I had a different home computer, with a cassette player hooked up to it, and I remember well having to fiddle with volume and tone controls to get things to load. I'd always been envious of Commodores and the like, which came with what I assumed was a specially built and calibrated tape drive, so surprised when you said it was quite fiddly to load as well. What kind of adjustments could you make to get stuff to load properly?

Not the person you're replying to but I remember loading games from tape on the Commodore 64 could be fiddly as well. Not sure about adjustments (today I am spoiled, having a disk drive for my 64) because I was a kid back then. I just remember how frustrating it was to see "LOAD ERROR" after waiting for what felt like an eternity. I think we just rewound the tape tried again.

Yeah, it was a super expensive custom cassette tape drive. The only components it shared with a regular cassette tape player was the read and write heads, and the capstan drive. Everything else about it was unique to Commodore.

That sounds like a Tandy, at least, they just used a normal tape recorded with an adapter for mic/headphones. And people had to fiddle as you say, I think.