Does anyone do this? I can find used studio released tapes for less $ than blank tapes, so I'm thinking about buying some. What's the quality like on these?

works fine, i think the clear ones sound the best. if you record over a grimey ass old tape youll get interesting effects too.

^Good insight. Right now I got type 1 maxells. Just to be clear i'm talking about going to the music shop, buying a $1 cassette with music already on it, and recording over it.

yeah man, i always record over old tapes. sometimes i take them apart and adjust the length by shortening the tape, or even splicing new ones together with scotch tape, i like 120 minute tapes, especially with my old hand held recorder with lofi mode, it plays at twice as slow, with a pitch adjuster so you can slow it down even more and get like 5 hours on one tape. I also sometimes touch the magnetic strip a little bit here and there and it adds some real cool lofi flakes, not recomended for anything to professional but super awesome if you like lofi. the Lofi is not nececarrily low quality and can always be enhanced with a little sp processing. got no spell checker.

how do you record over a used tape? i have a tascam tape recorder and wanna figure out how to do this to get that lofi sound even more!

I recently tried freezing a cassette in the fridge freezer then re heating it on the radiator just to see if it would have any real noticeable effect on the sound but i couldn't really tell, I thought maybe with the actual tape strip tightening and expanding might make it sound real lofi, to be honest i couldnt tell the difference but a nice experiment if you have some spare tapes lying around.

lol thats awesome!

Tape the square holes or wrinkle up a bit of paper and fill the hole. This should work.