As I have established, this is a wild year in audio hardware. Wired earbuds is back, MP3 player is something again, and CD players colder than ever. But as sloppy as hardware nostalgia was back then, you had to be one Minority Report-style pre-cog to place this device on your bingo card. Introducing: a DIY thing-y that streams Spotify on a cassette. Yes. Spotify on tape. F**k it.

Let me start by saying that you cannot buy this gadget; this is a hacked-together project from YouTuber Julius Nagima– a one-off with no Meanwhile plans to become a purchasable device. That said, there’s still a lot to love here, even if you can’t get your hands on it.

As we have already established, this thing takes your run-of-the-mill music stream (I named it Spotify, but it could be any streaming service) and converts the digital stream into an analog one. No, not like any regular digital-to-analog converter (DAC) like this one tape shape that I also want to buy; I’m talking Granted analog. Once the conversion has taken place via the DAC, the new analog stream from your chosen music service is recorded onto a thin strip of tape and played back through a speaker.

Why on God’s green earth would you want to do that? It’s definitely not fidelity—we have lossless formats, preamps, and regular DACs for that. It’s because tapes just have that—how shall I say—je ne sais quoi. It looks like tapes! Warm, crunchy, washed down, very lo-fi. It’s not how you want to listen to music all the time, probably, but it has a lot more character than your average shitty-ass Bluetooth stream.

Above all, Julius Makes’ gadget looks great. If you’re into nostalgia, especially from the era where tapes were a real thing, then there’s a lot to love here. It has buttons and knobs for recording level and playback volume, and works like a tape delay, which is a type of audio effect that gives sounds an echo-y, nostalgic vibe. For good measure, Julius Makes threw in a quarter-inch audio in and out jack so it can be used like a tape delay, too.

Obviously, the whole thing is a pain in the ass to make, too, so as angry as you are not able to own one, we are grateful that someone bothered to make this device in the first place. As Julius Makes said, there is a learning curve, manufacturing is expensive, and the wait for parts is longer than expected. But hey, we got Spotify on tape for the effort, and for that, I give this project 5 out of 5 nostalgia-shaped cassette tapes.