I asked my Mum about different audio from back in the day and she mentioned that her brother had an 8 track cassette player in his car. Unfortunately I don’t have the player to show or a photo, but here’s what that may have looked like:
Delving deeper into 8 tracks, here’s what I found out:
When it comes to the mechanics of the eight track tape, it was made up of “an endless loop of standard 1/4 inch magnetic tape, housed in a plastic cartridge”. Eight track is named as such as there were eight parallel soundtracks and four stereo programmes associated. source
I grew up with cassette tapes and I didn’t know what the difference was between cassettes and 8 tracks. Apparently 8 tracks had a single reel, whereas a cassette has two reels which can go in both directions. A cassette tape can also fit more than 8 tracks onto a tape (unlike the, you guessed it, 8 track tape). source