I tried to record music onto a cassette tape using modern tech

Summary

I tried to record music onto a cassette tape using modern tech I've always been a fan of retro tech, and this became even more true after AI swooped in and removed the soul and passion of all modern technology. I often go to my local second-hand stores to look at their games section in search of old gems, but I also pass by their electronics section because that's usually where they put the retro consoles themselves. This time however I found something much cooler: a 1978 Panasonic RQ-2106 shoebox cassette tape recorder for less than 10 euros. I remembered that my dad used to have this huge cassette deck that I was always playing with despite having no idea what the knobs did, so I couldn't let this one pass. I happened to already have a Five Finger Death Punch cassette that I got on another occasion, so I could use that to test it out. After popping in the batteries, I was very happy to see that it still worked perfectly apart from the fast-forward button acting a bit weird. This made me appreciate how things were built to last back then; my modern sneakers can't last 6 months without falling apart, yet this piece of tech from 1978 that must have been thrown around all over the place still worked as it should. The sound does suck, but that was also the case back then as cassettes were never a good medium for music in the first place. Before adventuring into recording new content, I wanted to fix the weirdness in the fast-forward button. One thing that is common among these decks is that they are almost entirely mechanical, with almost everything being driven by springs and cogs. I happened to find a video demonstrating how the mechanism worked for this particular model and this helped me understand that the issue was that one of the cogs in the fast-forward "circuit" happened to snap in half when I was playing with the device earlier. Not a fun start, but after gluing it back into one piece, I was able to put everything back together and the button now worked as it...