Loop bin duplicator

For 8-tracks, the tape is wound from the slave recorder onto a device mounted on its side, called a "sidewinder", which holds several small reels, and extracts and winds the tape from the slave recorder onto each reel into an endless-loop configuration (with the tape being pulled from the center of the wind), where each full reel is then placed in an empty 8-track cartridge and spliced together, either by machine or by hand, with a foil splice that holds the loop together.

This clear leader splice is read by an optical sensor (or in the case of a foil splice, coming in contact with electrical contacts in the tape path) in the loop bin duplicator, which triggers a cue tone that is recorded to the reel of pancake tape.

This cue tone is read by the loader, and engages it, for cassettes, to stop and cut the tape from the pancake and either splice it to the leader in the C-0 cassette shell, or for 8-tracks, to disengage winding to an internal cartridge reel on the "sidewinder" mechanism and then cut the tape (a process for both types of media called "de-spooling"), with the winding resuming to a new reel afterwards.

The early digital loop bins replaced the source tape with audio data stored on hard drives that was read and sent to digital-to-analog converters that were connected to the "slave" recorders, but they were prone to failure because of the amount of stress put on the hard disks.

The hard disks were replaced by huge RAM buffers which eliminated the failures but added greatly to the expense of the equipment.

At the time digital bins were first put into production, an S-VHS based storage device manufactured by Honeywell called a VLDS (Very Large Data Store) was used.