tap the tape in the deck to take out its case: the cover, then turn it over to see both sides' songs and tap one to cue it. • Open the fold-out for the liner notes: the album's story, who played what, and scans of an original sleeve, often the cassette's own J-card. Pinch to read the small print. • Credits and scans come from MusicBrainz and the Cover Art Archive, open music databases kept up by fans, with the story from Wikipedia.

YOUR MUSIC, WHEREVER IT LIVES • Apple Music: every album in your library. • Plex: sign in with Plex and PocketDeck finds your server, at home or away. • Jellyfin: enter your server address and you're in.

A TAPE IN THE BOX PocketDeck comes with "Side Street" by The House Band, four original chill synth tracks, so you can press PLAY the moment it's installed.

FREE FOR A WEEK Play your whole library free for 7 days, then unlock PocketDeck once for $0.99. No subscription, no ads, no tracking. The tape in the box always plays.

Apple Music playback of songs that aren't downloaded requires an Apple Music subscription. Plex and Jellyfin require your own server.