I started getting cassette players working again when I had kids - I had lots of old cassettes with stories still, and after looking into a lot of stuff determined that it is one of the best physical storage formats for that kind of content for kids we currently have. Its major advantage is that it automatically saves state, and the state saving is player-independent. Add to that that players typically have large clunky buttons ideal for kids hands, and you have something even all the dedicated digital kids media players can't compete with.
> Its major advantage is that it automatically saves state, and the state saving is player-independent.
Yes, it's pretty mad if you think if what you would need to do to replace it.
Either you have a system with QR codes or simple ID chip to refer to some URL. Now you need a server, media licensing agreements and somewhere to store progress information, subscriptions, on and on. And the eternal temptation to abuse the data if it's in the cloud.
Or you store all the audio in the card, and now you need a memory chip and PCB in every card, plus some proprietary USB/WiFi/Bluetooth device to write the cards.
And the barely-makes-contact head system is genius too rather than sliding gold contacts. And it just has paper label inserts.
The only real down sides of cassettes other then the
obvious physicality if you don't like that, is they integrate badly into modern cars, have a fairly short run length (and occasionally get chewed up). And if lots of need to be authored quickly, that's too bad!
Basically the same story here for me. I have a trove of audiobooks I've carted around with me from house to house since I left home which my kids now eagerly pick from each night to listen to at bedtime. I've even supplemented my collection considerably since from eBay and the like.
It's just such a great medium. Fairly resilient, incredibly easy to use, compact, cheap ish.
And of course there's the heady dose of nostalgia for us old gits :)
If anyone has any recommendations I'd love to hear them. Top one from me has to be the BBC dramatised Lord of the Rings adaptation which I myself have been listening to off and on since I was around 5 or 6
> If anyone has any recommendations I'd love to hear them
For kids: Just William (read by Martin Jarvis) and PG Wodehouse Wooster books (don't recall who read that).
Early Eddie Izzard shows were also memorably good as audio. Very quotable.
There's a gigantic, not always unofficial, archive of Just a Minute online, which is excellent car journey material. This is the first 5 series, but there's 80-plus series of it in total https://archive.org/details/Just-A-Minute
I absolutely loved those just william cassettes as a kid! Completely forgot they existed, must have been lost or broken. Will definitely be repurchasing
Snap. My mates kids have this modern player and I thought it was really cool. You get these cards for it and slot them in to play the different stories and music. You can even get a special card that you can make recordings with. We almost got one for our kid until we realised, wait a min, it’s a tape recorder!
You lose a bit of sound quality but there’s no internet-cloud-based crap to deal with. You don’t need to worry about the company failing and bricking the toy or the Chinese spying on your kids. Also, they’re mostly just mechanical machines with a simple circuit so actually fixable, you can pick up a 30 year old broken player off eBay and chances are a rubber belt has just perished somewhere.
The Harry Potter audio tapes are good. It’s read by Stephen Fry and he’s great!
John Le Carre’s “Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy”and Umberto Eco’s “The Name of the Rose” were constant companions for me on road trips (sadly no English unabridged “Foucault’s Pendulum” exists)
I still have the BBC Radio 4 version of His Dark Materials on CD somewhere - I ripped them years ago and listen to the digital version. I've experienced HDM in various forms, including the stage version and of course the books, but I am most fond of the Radio 4 version.
My family had a reel-to-reel player, which was definitely not compact. My dad would record tapes from Vietnam and send over the recordings so that our family could hear him. I was afraid to touch it growing up. Instead, I played records on our turntable, and 8-tracks tapes in our car and a couple of 8-track players we had. As a teenager, I played cassettes, which was awesome. Vinyl sounded great and had the best overall experience for things like Christmas records, but cassettes had a warm feel and you could listen to them in your car, a friend’s car, on a boombox, etc. and if you had two tape decks, you could make mix tapes and share them! Or you could just copy a tape for a friend. Those were the days.
My dad had an Akai M8 (7" tapes) that I was not allowed to touch under threat of injury, but then he got heavily into quad vinyl and gave the beast to me: The whole Beatles catalogue on 7" tapes, yay!
I noticed that when my kids were little they could use cassette players well before they could read. They would choose music based on the pictures on the cassettes and the covers. We had a (clickwheel) iPod for our own music, but they couldn't work it because they couldn't read the text-only interface.
I stopped using my smartphone for about 1 year now and bought a walkman fiio cp13, it is really cool, but it is really hard to make a good sounding cassette, particularly if you dont know what you are doing (like me).
I record stuff from youtube and make mix tapes.
I am experimenting with "not getting what I want the second I want it", e.g. "I want to listen to XYZ", 1 second later I click on spotify and its done. Now I have to wait, first XYZ might not be on the cassette I have with me, or it might be 5 songs later, and I dont want to waste battery rewinding, sometimes I rewind with the pencil if I am really desperate.
But the feeling of excitement when the song you wanted comes up is really nice :)
Some people recommend the `rewind` player instead of cp13, as it also has bluetooth.
We have forgotten how `not to get things NOW`. It took me a while to get used to it. There has to be some minimal amount of effort for a `thing`, when you go below it, it just becomes nothing. Maybe thats just me.
The GTA games (yes, those ones) have pre-recorded radio stations that I found to be perfect for cassettes. You play songs with no way to skip them with funny commentary in between so it feels like one long take (like Pink Floyd’s DSOTM)
> but it is really hard to make a good sounding cassette
It is unfortunate that cassettes are the lowest fidelity consumer medium (of modern times). But there is some room to optimize within that space. If you are curious:
The cassettes available today are Type I, Type II ("high bias") and Type IV ("metal"), each being higher fidelity than the last, but not all portable players supported these types of tape.
Dolby B/C noise reduction could improve the dynamic range of tapes a bit, but again not all portable players supported this.
The ultimate was "dbx", which dramatically improved noise reduction and dynamic range ("tape hiss" was essentially inaudible), but now you're in the territory of needing dedicated rack-mount equipment to record and play your tapes.
My dad was a bit of an audio buff, so I got to experience these things as a kid.
Edit: according to gemini AI:
* Type I had a dynamic range of about 50bB (roughly 8 bits)
* High quality tape with Dolby B, C and dbx yielded roughly 65, 75, and 85dB SNR (about 11, 12.5, and 14 bits)
So you could get pretty close to CD quality, but not quite.
The measurements you are linking to are showing the level of distortion (HD3 v level) not dynamic range! The Y-axis on the graphs is showing the 3rd harmonic in dB in relation to the mV given in on the x-axis. This has absolutely nothing to do with dynamic range and it is also not the signal-to-noise-ratio. The fundamental frequency in those measurements was at 315 Hz. HD3 refers to Harmonic Distortion at 3rd level.
It's just annoying to post unverifiable numbers without a credible source and expect others to do the hard work of verifying it (or just take you at face value, probably). It has nothing to do with AI except insofar as your own feelings on AI convinced you this is a reasonable method of communication.
I just produced an album release on Type I cassette. High quality Type I (ferro oxid) is almost comparable to Type II, but you need the correct bias settings while recording. Practically the 8bits/50db is non-sense. Really. Maybe on a very bad tape deck you have a signal-noise-ratio of 8bit from silence to the first noticeable noise? But the actual music you are playing has much more dynamic range possibilities. Tbh my recordings on tape sound more dynamic then on Spotify.
Recording with Dolby-B on a Sony consumer level integrated Hi-Fi produced pretty solid sounding cassettes back in the day, given you have used TDK's chrome or metal blanks.
Some gotchas:
- Loudness wars were just beginning.
- Many CDs had some analog stages in its recording/mastering stages, so none of them was sounding "razor sharp" anyway.
Yesterday, I have listened Depeche Mode's Best of album on an Mechen M-30 with a good but not exquisite pair of Philips neck headphones, encoded as FLAC, and it sound superbly enjoyable. While I love vinyl, no, I won't return back to cassette (even though I have a nice deck), thank you.
About 5 years ago or so I was able to collect my Dad's C64 collection from my Mom's house, buy some new cables and an official C64 monitor off of eBay, and gift him his old computer back for Christmas.
I can't speak to cassettes, we had only cartridges and floppies. My Dad was a prolific pirate, so cases and cases of floppies. I'd say roughly 3 out of 5 worked, and we were able to boot the old game up. Karateka, 4th and Inches, Hat Trick, Bubble Bobble, Impossible Mission...
I was surprised the C64 worked, honestly. It had been stored for nearly a decade in an old Barn next to decrepit plow/cattle equipment from the early 1900's, not protected from the environment at all, just an old cardboard box literally busting at the seams. At least it wasn't on the ground.
Do keep in mind 96 dB is only the theoretical dynamic range of the CD medium, 99% of recordings utilize way less. (Besides, you'd be in pain if you cranked up the volume until you had 96dB of range above your hearing threshold, anyway)
CDs also eliminate wow & flutter (which ought to be pretty much inaudible on a decent deck, probably less so on an el cheapo grande walkman), which probably does more for (experienced) audio quality than high dynamic range.
Oh, and better high frequency response, for the young ones. :D
> It is unfortunate that cassettes are the lowest fidelity consumer medium
So what? The quality of music and enjoyment of it isn't depending on fidelity. I have Adam A7X monitors I mostly use day-to-day, but when I listen to lo-fi, I change the output to the output of my monitor which are absolutely horrible, but fits the mood better.
>The quality of music and enjoyment of it isn't depending on fidelity
It depends somewhat on personal preference, but also on genre. Classical music often has very high dynamic range, so analog recordings can have obnoxiously loud hiss in the quiet sections. This is probably a big reason why classical music labels were early adopters of digital recording, and why classical recordings often have a SPARS code [0] prominently displayed. Classical music was also much less affected by the loudness war, removing one incentive for buying on vinyl. You rarely see any preference for analog among classical listeners.
The point about fidelity/quality is moot anyway when most people are listening to overcompressed[1] music on crappy bluetooth speakers and/or in a noisy environment.
It is not necessarily a protocol/technology issue, more a cultural one. Most people are just not looking at quality first and will buy whatever is cheap, loud and has the form factor they want. Music is so compressed nowadays that they don't even hear a difference between crappy and better quality speakers.
>but it is really hard to make a good sounding cassette, particularly if you dont know what you are doing (like me).
All these modern cassette players use the same super basic mechanism. To make a good sounding tape you would need vintage hardware with Dolby noise reduction and less wow/flutter.
> Now I have to wait, first XYZ might not be on the cassette I have with me,
> There has to be some minimal amount of effort for a `thing`, when you go below it, it just becomes nothing.
I had this conversation with someone at the weekend. It's hard to find new music on Spotify because it's too easy to find stuff you already like.
I'm in my early 50s. I grew up in the 80s, in a fairly rural part of the UK with basically one music shop nearby and the next nearest a good four hours each way on the bus.
In 1988 when I was 15, a load of awesome albums came out that I really wanted and mostly couldn't afford. I bought Public Enemy - Fear of a Black Planet, Iron Maiden - Seventh Son, 808 State - Newbuild, and probably a couple of others. I'm sure I got into FLA and and The Pixies round about then too.
These tapes were about a tenner each and I had to repair quite a lot of Amstrad satellite receiver power supplies in my weekend job, and if I spent it all on tapes I'd have no money left for beer.
An awful lot of my tapes were pirate copies from friends, which we swapped at school. To this day I'm convinced that Appetite For Destruction was mixed to sound "right" when copied onto a battered old TDK D90 that's been rattling around in your schoolbag for a month by your mate's big brother who bought the CD because he's got a good job earning nearly £5/hr working on a fishing boat and has a really nice stereo.
The upshot of this is that I listened to a lot of things that I simply did not like very much, because it was new and I hadn't listened to it a million times. That being said, I don't think there was much I heard and thought "yeah I don't care for this at all", but there were definitely tapes I listened to that I wouldn't have picked out by myself.
I wouldn't have listened to 10,000 Maniacs if someone my dad worked with hadn't put it on in the car, and gave me his copy of the tape. I might not have listened to Dire Straits so much if another of my dad's friends hadn't given me a handful of bootlegs of their concerts and a copy of Making Movies, and one of the bigger kids in high school (hi Aaron, hope you're doing well) hadn't given me a pirate copy of Brothers in Arms.
I've since bought all of these on at least one other format.
I wouldn't have listened to Suzanne Vega I don't think, if my aunt hadn't given me a copy of her eponymous first album for Christmas when I was about 12 or 13 (it hadn't been out long in the UK), and I absolutely love Suzanne Vega. Loved her stuff from the first note of "Cracking". Have you ever listened to or watched something that you wanted to play at ten times speed just so you could put it into your head faster, then play it again at one tenth speed so you could pick up all the details?
This doesn't even touch on mixtapes, where someone else puts the effort in to curate a collection of things they think you will like, that represents who you are to them. Mixtapes were beautiful.
Now, with any luck, people will get into media they can hold in their hand. Even just things like MP3s on an SD card in some homebrew Arduino blob of a player.
There's more to music than just the noise it makes.
Also, if you bought an album, that meant getting some tracks you liked, and some you did not. Oddly enough I bought Suzanne Vega's self-titled album with 'Cracked' on it (off a guy in a stall off Brick Lane, only a fiver), and some of them are fantastic some slightly less so. Some albums I own I turn off one or two of the tracks as they are rubbish, but that was slightly more difficult if you had to fast-forward past them on a tape.
That said I listen to a lot of music on youtube, and it's a rare case where the dreaded 'algorithm' actually works to recommend things I had not heard before. I'm pretty sure that's where I learned of Unkle (UNKLE?) - who I _should_ have heard back in the day, but somehow never did.
(Incidentally, I found 'Daughter' recently, a UK band that is similar in tone to Suzanne Vega. Possibly also Heather Nova, although a bit more dreamy.)
I was a huge DJ Shadow fan as a teen, getting as many albums, mixes and singles as I could find online.
DJ Shadow was involved in the production of UNKLE's first album Psyence Fiction. I recently discovered that there was an intro mix that wasn't on most CD copies of the album that has DJ Shadow mashing ~70 tracks together in just over 2 minutes.
Instant, infinite choice = permanent anxiety. The most relaxed I've been in decades was being stuck in an airport overnight, with a broken phone, and a book that was not as good as the show. No where to go, no one expecting anything from me, no notifications, no choice, no anxiety. Finite is fine by me.
My cousin had many old tapes from 1994-1995 of radio recordings. They've been put up for years and he's been recently listening to all of them. Most still work. He says that 30-ish years is the longest time he's seen a storage medium last. So he's been recording YouTube audio he wants to keep over them.
The article is also wrong on several points regarding the attributes of the medium:
> Meanwhile, cassettes break and jam quite easily.
No they don't. It happens sometimes but really tapes and decks were pretty reliable as long as you didn't have foreign material in the deck. CDs and vinyls are more fraglie. A Sony tape deck my cousin has had a belt wear out, but it was fixable. Unlike your Airpod batteries.
> Choosing a particular song might involve several minutes of fast forwarding, or rewinding, which clogs the playback head
Lol, clogging the head? No, tapes don't do that.
> and weakens the tape over time.
I recall that anything more than a 45-minute tape ("C90") is too thin and could experience this issue. So I never bought C100s or C120s (if those existed). Wearing tapes out wasn't a thing I ever experienced back in the day.
> The audio quality is low
I don't know the specs of all the Dolby NR stuff (which was a technology on later decks) but decent quality tapes had full frequency range. Given things like the loudness war and the artifacts of compressed audio, tape is perfectly fine for most typical music listening.
> and comes with a background hiss.
I've always liked the faint airy sound of tape silence in a weird way. But in most cases were you listen to music in real life, you don't notice it when the songs start playing.
The really cool thing about tapes are the same cool thing that playing an MP3 locally has: you can listen, give, trade, or share the audio without things on the Internet tracking or preventing you from doing it. In a time where digital freedom and creative artistic recognition is becoming less and less, this is one gateway into the offline world, which is going to be where the real interesting stuff starts to happen if current trends continue.
CDs can be scratched more easily, obviously, and ruin them, but if you kept the production CD in good shape they will last a long time.
About three years ago, I decided to buy one of those "random 100 CDs" on eBay, just to see what kind of weird stuff I would get. A few of the CDs in there were pressed in 1984, and they ripped just fine onto my 2022 laptop into FLAC and I listen to the FLAC files regularly. As far as I can tell there were no checksum errors or skips or anything like that.
Burned CDs and DVDs do not have that luxury, especially cheap ones. My dad found out that a lot of his home movies that he had archived on burnt DVDs were literally starting to rot away. Fortunately in his case he had the habit of burning like twenty copies of each of his collections, so I don't think he actually lost anything, and I was able to show him how to extract images from it, but I consider ourselves lucky.
> I've always liked the faint airy sound of tape silence in a weird way.
Me too! Honestly there's something kind of charming about being forced to hear the artifacts of the actual medium that carries the sound. The light hiss has a certain "purity" to it, for want of a better word. It's also why I like watching movies from the 1960s-1970s; they couldn't make everything completely silent, so there was always a small hiss. It makes movies like Straw Dogs much more unnerving.
> The really cool thing about tapes are the same cool thing that playing an MP3 locally has:
Yeah, and CDs as well. For reasons that I am equal parts surprised about and grateful for, CDs never had any DRM; I can take an exact copy of my CD to my computer, copy it to all my devices, stream it with Jellyfin, remix it with Acid or SoundForge, or pretty much anything else I can think of. Given that CDs still sound excellent, I think you could make an argument that it's objectively the best audio media that ever got widespread adoption.
I still refuse to buy Sony labelled products from that one. When you have to go through several dozen computers to wipe their rootkits off... even though creating a custom deployment image was faster, it was still a massive time consuming pain I'd never put on anyone.
If they'd have released a simple, single download, then maybe I'd have been less burned... but having to install custom uninstaller per machine, with an email address, and that software itself left another security hole... I'm out.
Are CDs more fragile? All of mine still seemed to work last I checked. I gave up on tapes years ago, because they'd always fuck up one way or the other. The sound quality was also annoyingly bad, and track search was a faff.
(I think I prefer measles to tapes. Neither killed me, but at least nobody reminisces fondly about that time they had measles!)
Really thinking about it, maybe they're not more fraglie. CDs scratch easily but tapes are still exposed on the bottom, so you really want to keep both in their cases.
I still think it's wild that portable (as in the Walkman sense) CD players were a thing - a spinning disc with a precision optical pickup with very little separating it from the outside world that b1umps around on your hip as you walk. I guess it's equally crazy to have a tape motor on your hip, but it just seemed less fragile to me.
My musical habits for the past few years have been long mixes of songs on YouTube, that I don't really skip around in. I think YouTube's ads that annoyingly hit between every video nudged me in that direction; but that's why I made mixtapes back in the day when you bought an album but there was only 1 or 2 good songs on it.
I have CDs from the 80s that still play perfectly. The only CDs I've had fail were a multi-disc set that were packaged with foam padding in the case, touching the label side of the disc. The plasticizer leached out and diffused into the protective lacquer, which softened and stuck to the foam, and tore away when I took them out, pulling chunks of the metal layer with it.
They weren't anything rare so I wasn't too bothered, but it later occurred to me that they technically could have been saved. The data is pressed into the polycarbonate, so if I'd very carefully peeled off all the metal, ideally in a laminar flow cabinet to avoid any dust, and then had them re-coated in aluminum with vacuum deposition, they would probably have still played. I think this is true for CDs lost to "disc rot" too.
I don't have any nostalgia for tapes. I used them as a child, but I never liked them. The first music I bought was on CD. I still buy a lot of used CDs on Ebay. Lots of great bargains are available and they sound identical to brand new CDs. It's worth finding sellers who'll combine postage and buying in bulk or you'll end up paying more for postage than the discs themselves.
I mostly agree. Tapes worked pretty well. The big advantage of CD's from my perspective was the ability to jump straight to a track. Rewinding and fastforwarding was quite annoying. But CD's skipped like crazy on any mobile application, especially on the early hardware. Of course mp3's solved this. And there was a nice time, albeit short, time where we downloaded music and felt as if it was ours to own. Granted, a lot of this was probably pirated, otherwise maybe you ripped a CD. But still it represented a great state of solid technology (they just played for you without any fuss) and reasonable ownership. Then along came streaming. It does, of course, have its advantages, but they come with many significant drawbacks.
Some of us never stopped. I never got into the whole streaming thing. My music collection today is a hard drive full of files, just as it was in 1999. No internet connection needed. No wondering if service X has song Y. I can load the whole library onto a phone, my car, wherever I want to play it. Peak music media.
Scratched enough that it was not working any more? IME CDs work surprisingly well even with scratches, way way better than LPs though. You need to properly gouge the surface before things become problematic.
IME that's mostly a problem with self-recorded disks while pressed discs are quite durable in practice. Maybe if you keep them in a very humid/hot environment you get different results.
I estimate renting over 1200 VCR tapes in my lifetime, and I've never had one unspool. The cassette problem was common enough that fixing it with a pencil was part of the zeitgeist, but I can't remember anything like that for VHS.
I grew up in the 80s, and was a prolific user of both video tapes (mostly VHS) and cassette tapes. I can't recall ever having a tape get eaten by any deck, either video or audio.
Not saying it never happens, but if it was common I absolutely would have encountered it many times over.
I think it happened more as the players aged and wore out. In the 90s and 2000s I remember it happening pretty commonly although cd or dvd skipping was way worse. A couple years ago we took the old family vcr player out of the parents attic and tested it out. It was a great vcr at the time, sony with all the bells and whistles. But it immediately at the tape and I mean ate it. Had to take it apart and route the tape out myself and I'm pretty sure its ruined the tape. We spent 2 hours on youtube with it taken apart and gave up the project indefinitely.
The answer is so obviously "no" for the general case (making even a tiny dent to streaming/digital) that the article's title amounts to clickbait.
That's regardless of the fact that there has always been a vibrant extremely niche cassete scene, the same way there still are 8-bit home computer fans and clubs.
At best, on top of the above, a tiny additional niche of more mainstream "hipster" artists and fans might release/get cassetes as a statement.
Both numbers summed would still be so small compared to the overall music consumption market/methods that implying any sort of "comeback" is ludicrous.
Indeed, the title is the usual nonsense. Sales within a niche like this will always fluctuate. When someone spots a slight increase, they jump at the chance to wheel out this kind of headline. The article itself doesn't give hard numbers, just says UK sales "reached their highest level since 2003" - meaningless since cassette sales had died long before then. It links to an article that says there were "195,000 units sold last year" - so, next to nothing.
I recall one point around 10-15 years ago, websites were simultaneously proclaiming the death of CDs because sales for the year had just dropped below 100 million, and the revival of vinyl because sales were approaching 1 million in the same timespan. Of course, the takeaway for many young people was that vinyl was outselling CDs.
I'm pretty sure these articles are planted by PR firms working for the music publishers they talk about. There are plenty of people happy to be told what's currently "cool" and they'll obediently go out and buy them.
The title is less nonsense than it first appears. Cassettes are riding the coattails of vinyl getting popular again as collectibles. Lots of medium sized bands added vinyl to their merch stands to great success with their fans but the total manufacturing capacity of vinyl is small and everyone was suddenly competing for it. Not to mention when Taylor Swift drops an album and buys it all. Enter cassettes, another piece of physical media that's easier for artists to get their hands on and has similar collectible properties.
Neither vinyl nor cassettes are going to make a dent in terms of music distribution, but that's because they compete in the same market as band t shirts.
Shameless plug. I've produced an entire album and released it on cassette (as primarily medium in mind). You can listen to it here and watching my tape deck spinning. It is recorded from my tape deck, so you get the real tape sound! :-)
https://tonleiter.net/reihenhaus/
BTW this is the final audio chain then. Crazy. :-)
Synths, instruments, etc. -> Analogue mixing console -> ADC -> DAC -> Professional tape production apparatus -> My tape deck -> ADC -> ACC Codec -> Your DAC
> Synths, instruments, etc. -> Analogue mixing console -> ADC -> DAC -> Professional tape production apparatus -> My tape deck -> ADC -> ACC Codec -> Your DAC
Reminds me of the early music CD's which had AAA, AAD, ADD, DDD printed on them to tell you how the material was recorded, mixed, and mastered. A stood for analog and D for digital. Looks like you went the DDA route :-)
Yeah, mostly DDA, and some songs are live mixed on the console, this is DAA then? Anyway.. :-)
I think the real shift to digital was around 1994-95 when professional digital recording equipment became somewhat affordable even for smaller studios. My Roland DM-80 4-track digital hard disk recorder, you also find on the albums webpage, was more then 20.000$ back in 1991, so most studio easily stood with 16-tracks on analogue tape.
I lived through vinyl, 8-track, cassettes, and CDs. I digitized all of my music over 20 years ago and no longer even own a physical media playback device. I can't fathom going back. Digital or bust.
If you want the cassette experience without the massive downsides of cassettes, pick up an old Minidisc recorder. Physical media that are nearly infinitely re-recordable (unused ones are expensive but used ones from Japan are not) and nearly indestructible. The NetMD ones have been bid up in price because of transfer speed but older ones that only do real-time transfers are not hideously expensive.
If there is one old format that actually should have a revival, it's minidisk. I was really holding out for their production keep on until that revival came but they gave up the ghost this year.
Tiny digital CDs packaged in little neon jewel floppy disks is the neotokyo future we all deserve.
Mix tapes were a very cool experience that a Spotify playlist can’t replicate. Beyond that, ask someone who wants it. I don’t, but they are a really cool piece of tech.
I still have a few specialty MD's from various brands such as the mona/bitclub; my last recorder was the RH1 and I regretted ever letting that unit go.
Cassettes were always a pain, but LPs are an awesome medium even today.
While it's convenient to just listen to anything with a click, the joy of the experience is gone. Purposefully pulling out an LP and setting it on the turntable, sitting on the couch to meaningfully listen while reading the album cover is a much more engaging musical experience.
Yes, I don't have time to do that much anymore either. But when possible, it is much more enjoyable.
Owning bit-perfect rips of your favourite music is a sweet spot. I have no interest in tape - of any kind - or vinyl.
The one frustration is that continuous FLAC playback appears to be an arcane programming challenge that only a select few developers have mastered. Especially on mobile.
And unless you set up a server the business of getting files onto and off devices is insanely perverse.
But in terms of sound quality and convenience, lossless rips win over anything else.
Going back to physical seems almost pointlessly decadent.
Not trying to correct you, just looking for the right word.
Digital isn't the right term here, because CDs are also digital. I'm trying to come up with the word for the opposite of physical media, but strangely I can't. Maybe streaming, but how would MP3s on a USB drive fit in?
The issue here is, "physical" is a misleading word. Digital works are also held on physical media. The distinction is whether the work is stored on a dedicated physical object.
Edit: I suppose a jukebox confuses things as I think it belongs in the "physical media" box, but it isn't dedicated to a specific work. Hmm.
Although, if we want to pedantic: music stored on a hard disk is still stored on a medium, but you can't pop the hard drive into any old player and play the music.
Same here. And I've been old-guy grumbling for years now about kids-these-days getting into vinyl and other retro technology that I was happy to be rid of.
I don’t think so. I spent a huge amount of time in my youth recording, trading, buying, and selling audio tapes (all from the metal/hardcore/punk underground). It was a lot of fun, but everyone I know was glad when other ways of sharing and spreading music became available. As a niche, yes otherwise no.
Plenty of bands on Bandcamp selling tapes as merch in my experience. I think they're more of a physical collectable item instead of a genuine medium for most of the buyers though?
As soon as recordable CDs were affordable, I switched completely, and never looked back.
Cassette tapes were nice when we didn't have anything better, but they were always a big pain in the back. Noisy, wearing out, skipping took a long time, making compilations took hours. I don't miss those times.
Nowadays, I can play mp3's on a $3 microcontroller, at excellent quality, and I love it.
Do you still use a kerosene lamp when you go into your barn at night?
> As soon as recordable CDs were affordable, I switched completely, and never looked back.
Cassettes were good for mix tapes, but once their were CDs and MP3s I never really looked back.
> Do you still use a kerosene lamp when you go into your barn at night?
It not quite the same comparison. Not sure about a kerosene lamp, however a kerosene/paraffin stove does have it uses.
You would be surprised what people are using. I spend a lot of time walking/cycling up canals and people are using wood hearths and similar to keep the boats warm in the winter. Wood is literally everywhere along the side of the canals and so it is literally free energy.
Some of the boats have solar panels, generators, full internet but quite a few of the boats only have relatively basic amenities by today's standards.
I used to code at night with a kerosene lamp sitting on my desk. I love the light spectrum of a live fire.
"Portable" (they couldn't even fit in a pocket) CD players were the worst thing imho. Too sensitive to even small shocks, which was particularly annoying while taking longer walks, and draining batteries like crazy. I switched from cassette players to MP3 players, almost completely skipping the era of CD players. I've tried it once or twice because my sister had it, and never again.
While I agree with the overall sentiment, streaming services have also degraded our behaviours by prioritising instant rewards and locking us into a platform you cannot escape easily from, and that once you escape, you lose literally everything, for you never owned those songs. Then you have social media notifications interrupting your songs, no headphone jack, and no physical button feedback when playing music on your smartphone.
I also don't really see the appeal of cassette tapes, personally, and the quality of digital media like CDs and even MP3 files is arguably superior.
I guess a good middle ground is one of those modern audio players that don't have smartphone functionality and take an SD card or so. FiiO I think is quite popular. Might give it a try some day.
Man I love tape saturation and the sound of high quality cassettes played with a nice tape deck. Sure, there are many bad ones.. Luckily, we have more possibilities then ever (given you have enough hipster money to spend). Tape is a little bit like slow food and very enjoyable to me. To each his own.
It's perfecly legitimate to do stuff simply because you want to. This is a site for tinkering people, so it's kind of expected people tinker with stuff. Quite often that includes old stuff. :)
Waiting for the writeup about the steel wire recorder resurgence now.
It's been thirty years since I last used a cassette tape (the adaptor things you'd stick in the car radio don't count) and I've never once missed them.
You couldn't instantly record the radio on CD and until computers with CD recorder were common it was harder to share/copy/mix stuff between friends. Tapes were useful before MP3/broadband/p2p file sharing were a thing even long after CD had become common. As a teenager I couldn't afford every CD and vinyl release I liked and even if I had the means the records weren't necessarily available in store locally. Many of us had to rely on that tape being ready in the deck and ninja reflexes to hit the record button fast enough.
Minidiscs would have been better but harder to finance/justify as a kid.
I don't miss cassettes, but they were an important thing to me in the 1980s. When my wife and I got married we were as poor as could be. Our first stereo was a little radio/cassette deck with four inch speakers. We played a lot of cassettes on that thing.
I moved to digital players as soon as I could afford them. The most memorable (before the iPod) was the Creative Nomad with its 5GB hard drive. It was too big to fit easily in my jacket pocket, but I shoved it in there anyway. I didn't have to choose the tapes I had on my long bus commute anymore. And when the second-gen iPod came along, it was like heaven.
I'd never go back to cassette...but it was great when there was little else available.
Did a remix awhile back and printed to a cassette using a Tascam 414 Portastudio. Brought it back into the computer at about three quarters of normal speed twisting the dial occasionally. The other side of tape was Fleetwood Mac “The Dance” my dad dubbed for me in the 90s. The imperfections of that old hissy tape with backwards Stevie Nicks bleeding through collapsed the stereo field in a nice way. I welcome this trend!
Of course cassettes were all around me when I was younger; even my first car had a cassette deck. They seemed like an old relic in that time already - with the drawbacks mentioned in the article, so it was easy to put them away seemingly forever.
However, I got "back" into cassettes recently with some new releases. Grabbed a FiiO CP-13, and while the quality still isn't great, with low wow and flutter it's perfectly serviceable. There's one thing that made it stand out and felt like we missed something that's now become a lost art - absolutely no delay between pressing play and music playing. No buffering from a streaming service, no megabytes pushed into RAM, no decoding, no FIFOs being filled before the signal exiting through a DAC.
> FiiO CP-13, and while the quality still isn't great
The sad part is that the quality of modern cassette players is actually decidedly worse than their vintage counterparts. There's essentially only one company producing the actual mechanism (Tanashin) and they're cheaply made of low quality materials (plastic flywheels etc.). That's the main reason that the vintage machines are still fetching higher prices. Also I don't think any modern machines have Dolby B-C noise reduction, HX Pro, automatic track seek/skip, and whatever other fancy features you could find in the likes of a high end Sony or Nakamichi deck.
I remember being SO HAPPY when I got rid of all my cassette tapes and vinyl discs for CDs. I was an early adopter of digital and, to this day I don't regret it. There's no way I'm going back.
VHS is still the only way to watch the star wars you grew up with. Lucas lost his mind and started meddling with the finished product again in the DVD era.
I put The Full Monty in a combo VHS/TV machine in a hostel a few years back, and was pleasantly surprised by how good it looked. Admittedly on, like, a 17" or 19" screen, but still. Turns out when you aren't trying to record 6 hours of video on a 2 hour tape from broadcast TV, the format performs pretty well. Yes, I lived through that. Star Trek marathons were the motivator for that.
Cassettes were never the best for audio fidelity but I always really liked the physicality of pushing the play button to move the heads into position. In some ways the inability to easily skip around a recording made listening a different experience than a CD or streaming.
Which is why I wrote a web component[0] that wraps an html audio element in an interface that mimics a (cheap) tape player.
Based on the assumption that the appeal here is the experience, not the actual legacy media, it seems like it would be trivial to implement a digital stream standard so that audio cassette players could record and play a digital stream for higher fidelity with an identical experience? Or would that not be possible on legacy media because of bitrate limitations?
I can easily imagine the DAC/ADC and amplifier tuning/stream processing being an optional step so that legacy compatibility would be perfect, and even dual head setups that could do on the fly conversion. But perhaps the data density of the tape just isn’t there? Though it seems like with the type of data stuffing tech we use it flash memory and hdd these days to quadruple up on bits per domain, that it should be possible.
I think this used a spinning head, similar to video? The trick would be to use a static head and still record 4 or
More digital tracks on a 4mm tape, with enough headroom for robust ECC. I’m pretty sure it could be done at ~kbps with contemporary recording head litho at 8 tracks per mm. That makes 16 tracks per side, 32 for the full 4mm (both sides). It would even be possible to convert existing tapes to digital in one play/pass using a 2 head system, or a read-store-record setup.
A friend’s daughter (young adult) told me about five years ago that cassette tapes are “cool” again. I was surprised because I always considered them to be the worst physical medium for music. I still have the cassette deck that I bought in the 90s for my hi-fi separate system but I haven’t listened to it in years. In the mid-2000s, I gave away most of my cassettes to a friend who had bought an old car that only had a tape deck. I only held on to recordings that were only released on cassette: demo tapes, bootlegs of live concerts that I had attended and some DIY releases from 90s’ punk bands that didn’t have (nor want) a record label.
Good cassettes played with a good tape deck are actually really good for music. It naturally saturates and compresses the audio material which often leads to much more homogeneous musical experience. Also the frequency spectrum tends to soften too harsh recordings, which is also cool. It all depends on the genre of course. The typical high resolution classic concert is probably better to be listened from HQ flac or whatever.
Back in the days the only way poor bands could achieve some sort of release was on cassette, paired with car radios and kitchen players this for sure wasn't the best experience to listen to music. And unfortunately many professional tape productions weren't that great either. But this was a management and production problem.
Yeah, it’s wild to me too, but I then remember purposely obtaining an eight track player in the 90s. My daughter has taken to vinyl for a time and now has a discman and it seems like a push back against the Illusion of Choice that music streaming “provides”.
That and she’s clearly genetically predisposed to hipsterism.
> I was surprised because I always considered them to be the worst physical medium for music.
That's a big part of why they're cool.
Imperfection is beautiful. We feel this intuitively when it comes to loving someone, or when it comes to impressionistic art. It really is the same thing with music.
I believe the typical response is that you can simulate that imperfection on digital media... but cassette lovers would argue this is tantamount to putting a photograph through a 'Da Vinci' filter in Photoshop. It's missing the point. There's more to music than what it sounds like. Where it came from, what you did to play it, these are all part of the experience. The context of a piece of a media, the means by which you listen to it, where it came from -- these change how the music feels, even if there is no difference in how it sounds.
Back when vinyl or cassettes were the only option, sure, the response is "screw your romanticism". But now that we have perfect digital media always available, there is romance in getting to choose something fragile and imperfect and precious. People like that feeling.
I don't understand vinyl either. Tape is worse but vinyl has all of the same downsides, sonically. The "Warmness" people are always talking about is a symptom of fragility. Unless you're going to get a laser player, your vinyl gets worse with every listen. And if you're using a laser, you loose the garbage that is referred to as "Warm". Nevermind if they get left somewhere warm.
It's objectively worse than lossless digital in every way except coming with a big artwork surface. I'd rather buy a poster.
I'd rather listen to music as close to was intended and for it to stay that way as long as possible.
Worn out vinyl grooves are typically caused by an unbalanced tonearm or damaged stylus.
Realistically if the tonearm is adequately balanced and the stylus is kept clean you're looking at hundreds to thousands of listens before it has any kind of even slightly discernible effect.
There's a much more likely chance of vinyls being damaged by simply handling them.
How many people are performing proper maintenance on their record players?
The point stands either way. Vinyl isn't durable. It gets worn by proper usage and worse by improper usage.
My FLAC files are as perfect as the day I got them and are backed up both at home and remotely. Vinyl is an inferior format but people like rituals and hobbies but then they tell themselves lies about how it's actually better.
It's fine if you find it romantic and pleasing to pull out the vinyl, put it on the player then read the liner notes while listening to the album. That's awesome. It's the same for lots of hobbies I have but let's not act like it's technically superior in any way.
Even when I was a kid an cassettes were the height of tech I hated them. They sound like crap and you can't even try to skip meaningfully and rewind is a nightmare.
Well, they kind of never were the height of tech. To be sure, the cassette Walkman was a kind of height of tech (probably in spite of the format though).
Been following people who have been making electronic music mixes between two cassette decks and a mixer which are worth a listen. The thing that's interesting is that you can pitch up and down in ways that sound nice:
Music sounded different when there were physically moving things that produced it. Live music, turn-table, cassette spindle that have a visible action. It's not fidelity. It's about connecting the sound to real world. We know tape is not producing the sound, but we know that it moves and movement causes sound.
Sound without any visible action or movement is a bit weird for our animal instincts.
Did people just forget the era of CD burning? Cassettes sucked.
Normal non-tech people were ripping CDs with iTunes. "Rip. Mix. Burn." was a nationwide if not worldwide advertisement.
All of this still works, if you have a CD drive.
If you're going to bother buying a cassette player... what's the allure for that over a CD-R and a basic CD player. CD players in cars are going away, but they're still around in houses and inexpensive small boomboxes.
But then... what's the allure of that over say any old audio player that takes SD cards or just a USB stick. A lot of modern cars and also stereo receivers and TVs will take a USB stick and play files from it. These players are incredibly prevalent and very easy to use. And loading the music from a computer or even a tablet is easy.
Of these three, cassette is the absolute least likely to be available anywhere.
You can still have the experience of making a playlist and even putting the files on a USB stick for someone. Importantly, they can actually play it on their own listening device.
CDs skip very easily so they're not good for portability. So that limits their use to in the house, and they're you're competing with vinyl. Cassette fill a niche in the nostalgia world being something you can more easily use on the go.
Cassettes get distorted too when moving (.e.g running). There’s very cool tech in some models that prevent this distortion but they are more expensive.
I had lots of CD and mp3-CD players with good anti-skip. Some would even buffer enough or the song to stop the CD for several seconds at a time, especially so on my later mp3/ATRAC CD players. The crappier ones added crappy audio compression to fit it's tiny memory, but better ones could do the raw data and had no (at least to me) loss in quality and later the mp3/ATRAC ones would just buffer the actual file data.
I don't think I've ever experienced a car CD player skipping due to shock. I'm sure it could happen, but I don't do much trail driving at high speeds personally.
I listened to my CD players while biking, hiking, and more. No reason to leave the CDs at home unless you already upgraded to one of those fancy hard drive mp3 players.
Yeah it was probably around 2003 I listened to all my music on MP3 CDs I made and it had like 30 seconds solid of buffering that I never managed to hit unless I sat their purposefully shaking my player in my hands to watch the buffer meter go down.
Not for me, analog audio is bulky and expensive compared to whats available today. The choices I see are, pirate a decent collection to manage and store on my computer that I can load onto a phone or "dedicated mp3 player", pay money for a subpar streaming service, listen to free radio streams, or just pick one of the billion playlists off youtube. I keep 2 MP3 CDs in my car for the rare times im in deep BFE and don't have reliable service, but I doubt 99% of people experience even that these days.
Its the same hipstery thingie like LPs are with similar talk about quality, experience and whatnot. People still do it, heck people do a lot of seemingly weird stuff that is far from optimal behavior.
Who cares at the end, somebody likes gardening and somebody likes analog music thingies (that they usually didn't grow up with before - this seems to remove most of the lure of these gizmos).
There is that fact of another plastic stuff playing more (rather fragile) plastic stuff polluting the planet at the end, but since this will be fringe activity and many folks reuse their old collections its not the worst offender.
I might use audio cassettes if I want to record my own audio temporarily (and later copy it to a CD if I decide to keep it; I have done this before), especially if the higher quality of CDs is not needed. For most uses I would probably not use audio cassette tapes; I prefer to use CDs.
(One feature of audio cassettes is that it will stay where it was left off (even if it is removed and used in a different player), although this can be both an advantage and a disadvantage (for one thing, each cassette has only one position). At least, you can easily rewind it back to the beginning. There are other advantages and disadvantages as well)
Strong disagree. This trend has been underway for a few years already. There are a few reasons for this:
1. Musicians love tape. We like the frequency roll-off, we like the imprecision - but these are nostalgia. What we like most is the with tape your options are largely reduced to Record and Play, because doing anything more complicated (eg editing via punch-ins with synchronization) is such a PITA. They're a great tool for just making you commit to a performance instead of editing it to death.
2. In similar fashion, young people are fascinated by a medium you have to sit through by default, because skipping around is inconvenient and might damage your tape. Not being able to listen nonlinearly promotes a different sort of engagement with the material from the fragmented one provided by streaming. To a lesser extent, music on tape has better dynamics not because the medium is superior, but because maximizing loudness over the entire track means the whole recording will be saturated. This is desirable in some genres (metal, some kinds of dance music), but most cassette recordings avoid maximizing loudness which sounds refreshingly different to people who grew up during the Loudness War.
3. Chinese bootlegs. In the 80s and 90s China was a target country for first world garbage disposal, so unsold CDs and cassettes would be damaged by being run through a table saw and then shipped to China in bulk for recycling, sold by weight. While publication or importation of western music was heavily restricted by censors, garbage imports were uncontrolled, and enterprising minds soon observed that damaged media could often be rendered playable, at at least in part. This led to the emergence of a "dakou" (打口 - saw cut) music scene, with parts of albums being sold to enthusiasts in semi underground stores with no regard to release date, genre, or marketing campaigns. This had a big impact on China's domestic music scene.
4. Differing media preferences. Other countries (but Japan in particular) never lost the taste for physical media the way Anglosphere countries did. Japan was always record collectors' paradise because industry cartelism kept the price of physical media high, but buyers were rewarded with high production quality of CD mastering, vinyl grade, and printed media, and labels would typically add bonus tracks exclusive to the Japanese editions of albums. A combination of Japanese taste for the best-quality version of something and 30+ years of economic stagnation meant Japanese consumers were more into maintaining and using their hifi equipment; if you watch Japanese TV dramas a fancy stereo is still a common status marker, much like expensive furniture. Record stores are still a big deal, and music appreciation its own distinct hobby and and social activity in a way that fell out of fashion in other countries.
5. Developing world and cheap distribution. Cassettes were popular in Africa and other developing economies for decades for reasons that should be obvious, and they're popular again with emerging/underground artists for similar reasons. You can self-release on cassette very very cheaply, at the loss of time efficiency. You won't make much money doing this, but you can make a bit, and it's a way to target serious fans who like collecting things and want to support obscure and cool artists who have not yet got big and sold out. Also making $3 on a cassette sale through Bandcamp or at a show may be easier than 1-2000 plays on Spotify or some other service for artists who are not already famous. Self-releasing on vinyl is also possible but typically you need to invest $1-2000, whereas you can get into duplicating your own cassettes for $50 or a few hundred $ in bulk. Vinyl is the way to go if you need to reach DJs but cassette players are dirt cheap or free for consumers and are less effort to use than a record player.
Physical media are still a Big Deal for people who obsess over music, who care about quite different things from the median consumer.
I could skip around on tapes relatively well on a walkman, you just had to remember the counters or roughly how long it was to rewind/fast forward. It wasn't that inconvenient. It just wasn't as quick as an mp3 player, CD or Winamp.
I recently had to look at a particular kind of marketing, as a techie.
And suddenly I realized why Pinterest was so highly ranked on Google image searches.
It's not so much about a useful tool for individual users; rather, it's a marketing venue for manufacturing a lifestyle image that lets you extract money from people.
Like a fashion magazine with a greater illusion of participation.
Of course someone was going to decide that vinyl -- started as fringe genuine/hipster, and turned into marketable lifestyle -- had been milked or moated. The timing is right for you to extract more money for yourself with a new lifestyle twist to sell.
The exact gimmick doesn't much matter. Fire up the memetic lifestyle machine: we've got consumers (producers of money) to milk.
The most interesting thing about this article was the Bow Wow Wow song linked. It's a song about music piracy (including a usage of the word "pirate") from 1980, including this stanza:
It used to break my heart when I went in your shop
Taylor Swift (and Ed Sheeran) releasing her albums on vinyl is what caused vinyl prices to sky rocket, so not happy to hear she's moving onto cassettes too. I moved to collecting tapes due to vinyls being too expensive to get for anything but my most loved albums.
Some genres just feel better to listen to on tape too: lofi black metal, dungeon synth, hardcore, anything that likes to play with lo-fi sounds for aesthetic sounds nice on tapes and it really adds to the experience.
Tapes stretch. Tone and tempo changes. You can't easily play along the track anymore. Tapes also break. Some players mess up the tape too, destroying precious cassettes. These were actual practical problems way back.
Just a couple months ago I converted to mp3 some cassettes I recorded in the very early 80s of a local band. Not perfect audio, but sounded quite good still. Not bad for a ~45 year old tape.
If you were free to invent a completely new form of physical media for music roughly in the same space as casettes/vinyls/cds, what would you invent?
Casettes save state but you to rewind. Vinyl have a great album art, but are fragile. CDs and Casettes are small and allow saving and making mix tapes at home. Can we mix and match? How?
I have never experience reel-to-reel. That is the format I would like to get into.
My sense though is that anything made of rubber on these old machines need replacing. I'm a little intimidated about spending so much on a device only to be unable to restore it.
I sold my Studer-ReVox B77 in mint condition to a collector for the price of a new high-quality digital recorder.
The thing was sitting in its original carton, barely used. Between the hassle of hauling it around, and the cost of tapes, I never actually took it anywhere to record anything.
My car radio has stopped playing cassettes for a while, I inherited this car with a full library on the glove compartment that I enjoyed playing from time to time. Guess it can be fixed?
Should be possible to store digital music on cassettes as well just like you would with a tape backup. Would probably increase both the quality and storage capacity of cassettes.
According to that article, it looks like the best cassettes (if everything goes right) could have a bandwidth of 20kHz. So a quick calculation of 8bit samples: (20000 * 8) / 1024 == about 156kB/s bitrate. If i did my math correctly, a 90 minute cassette could keep 824 MB (raw)
The article suggests that they struggle to sustain 20kHz, and I assumed you could keep 8 bits per sample cleanly, but the actual data size would probably be much smaller than that. Keep in mind, besides the mechanical wear and tear, seeking in the digital data would be tricky, the data stream would have to lose some of that raw data size for framing + synchronization marks.
Cassettes were fairly good for car radios and little else. They aren't large enough to lead in cover art like LPs or even CDs. They are terrible for snapping and getting chewed up.
I still have some cassettes from years ago but definitely not the best format by a long shot.
Are you commenting on the title? If yes, I was about to do the same. I've seen this more often lately on HN and don't understand the reason. The actual title doesn't have a question mark, so the poster decided to add one and I have no idea why. Actual title: "Cassette tapes are making a comeback. Yes, really"
A bunch of things are on their way out among native speakers, e.g. singular vs plural (there is / there are), much vs many (how much people / large amount of people), past vs present tense (build / built), ... as a German we have to pass English classes else we get held back a year, what's going on in English schools?
That's the conclusion the article came to, though without the potentially derogatory "hipster" label.
I buy cassettes and vinyl because it's a more complete sensory experience than just Spotify or MP3s. Listening to music then involves tactile feeling, not just audio. And the ritual of setting up to play a song adds something to the experience, too, even if it's more work than just hitting "shuffle" on your streaming service.
Cassettes suck hard. Sorry, but apart from being smaller and failing in a different way to CDs, they suck hard.
Yes they were portable, and if you want a "pure" sound experience (you're not going to get that from cassette, you're going to get tape hiss and pitch wobbling) I can sorta understand. But DAT is where its at if you want that.
Cassettes have terrible dynamic range, and hiss like a mother fucker. Sure it evokes a sound of your parent's youth, in the same way that those tedious fuckers talk about vinyls "warmth" but objectively they both suck bollocks.
The casing though, thats great. I do like the album art. thats nice.
I find it depressing that there seem to be only two ways to distribute media and manage one's audio collection: Either ultra-convenient but fully locked down streaming services - or analog "vintage" media like vinyl or cassettes, which do give you a physical medium under your full control, but also require you to forego all the progress we made with digital media.
The one thing that's absent: Plain old audio files that you can store on your hard drive and copy to your phone or other devices.
Edit: Ok, there are still more options left than I thought. I take that back then :)
If I can't find them there I will grab the audio off youtube or hit the torrents.
Used to buy CDs and rip them, but those are getting hard to find (and it was a PITA).
syncthing is a very useful utility for this. just install it on 2 devices, add a folder, then the files will sync over the network whenever both devices are on.
if you have an old phone or laptop lying around gathering dust you can set up syncthing on that and have it act as the always-on server. something simple like a raspberry pi with an external drive would do either.
every syncthing folder has a .ignore file where you can add patterns to reduce the overall size of the folder, which can be useful if youre going to try and sync your music library to your phone.
its very basic but it can be useful in some cases. like adding *.flac would ignore all .flac files and only sync .mp3 does. or maybe if you have a few artists with very large folders you could ignore them and sync the rest. i havnt found a good solution to that problem yet tbh
Apple has neglected the iTunes store for years. Yes, you can still buy tracks, but it's really crappy. 1) The catalog is nowhere near as extensive as Apple Music. 2) It's AAC 256kbps format only. Not lossless.
Apple goes along with the enshitification of everything and wants you to rent your music, not own it.
OK, why not high res scan all those Picassos then and burn the original paintings? Should be sufficient to have this _piece of art_ in the digital domain.
You assume that cassettes are all mass-produced artifacts. But that's not true. Many of them have a limited edition of perhaps 50 copies. But what I wanted to say was something completely different. People like to own art in a physical way. But to implicitly tell someone whether or not they should own something made of plastic is, in my opinion, crossing a line.
You can definitely beat that for $30. Hit the thrift stores and you can find vintage machines that will greatly outperform this. You may need to replace a belt on some, but many are working just fine.
Can confirm. I've bought around 20 cassette tapes over the last 2 years - mostly new releases or re-releases of old stuff from the CD-era. I get way more enjoyment out of tapes than CDs. I think its because they're more hand's on, and I find the sound of my cassette deck soothing.
Simple "mp3" player with terrible screen/interface, low-capacity SD cards with some wav files, decorated like a mix-tape, curated for straight-through listening. Perfectly scratches the retro/disconnected itch for me.
I started getting cassette players working again when I had kids - I had lots of old cassettes with stories still, and after looking into a lot of stuff determined that it is one of the best physical storage formats for that kind of content for kids we currently have. Its major advantage is that it automatically saves state, and the state saving is player-independent. Add to that that players typically have large clunky buttons ideal for kids hands, and you have something even all the dedicated digital kids media players can't compete with.
> Its major advantage is that it automatically saves state, and the state saving is player-independent.
Yes, it's pretty mad if you think if what you would need to do to replace it.
Either you have a system with QR codes or simple ID chip to refer to some URL. Now you need a server, media licensing agreements and somewhere to store progress information, subscriptions, on and on. And the eternal temptation to abuse the data if it's in the cloud.
Or you store all the audio in the card, and now you need a memory chip and PCB in every card, plus some proprietary USB/WiFi/Bluetooth device to write the cards.
And the barely-makes-contact head system is genius too rather than sliding gold contacts. And it just has paper label inserts.
The only real down sides of cassettes other then the obvious physicality if you don't like that, is they integrate badly into modern cars, have a fairly short run length (and occasionally get chewed up). And if lots of need to be authored quickly, that's too bad!
Basically the same story here for me. I have a trove of audiobooks I've carted around with me from house to house since I left home which my kids now eagerly pick from each night to listen to at bedtime. I've even supplemented my collection considerably since from eBay and the like.
It's just such a great medium. Fairly resilient, incredibly easy to use, compact, cheap ish.
And of course there's the heady dose of nostalgia for us old gits :)
If anyone has any recommendations I'd love to hear them. Top one from me has to be the BBC dramatised Lord of the Rings adaptation which I myself have been listening to off and on since I was around 5 or 6
> If anyone has any recommendations I'd love to hear them
For kids: Just William (read by Martin Jarvis) and PG Wodehouse Wooster books (don't recall who read that).
Early Eddie Izzard shows were also memorably good as audio. Very quotable.
There's a gigantic, not always unofficial, archive of Just a Minute online, which is excellent car journey material. This is the first 5 series, but there's 80-plus series of it in total https://archive.org/details/Just-A-Minute
I absolutely loved those just william cassettes as a kid! Completely forgot they existed, must have been lost or broken. Will definitely be repurchasing
Snap. My mates kids have this modern player and I thought it was really cool. You get these cards for it and slot them in to play the different stories and music. You can even get a special card that you can make recordings with. We almost got one for our kid until we realised, wait a min, it’s a tape recorder!
You lose a bit of sound quality but there’s no internet-cloud-based crap to deal with. You don’t need to worry about the company failing and bricking the toy or the Chinese spying on your kids. Also, they’re mostly just mechanical machines with a simple circuit so actually fixable, you can pick up a 30 year old broken player off eBay and chances are a rubber belt has just perished somewhere.
The Harry Potter audio tapes are good. It’s read by Stephen Fry and he’s great!
John Le Carre’s “Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy”and Umberto Eco’s “The Name of the Rose” were constant companions for me on road trips (sadly no English unabridged “Foucault’s Pendulum” exists)
I still have the BBC Radio 4 version of His Dark Materials on CD somewhere - I ripped them years ago and listen to the digital version. I've experienced HDM in various forms, including the stage version and of course the books, but I am most fond of the Radio 4 version.
>compact
since "compact cassette" is the actual trademark®, I can't help but think you might've been unduly influenced here.
https://duckduckgo.com/i/4b7c08d5084dbabb.png
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Compact_Cassette
Maybe it's just an accurate name? CDs were pretty compact, back in the day: think of how many floppies would fit on a CD-ROM.
My family had a reel-to-reel player, which was definitely not compact. My dad would record tapes from Vietnam and send over the recordings so that our family could hear him. I was afraid to touch it growing up. Instead, I played records on our turntable, and 8-tracks tapes in our car and a couple of 8-track players we had. As a teenager, I played cassettes, which was awesome. Vinyl sounded great and had the best overall experience for things like Christmas records, but cassettes had a warm feel and you could listen to them in your car, a friend’s car, on a boombox, etc. and if you had two tape decks, you could make mix tapes and share them! Or you could just copy a tape for a friend. Those were the days.
My dad had an Akai M8 (7" tapes) that I was not allowed to touch under threat of injury, but then he got heavily into quad vinyl and gave the beast to me: The whole Beatles catalogue on 7" tapes, yay!
Unlike a CD, a cassette could fit a pocket. Barely, but still. A CD never could.
That is one advantage. Also great in cars if they're not chewed up. Very hard to change CDs in a car.
I noticed that when my kids were little they could use cassette players well before they could read. They would choose music based on the pictures on the cassettes and the covers. We had a (clickwheel) iPod for our own music, but they couldn't work it because they couldn't read the text-only interface.
Physical medias are great for kids. Also teach them to respect stuff.
I stopped using my smartphone for about 1 year now and bought a walkman fiio cp13, it is really cool, but it is really hard to make a good sounding cassette, particularly if you dont know what you are doing (like me).
I record stuff from youtube and make mix tapes.
I am experimenting with "not getting what I want the second I want it", e.g. "I want to listen to XYZ", 1 second later I click on spotify and its done. Now I have to wait, first XYZ might not be on the cassette I have with me, or it might be 5 songs later, and I dont want to waste battery rewinding, sometimes I rewind with the pencil if I am really desperate.
But the feeling of excitement when the song you wanted comes up is really nice :)
Some people recommend the `rewind` player instead of cp13, as it also has bluetooth.
We have forgotten how `not to get things NOW`. It took me a while to get used to it. There has to be some minimal amount of effort for a `thing`, when you go below it, it just becomes nothing. Maybe thats just me.
The GTA games (yes, those ones) have pre-recorded radio stations that I found to be perfect for cassettes. You play songs with no way to skip them with funny commentary in between so it feels like one long take (like Pink Floyd’s DSOTM)
Are you tired of dad?
Dad, no one wants to hear your stupid Vietnam stories.
Are you tired of mom?
Hi angel, do you want to read a book or go outside?
No.
Degenatron!The arcade comes to your living room, only without the creepy guys offering to show you puppies.
How do you like to enjoy a Rusty Brown’s Ring Donut?
> but it is really hard to make a good sounding cassette
It is unfortunate that cassettes are the lowest fidelity consumer medium (of modern times). But there is some room to optimize within that space. If you are curious:
The cassettes available today are Type I, Type II ("high bias") and Type IV ("metal"), each being higher fidelity than the last, but not all portable players supported these types of tape.
Dolby B/C noise reduction could improve the dynamic range of tapes a bit, but again not all portable players supported this.
The ultimate was "dbx", which dramatically improved noise reduction and dynamic range ("tape hiss" was essentially inaudible), but now you're in the territory of needing dedicated rack-mount equipment to record and play your tapes.
My dad was a bit of an audio buff, so I got to experience these things as a kid.
Edit: according to gemini AI:
* Type I had a dynamic range of about 50bB (roughly 8 bits)
* High quality tape with Dolby B, C and dbx yielded roughly 65, 75, and 85dB SNR (about 11, 12.5, and 14 bits)
So you could get pretty close to CD quality, but not quite.
>Edit: according to gemini AI:
>* Type I had a dynamic range of about 50bB (roughly 8 bits)
>* High quality tape with Dolby B, C and dbx yielded roughly 65, 75, and 85dB SNR (about 11, 12.5, and 14 bits)
>So you could get pretty close to CD quality, but not quite.
Source? AI content without it is less than worthless.
Did you actually try any searches? Or is this just an excuse to broadcast your feelings about AI?
The author of the Ogg format claims a bit more pessimistic range of bit depth: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cIQ9IXSUzuM
Here are some measurements of type I, II and IV:
http://www.ant-audio.co.uk/Tape_Recording/Measurements/HD3_v...
http://www.ant-audio.co.uk/Tape_Recording/Measurements/HD3_v...
http://www.ant-audio.co.uk/Tape_Recording/Measurements/HD3_v...
Here are the specifications of a typical dbx unit: https://www.hifiengine.com/manual_library/dbx/222.shtml
The measurements you are linking to are showing the level of distortion (HD3 v level) not dynamic range! The Y-axis on the graphs is showing the 3rd harmonic in dB in relation to the mV given in on the x-axis. This has absolutely nothing to do with dynamic range and it is also not the signal-to-noise-ratio. The fundamental frequency in those measurements was at 315 Hz. HD3 refers to Harmonic Distortion at 3rd level.
My bad. This Wikipedia article has a table of SNR values for 13 different kinds of tape: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Compact_Cassette_tape_types_an...
It's just annoying to post unverifiable numbers without a credible source and expect others to do the hard work of verifying it (or just take you at face value, probably). It has nothing to do with AI except insofar as your own feelings on AI convinced you this is a reasonable method of communication.
I just produced an album release on Type I cassette. High quality Type I (ferro oxid) is almost comparable to Type II, but you need the correct bias settings while recording. Practically the 8bits/50db is non-sense. Really. Maybe on a very bad tape deck you have a signal-noise-ratio of 8bit from silence to the first noticeable noise? But the actual music you are playing has much more dynamic range possibilities. Tbh my recordings on tape sound more dynamic then on Spotify.
Recording with Dolby-B on a Sony consumer level integrated Hi-Fi produced pretty solid sounding cassettes back in the day, given you have used TDK's chrome or metal blanks.
Some gotchas:
Yesterday, I have listened Depeche Mode's Best of album on an Mechen M-30 with a good but not exquisite pair of Philips neck headphones, encoded as FLAC, and it sound superbly enjoyable. While I love vinyl, no, I won't return back to cassette (even though I have a nice deck), thank you.> The cassettes available today are Type I, Type II ("high bias") and Type IV ("metal")
That statement feels a litle misleading. The only type of cassettes produced today is Type I.
Everything else is new old stock, where you might end up with a decades-old, chemically degraded cassette.
I have sealed TDK MA-XG in mint condition. Stored in a dry, dark place. Do you say that they are degraded now?
> decades-old, chemically degraded cassette
Somehow it never occurred to me. I wonder how all the C64 games in the basement are doing...
About 5 years ago or so I was able to collect my Dad's C64 collection from my Mom's house, buy some new cables and an official C64 monitor off of eBay, and gift him his old computer back for Christmas.
I can't speak to cassettes, we had only cartridges and floppies. My Dad was a prolific pirate, so cases and cases of floppies. I'd say roughly 3 out of 5 worked, and we were able to boot the old game up. Karateka, 4th and Inches, Hat Trick, Bubble Bobble, Impossible Mission...
I was surprised the C64 worked, honestly. It had been stored for nearly a decade in an old Barn next to decrepit plow/cattle equipment from the early 1900's, not protected from the environment at all, just an old cardboard box literally busting at the seams. At least it wasn't on the ground.
Do keep in mind 96 dB is only the theoretical dynamic range of the CD medium, 99% of recordings utilize way less. (Besides, you'd be in pain if you cranked up the volume until you had 96dB of range above your hearing threshold, anyway)
CDs also eliminate wow & flutter (which ought to be pretty much inaudible on a decent deck, probably less so on an el cheapo grande walkman), which probably does more for (experienced) audio quality than high dynamic range.
Oh, and better high frequency response, for the young ones. :D
I wish the comeback was minidisc. I was just the right age to think this was the future of portable music.
Mostly because I could record radio, other cds and cassettes onto them.
I had a 4 track mini disc recorder, and dreams of becoming the go-to "audio engineer" for all the bands in my school :)
> Type IV
also they are 20$ per cassette :)
Wow! And Type I are about $2.80 on amazon. That's quite the span!
Type IV cassettes were always exorbitantly expensive both due to high cost and low demand (and rarity of the hardware which can record them well).
So, if you were able to afford a Nakamichi / Technics / Akai, then you'd be able to afford them back in the day.
Type IV (also known as Metal) cassettes came in stunning industrial designs – BASF, TDK, Maxell etc.
They were worth owing even if a Nakamichi was out of reach.
> It is unfortunate that cassettes are the lowest fidelity consumer medium
So what? The quality of music and enjoyment of it isn't depending on fidelity. I have Adam A7X monitors I mostly use day-to-day, but when I listen to lo-fi, I change the output to the output of my monitor which are absolutely horrible, but fits the mood better.
>The quality of music and enjoyment of it isn't depending on fidelity
It depends somewhat on personal preference, but also on genre. Classical music often has very high dynamic range, so analog recordings can have obnoxiously loud hiss in the quiet sections. This is probably a big reason why classical music labels were early adopters of digital recording, and why classical recordings often have a SPARS code [0] prominently displayed. Classical music was also much less affected by the loudness war, removing one incentive for buying on vinyl. You rarely see any preference for analog among classical listeners.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SPARS_code
It's less about fidelity, more about portability and customizability.
Today we can hear all the hifi we want, it's a trip to see what the imagination can fill in as well.
If you're really into walkmans, check out the Panasonic ultra small ranges.
The point about fidelity/quality is moot anyway when most people are listening to overcompressed[1] music on crappy bluetooth speakers and/or in a noisy environment.
[1] as in dynamic range compression, not encoding
Some decade, bluetooth will get there.
While it's improved a great deal, there remains a gap.
Noise cancellation is getting pretty good.
It is not necessarily a protocol/technology issue, more a cultural one. Most people are just not looking at quality first and will buy whatever is cheap, loud and has the form factor they want. Music is so compressed nowadays that they don't even hear a difference between crappy and better quality speakers.
Very plausible. Until they hear the same song much clearer and wonder what the difference was, as long as they enjoy music :)
Chances are you're not listening to it in an environment that's quiet enough for 65dB SNR to be even noticeable.
>but it is really hard to make a good sounding cassette, particularly if you dont know what you are doing (like me).
All these modern cassette players use the same super basic mechanism. To make a good sounding tape you would need vintage hardware with Dolby noise reduction and less wow/flutter.
Yeah, with high-end vintage decks in good shape, tapes can sound pretty decent, more than enough for day-to-day listening.
A type I tape recorded on a modern player? It'll sound horrible.
> Now I have to wait, first XYZ might not be on the cassette I have with me,
> There has to be some minimal amount of effort for a `thing`, when you go below it, it just becomes nothing.
I had this conversation with someone at the weekend. It's hard to find new music on Spotify because it's too easy to find stuff you already like.
I'm in my early 50s. I grew up in the 80s, in a fairly rural part of the UK with basically one music shop nearby and the next nearest a good four hours each way on the bus.
In 1988 when I was 15, a load of awesome albums came out that I really wanted and mostly couldn't afford. I bought Public Enemy - Fear of a Black Planet, Iron Maiden - Seventh Son, 808 State - Newbuild, and probably a couple of others. I'm sure I got into FLA and and The Pixies round about then too.
These tapes were about a tenner each and I had to repair quite a lot of Amstrad satellite receiver power supplies in my weekend job, and if I spent it all on tapes I'd have no money left for beer.
An awful lot of my tapes were pirate copies from friends, which we swapped at school. To this day I'm convinced that Appetite For Destruction was mixed to sound "right" when copied onto a battered old TDK D90 that's been rattling around in your schoolbag for a month by your mate's big brother who bought the CD because he's got a good job earning nearly £5/hr working on a fishing boat and has a really nice stereo.
The upshot of this is that I listened to a lot of things that I simply did not like very much, because it was new and I hadn't listened to it a million times. That being said, I don't think there was much I heard and thought "yeah I don't care for this at all", but there were definitely tapes I listened to that I wouldn't have picked out by myself.
I wouldn't have listened to 10,000 Maniacs if someone my dad worked with hadn't put it on in the car, and gave me his copy of the tape. I might not have listened to Dire Straits so much if another of my dad's friends hadn't given me a handful of bootlegs of their concerts and a copy of Making Movies, and one of the bigger kids in high school (hi Aaron, hope you're doing well) hadn't given me a pirate copy of Brothers in Arms.
I've since bought all of these on at least one other format.
I wouldn't have listened to Suzanne Vega I don't think, if my aunt hadn't given me a copy of her eponymous first album for Christmas when I was about 12 or 13 (it hadn't been out long in the UK), and I absolutely love Suzanne Vega. Loved her stuff from the first note of "Cracking". Have you ever listened to or watched something that you wanted to play at ten times speed just so you could put it into your head faster, then play it again at one tenth speed so you could pick up all the details?
This doesn't even touch on mixtapes, where someone else puts the effort in to curate a collection of things they think you will like, that represents who you are to them. Mixtapes were beautiful.
Now, with any luck, people will get into media they can hold in their hand. Even just things like MP3s on an SD card in some homebrew Arduino blob of a player.
There's more to music than just the noise it makes.
Also, if you bought an album, that meant getting some tracks you liked, and some you did not. Oddly enough I bought Suzanne Vega's self-titled album with 'Cracked' on it (off a guy in a stall off Brick Lane, only a fiver), and some of them are fantastic some slightly less so. Some albums I own I turn off one or two of the tracks as they are rubbish, but that was slightly more difficult if you had to fast-forward past them on a tape.
That said I listen to a lot of music on youtube, and it's a rare case where the dreaded 'algorithm' actually works to recommend things I had not heard before. I'm pretty sure that's where I learned of Unkle (UNKLE?) - who I _should_ have heard back in the day, but somehow never did.
(Incidentally, I found 'Daughter' recently, a UK band that is similar in tone to Suzanne Vega. Possibly also Heather Nova, although a bit more dreamy.)
> UNKLE
I was a huge DJ Shadow fan as a teen, getting as many albums, mixes and singles as I could find online.
DJ Shadow was involved in the production of UNKLE's first album Psyence Fiction. I recently discovered that there was an intro mix that wasn't on most CD copies of the album that has DJ Shadow mashing ~70 tracks together in just over 2 minutes.
https://youtube.com/watch?v=oRwnUM10mf4
>Psyence Fiction
Its kinda crazy, I loved that album in the 2000's, but hadn't really listened to it in about a decade until youtube brought it up again recently.
Instant, infinite choice = permanent anxiety. The most relaxed I've been in decades was being stuck in an airport overnight, with a broken phone, and a book that was not as good as the show. No where to go, no one expecting anything from me, no notifications, no choice, no anxiety. Finite is fine by me.
I'm looking at cassettes that way as well, a physical limitation to avoid instant gratification and to take my time.
There appear to be much higher quality sounding cassettes as well, made by companies like Sony.
Also, the phrase demotape for an up and coming musician to my recollection was often with a cassette tape due to it's accessibility.
My cousin had many old tapes from 1994-1995 of radio recordings. They've been put up for years and he's been recently listening to all of them. Most still work. He says that 30-ish years is the longest time he's seen a storage medium last. So he's been recording YouTube audio he wants to keep over them.
The article is also wrong on several points regarding the attributes of the medium:
> Meanwhile, cassettes break and jam quite easily.
No they don't. It happens sometimes but really tapes and decks were pretty reliable as long as you didn't have foreign material in the deck. CDs and vinyls are more fraglie. A Sony tape deck my cousin has had a belt wear out, but it was fixable. Unlike your Airpod batteries.
> Choosing a particular song might involve several minutes of fast forwarding, or rewinding, which clogs the playback head
Lol, clogging the head? No, tapes don't do that.
> and weakens the tape over time.
I recall that anything more than a 45-minute tape ("C90") is too thin and could experience this issue. So I never bought C100s or C120s (if those existed). Wearing tapes out wasn't a thing I ever experienced back in the day.
> The audio quality is low
I don't know the specs of all the Dolby NR stuff (which was a technology on later decks) but decent quality tapes had full frequency range. Given things like the loudness war and the artifacts of compressed audio, tape is perfectly fine for most typical music listening.
> and comes with a background hiss.
I've always liked the faint airy sound of tape silence in a weird way. But in most cases were you listen to music in real life, you don't notice it when the songs start playing.
The really cool thing about tapes are the same cool thing that playing an MP3 locally has: you can listen, give, trade, or share the audio without things on the Internet tracking or preventing you from doing it. In a time where digital freedom and creative artistic recognition is becoming less and less, this is one gateway into the offline world, which is going to be where the real interesting stuff starts to happen if current trends continue.
> CDs... are more fraglie.
CDs can be scratched more easily, obviously, and ruin them, but if you kept the production CD in good shape they will last a long time.
About three years ago, I decided to buy one of those "random 100 CDs" on eBay, just to see what kind of weird stuff I would get. A few of the CDs in there were pressed in 1984, and they ripped just fine onto my 2022 laptop into FLAC and I listen to the FLAC files regularly. As far as I can tell there were no checksum errors or skips or anything like that.
Burned CDs and DVDs do not have that luxury, especially cheap ones. My dad found out that a lot of his home movies that he had archived on burnt DVDs were literally starting to rot away. Fortunately in his case he had the habit of burning like twenty copies of each of his collections, so I don't think he actually lost anything, and I was able to show him how to extract images from it, but I consider ourselves lucky.
> I've always liked the faint airy sound of tape silence in a weird way.
Me too! Honestly there's something kind of charming about being forced to hear the artifacts of the actual medium that carries the sound. The light hiss has a certain "purity" to it, for want of a better word. It's also why I like watching movies from the 1960s-1970s; they couldn't make everything completely silent, so there was always a small hiss. It makes movies like Straw Dogs much more unnerving.
> The really cool thing about tapes are the same cool thing that playing an MP3 locally has:
Yeah, and CDs as well. For reasons that I am equal parts surprised about and grateful for, CDs never had any DRM; I can take an exact copy of my CD to my computer, copy it to all my devices, stream it with Jellyfin, remix it with Acid or SoundForge, or pretty much anything else I can think of. Given that CDs still sound excellent, I think you could make an argument that it's objectively the best audio media that ever got widespread adoption.
> CDs never had any DRM
Oh, but they did, and quite infamously :D
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sony_BMG_copy_protection_rootk...
https://arstechnica.com/uncategorized/2005/11/5549-2/
https://www.networkworld.com/article/715376/network-security...
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/240779158_Lessons_f...
"Hey, I can't burn my presentation to disc."
I still refuse to buy Sony labelled products from that one. When you have to go through several dozen computers to wipe their rootkits off... even though creating a custom deployment image was faster, it was still a massive time consuming pain I'd never put on anyone.
If they'd have released a simple, single download, then maybe I'd have been less burned... but having to install custom uninstaller per machine, with an email address, and that software itself left another security hole... I'm out.
Are CDs more fragile? All of mine still seemed to work last I checked. I gave up on tapes years ago, because they'd always fuck up one way or the other. The sound quality was also annoyingly bad, and track search was a faff.
(I think I prefer measles to tapes. Neither killed me, but at least nobody reminisces fondly about that time they had measles!)
Really thinking about it, maybe they're not more fraglie. CDs scratch easily but tapes are still exposed on the bottom, so you really want to keep both in their cases.
I still think it's wild that portable (as in the Walkman sense) CD players were a thing - a spinning disc with a precision optical pickup with very little separating it from the outside world that b1umps around on your hip as you walk. I guess it's equally crazy to have a tape motor on your hip, but it just seemed less fragile to me.
My musical habits for the past few years have been long mixes of songs on YouTube, that I don't really skip around in. I think YouTube's ads that annoyingly hit between every video nudged me in that direction; but that's why I made mixtapes back in the day when you bought an album but there was only 1 or 2 good songs on it.
I have CDs from the 80s that still play perfectly. The only CDs I've had fail were a multi-disc set that were packaged with foam padding in the case, touching the label side of the disc. The plasticizer leached out and diffused into the protective lacquer, which softened and stuck to the foam, and tore away when I took them out, pulling chunks of the metal layer with it.
They weren't anything rare so I wasn't too bothered, but it later occurred to me that they technically could have been saved. The data is pressed into the polycarbonate, so if I'd very carefully peeled off all the metal, ideally in a laminar flow cabinet to avoid any dust, and then had them re-coated in aluminum with vacuum deposition, they would probably have still played. I think this is true for CDs lost to "disc rot" too.
I don't have any nostalgia for tapes. I used them as a child, but I never liked them. The first music I bought was on CD. I still buy a lot of used CDs on Ebay. Lots of great bargains are available and they sound identical to brand new CDs. It's worth finding sellers who'll combine postage and buying in bulk or you'll end up paying more for postage than the discs themselves.
I mostly agree. Tapes worked pretty well. The big advantage of CD's from my perspective was the ability to jump straight to a track. Rewinding and fastforwarding was quite annoying. But CD's skipped like crazy on any mobile application, especially on the early hardware. Of course mp3's solved this. And there was a nice time, albeit short, time where we downloaded music and felt as if it was ours to own. Granted, a lot of this was probably pirated, otherwise maybe you ripped a CD. But still it represented a great state of solid technology (they just played for you without any fuss) and reasonable ownership. Then along came streaming. It does, of course, have its advantages, but they come with many significant drawbacks.
> there was a nice time, albeit short, time where we downloaded music and felt as if it was ours to own. Granted, a lot of this was probably pirated
Nothing prevents you from doing it today, and there is more music to download than ever before.
Some of us never stopped. I never got into the whole streaming thing. My music collection today is a hard drive full of files, just as it was in 1999. No internet connection needed. No wondering if service X has song Y. I can load the whole library onto a phone, my car, wherever I want to play it. Peak music media.
I bought a new album on CD a couple of years ago. Badly scratched straight out of the case. Guess that wasn't really the right comparison though.
Scratched enough that it was not working any more? IME CDs work surprisingly well even with scratches, way way better than LPs though. You need to properly gouge the surface before things become problematic.
Depends on what you mean by fragile. CDs are really susceptible to bitrot
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Disc_rot
Archival discs are made with gold backing, which is much more robust than the aluminum reflector used in mass-pressed discs.
> CDs are really susceptible to bitrot
Define "really susceptible"? I've bought hundreds of albums on CD over the last four decades, and only one of them has ever gone bad on me.
The first CD I ever purchased, manufactured in 1990, still sounds as good as the day I bought it.
IME that's mostly a problem with self-recorded disks while pressed discs are quite durable in practice. Maybe if you keep them in a very humid/hot environment you get different results.
My experience with tapes does not match yours. I've seen both audio and VCR tapes unspool by playing or trying to remove them from the player.
I estimate renting over 1200 VCR tapes in my lifetime, and I've never had one unspool. The cassette problem was common enough that fixing it with a pencil was part of the zeitgeist, but I can't remember anything like that for VHS.
i had ONE cassette unwind. my less careful friend was always winding them with a pencil. the culprit? button mashing between fast-forward and play.
I grew up in the 80s, and was a prolific user of both video tapes (mostly VHS) and cassette tapes. I can't recall ever having a tape get eaten by any deck, either video or audio.
Not saying it never happens, but if it was common I absolutely would have encountered it many times over.
I think it happened more as the players aged and wore out. In the 90s and 2000s I remember it happening pretty commonly although cd or dvd skipping was way worse. A couple years ago we took the old family vcr player out of the parents attic and tested it out. It was a great vcr at the time, sony with all the bells and whistles. But it immediately at the tape and I mean ate it. Had to take it apart and route the tape out myself and I'm pretty sure its ruined the tape. We spent 2 hours on youtube with it taken apart and gave up the project indefinitely.
> I can't recall ever having a tape get eaten by any deck ... if it was common I absolutely would have encountered it many times over.
Common enough that you know the slang for it, despite it not happening to you.
That must be an issue with the player
The answer is so obviously "no" for the general case (making even a tiny dent to streaming/digital) that the article's title amounts to clickbait.
That's regardless of the fact that there has always been a vibrant extremely niche cassete scene, the same way there still are 8-bit home computer fans and clubs.
At best, on top of the above, a tiny additional niche of more mainstream "hipster" artists and fans might release/get cassetes as a statement.
Both numbers summed would still be so small compared to the overall music consumption market/methods that implying any sort of "comeback" is ludicrous.
Indeed, the title is the usual nonsense. Sales within a niche like this will always fluctuate. When someone spots a slight increase, they jump at the chance to wheel out this kind of headline. The article itself doesn't give hard numbers, just says UK sales "reached their highest level since 2003" - meaningless since cassette sales had died long before then. It links to an article that says there were "195,000 units sold last year" - so, next to nothing.
I recall one point around 10-15 years ago, websites were simultaneously proclaiming the death of CDs because sales for the year had just dropped below 100 million, and the revival of vinyl because sales were approaching 1 million in the same timespan. Of course, the takeaway for many young people was that vinyl was outselling CDs.
I'm pretty sure these articles are planted by PR firms working for the music publishers they talk about. There are plenty of people happy to be told what's currently "cool" and they'll obediently go out and buy them.
The title is less nonsense than it first appears. Cassettes are riding the coattails of vinyl getting popular again as collectibles. Lots of medium sized bands added vinyl to their merch stands to great success with their fans but the total manufacturing capacity of vinyl is small and everyone was suddenly competing for it. Not to mention when Taylor Swift drops an album and buys it all. Enter cassettes, another piece of physical media that's easier for artists to get their hands on and has similar collectible properties.
Neither vinyl nor cassettes are going to make a dent in terms of music distribution, but that's because they compete in the same market as band t shirts.
Shameless plug. I've produced an entire album and released it on cassette (as primarily medium in mind). You can listen to it here and watching my tape deck spinning. It is recorded from my tape deck, so you get the real tape sound! :-) https://tonleiter.net/reihenhaus/
BTW this is the final audio chain then. Crazy. :-) Synths, instruments, etc. -> Analogue mixing console -> ADC -> DAC -> Professional tape production apparatus -> My tape deck -> ADC -> ACC Codec -> Your DAC
> Synths, instruments, etc. -> Analogue mixing console -> ADC -> DAC -> Professional tape production apparatus -> My tape deck -> ADC -> ACC Codec -> Your DAC
Reminds me of the early music CD's which had AAA, AAD, ADD, DDD printed on them to tell you how the material was recorded, mixed, and mastered. A stood for analog and D for digital. Looks like you went the DDA route :-)
Yeah, mostly DDA, and some songs are live mixed on the console, this is DAA then? Anyway.. :-)
I think the real shift to digital was around 1994-95 when professional digital recording equipment became somewhat affordable even for smaller studios. My Roland DM-80 4-track digital hard disk recorder, you also find on the albums webpage, was more then 20.000$ back in 1991, so most studio easily stood with 16-tracks on analogue tape.
Excellent work! Reminds me (though maybe inaccurately) of soundtracks from old CGI laser discs that were basically long demos.
Thank you! Ah cool CGI laser discs!! This is a great reminder.
Sounds great!
Thank you! :-)
I lived through vinyl, 8-track, cassettes, and CDs. I digitized all of my music over 20 years ago and no longer even own a physical media playback device. I can't fathom going back. Digital or bust.
If you want the cassette experience without the massive downsides of cassettes, pick up an old Minidisc recorder. Physical media that are nearly infinitely re-recordable (unused ones are expensive but used ones from Japan are not) and nearly indestructible. The NetMD ones have been bid up in price because of transfer speed but older ones that only do real-time transfers are not hideously expensive.
If there is one old format that actually should have a revival, it's minidisk. I was really holding out for their production keep on until that revival came but they gave up the ghost this year.
Tiny digital CDs packaged in little neon jewel floppy disks is the neotokyo future we all deserve.
I remember minidiscs, but never had my own player. But I don't want any sort of physical media.
But why would I want the cassette experience in the first place?
Mix tapes were a very cool experience that a Spotify playlist can’t replicate. Beyond that, ask someone who wants it. I don’t, but they are a really cool piece of tech.
I still have a few specialty MD's from various brands such as the mona/bitclub; my last recorder was the RH1 and I regretted ever letting that unit go.
Yep. Picked up a few MiniDisc players. My daughter is fascinated with them.
Minidiscs were so cool! I was surprised to see they still make them. Unfortunately they’re not all that cheap but not terrible.
They don’t still make them. It’s all NOS or used.
Only recently discontinued in Feburary 2025!
You do not get tape saturation with minidisc, thus you cannot get the "cassette experience".
Cassettes were always a pain, but LPs are an awesome medium even today.
While it's convenient to just listen to anything with a click, the joy of the experience is gone. Purposefully pulling out an LP and setting it on the turntable, sitting on the couch to meaningfully listen while reading the album cover is a much more engaging musical experience.
Yes, I don't have time to do that much anymore either. But when possible, it is much more enjoyable.
Owning bit-perfect rips of your favourite music is a sweet spot. I have no interest in tape - of any kind - or vinyl.
The one frustration is that continuous FLAC playback appears to be an arcane programming challenge that only a select few developers have mastered. Especially on mobile.
And unless you set up a server the business of getting files onto and off devices is insanely perverse.
But in terms of sound quality and convenience, lossless rips win over anything else.
Going back to physical seems almost pointlessly decadent.
Not trying to correct you, just looking for the right word. Digital isn't the right term here, because CDs are also digital. I'm trying to come up with the word for the opposite of physical media, but strangely I can't. Maybe streaming, but how would MP3s on a USB drive fit in?
The issue here is, "physical" is a misleading word. Digital works are also held on physical media. The distinction is whether the work is stored on a dedicated physical object.
Edit: I suppose a jukebox confuses things as I think it belongs in the "physical media" box, but it isn't dedicated to a specific work. Hmm.
Maybe "mediumless" is the right word.
Although, if we want to pedantic: music stored on a hard disk is still stored on a medium, but you can't pop the hard drive into any old player and play the music.
Ethereal, Ephemeral?
I know what you mean but I can't think of any word that describes the concept (without requiring further elaboration).
"physical media" is an inaccurate, redundant, phrase.
I would especially not go back to tape. sssssssssssssssssssssss
Why not? Now after 20 years passed you won't hear it anymore! :-P
8-track is lower than cassette in my book, but they share a common factor!
Same here. And I've been old-guy grumbling for years now about kids-these-days getting into vinyl and other retro technology that I was happy to be rid of.
I don’t think so. I spent a huge amount of time in my youth recording, trading, buying, and selling audio tapes (all from the metal/hardcore/punk underground). It was a lot of fun, but everyone I know was glad when other ways of sharing and spreading music became available. As a niche, yes otherwise no.
Plenty of bands on Bandcamp selling tapes as merch in my experience. I think they're more of a physical collectable item instead of a genuine medium for most of the buyers though?
Yeah on bandcamp they are collectables first and medium second
As soon as recordable CDs were affordable, I switched completely, and never looked back.
Cassette tapes were nice when we didn't have anything better, but they were always a big pain in the back. Noisy, wearing out, skipping took a long time, making compilations took hours. I don't miss those times.
Nowadays, I can play mp3's on a $3 microcontroller, at excellent quality, and I love it.
Do you still use a kerosene lamp when you go into your barn at night?
> As soon as recordable CDs were affordable, I switched completely, and never looked back.
Cassettes were good for mix tapes, but once their were CDs and MP3s I never really looked back.
> Do you still use a kerosene lamp when you go into your barn at night?
It not quite the same comparison. Not sure about a kerosene lamp, however a kerosene/paraffin stove does have it uses.
You would be surprised what people are using. I spend a lot of time walking/cycling up canals and people are using wood hearths and similar to keep the boats warm in the winter. Wood is literally everywhere along the side of the canals and so it is literally free energy.
Some of the boats have solar panels, generators, full internet but quite a few of the boats only have relatively basic amenities by today's standards.
I used to code at night with a kerosene lamp sitting on my desk. I love the light spectrum of a live fire.
"Portable" (they couldn't even fit in a pocket) CD players were the worst thing imho. Too sensitive to even small shocks, which was particularly annoying while taking longer walks, and draining batteries like crazy. I switched from cassette players to MP3 players, almost completely skipping the era of CD players. I've tried it once or twice because my sister had it, and never again.
While I agree with the overall sentiment, streaming services have also degraded our behaviours by prioritising instant rewards and locking us into a platform you cannot escape easily from, and that once you escape, you lose literally everything, for you never owned those songs. Then you have social media notifications interrupting your songs, no headphone jack, and no physical button feedback when playing music on your smartphone.
I also don't really see the appeal of cassette tapes, personally, and the quality of digital media like CDs and even MP3 files is arguably superior.
I guess a good middle ground is one of those modern audio players that don't have smartphone functionality and take an SD card or so. FiiO I think is quite popular. Might give it a try some day.
Yes, I actually do use my kerosene lamp when I go into my (shed) at night.
It also helps heat the shed in the winter, which is when it's mostly likely to be dark when I want to do some work in my shed.
Here's a nice resource where you can read more about kerosene lamps! https://www.sevarg.net/2022/10/09/keropunk-part-1-kerosene-l... (not my website, but great for learning about kerosene lamps)
You can also just use your iPhone's torch and install the heating app. Drains your battery quickly though.
https://www.reddit.com/r/iOSProgramming/comments/7tew81/hand...
> Do you still use a kerosene lamp when you go into your barn at night?
No, but people still use candles or LEDs that resemble candles, including the flickering.
People also read paperback books. It's not always about practicality.
Man I love tape saturation and the sound of high quality cassettes played with a nice tape deck. Sure, there are many bad ones.. Luckily, we have more possibilities then ever (given you have enough hipster money to spend). Tape is a little bit like slow food and very enjoyable to me. To each his own.
> Do you still use a kerosene lamp when you go into your barn at night?
To be fair, there really is nothing like the gentle hiss of a tilley lamp while there's a storm blowing outside.
It's got that analog warmth
It's perfecly legitimate to do stuff simply because you want to. This is a site for tinkering people, so it's kind of expected people tinker with stuff. Quite often that includes old stuff. :)
Waiting for the writeup about the steel wire recorder resurgence now.
It's been thirty years since I last used a cassette tape (the adaptor things you'd stick in the car radio don't count) and I've never once missed them.
Yea, I was pretty happy to move from tapes to cds.
You couldn't instantly record the radio on CD and until computers with CD recorder were common it was harder to share/copy/mix stuff between friends. Tapes were useful before MP3/broadband/p2p file sharing were a thing even long after CD had become common. As a teenager I couldn't afford every CD and vinyl release I liked and even if I had the means the records weren't necessarily available in store locally. Many of us had to rely on that tape being ready in the deck and ninja reflexes to hit the record button fast enough.
Minidiscs would have been better but harder to finance/justify as a kid.
I don't miss cassettes, but they were an important thing to me in the 1980s. When my wife and I got married we were as poor as could be. Our first stereo was a little radio/cassette deck with four inch speakers. We played a lot of cassettes on that thing.
I moved to digital players as soon as I could afford them. The most memorable (before the iPod) was the Creative Nomad with its 5GB hard drive. It was too big to fit easily in my jacket pocket, but I shoved it in there anyway. I didn't have to choose the tapes I had on my long bus commute anymore. And when the second-gen iPod came along, it was like heaven.
I'd never go back to cassette...but it was great when there was little else available.
Did a remix awhile back and printed to a cassette using a Tascam 414 Portastudio. Brought it back into the computer at about three quarters of normal speed twisting the dial occasionally. The other side of tape was Fleetwood Mac “The Dance” my dad dubbed for me in the 90s. The imperfections of that old hissy tape with backwards Stevie Nicks bleeding through collapsed the stereo field in a nice way. I welcome this trend!
Of course cassettes were all around me when I was younger; even my first car had a cassette deck. They seemed like an old relic in that time already - with the drawbacks mentioned in the article, so it was easy to put them away seemingly forever.
However, I got "back" into cassettes recently with some new releases. Grabbed a FiiO CP-13, and while the quality still isn't great, with low wow and flutter it's perfectly serviceable. There's one thing that made it stand out and felt like we missed something that's now become a lost art - absolutely no delay between pressing play and music playing. No buffering from a streaming service, no megabytes pushed into RAM, no decoding, no FIFOs being filled before the signal exiting through a DAC.
> FiiO CP-13, and while the quality still isn't great
The sad part is that the quality of modern cassette players is actually decidedly worse than their vintage counterparts. There's essentially only one company producing the actual mechanism (Tanashin) and they're cheaply made of low quality materials (plastic flywheels etc.). That's the main reason that the vintage machines are still fetching higher prices. Also I don't think any modern machines have Dolby B-C noise reduction, HX Pro, automatic track seek/skip, and whatever other fancy features you could find in the likes of a high end Sony or Nakamichi deck.
Tanashin stopped producing tape mechanisms years ago. The modern "Tanashin" tape mechanisms are Chinese clones.
I found a French manufacturer called wearerewind.com who uses a heavier brass wheel and better clarity. Quite pricey though, as it is to be expected.
I've read this but I don't get it. Why can't those parts just be 3D printed on demand?
I agree
And also .. there is absolutely no chance that you might unexpectedly hear an ad instead of a song.
I personally would never listen through a music player that serves ADs. Might just be me and my insane hatred of seeing ADs tho.
I miss driving down the freeway, occasionally seeing the shoulders strewn with cassette tape…
Actually, I don't miss that at all.
Cassettes lack the one thing LP records do better than digital formats: a large surface to display album art and roll a doobie.
true but j cards hold the torch for diy unique and handmade artwork anyway
These kids and their vapes.
I remember being SO HAPPY when I got rid of all my cassette tapes and vinyl discs for CDs. I was an early adopter of digital and, to this day I don't regret it. There's no way I'm going back.
What's next? VHS?
VHS is still the only way to watch the star wars you grew up with. Lucas lost his mind and started meddling with the finished product again in the DVD era.
I put The Full Monty in a combo VHS/TV machine in a hostel a few years back, and was pleasantly surprised by how good it looked. Admittedly on, like, a 17" or 19" screen, but still. Turns out when you aren't trying to record 6 hours of video on a 2 hour tape from broadcast TV, the format performs pretty well. Yes, I lived through that. Star Trek marathons were the motivator for that.
I could see dumber things happening.
Terror Vision releases modern movies on VHS.. $30+ a pop
>What's next? VHS?
Yes, please! I've been thinking of starting a collection.
Lots of tapes more or less being given away here. Check your local flea markets!
Cassettes were never the best for audio fidelity but I always really liked the physicality of pushing the play button to move the heads into position. In some ways the inability to easily skip around a recording made listening a different experience than a CD or streaming.
Which is why I wrote a web component[0] that wraps an html audio element in an interface that mimics a (cheap) tape player.
[0] https://sheep.horse/2025/3/a_cassette_audio_control_for_the_...
I predicted this back in 2004 as an angsty teenager: https://evilschemes.livejournal.com/3007.html
Based on the assumption that the appeal here is the experience, not the actual legacy media, it seems like it would be trivial to implement a digital stream standard so that audio cassette players could record and play a digital stream for higher fidelity with an identical experience? Or would that not be possible on legacy media because of bitrate limitations?
I can easily imagine the DAC/ADC and amplifier tuning/stream processing being an optional step so that legacy compatibility would be perfect, and even dual head setups that could do on the fly conversion. But perhaps the data density of the tape just isn’t there? Though it seems like with the type of data stuffing tech we use it flash memory and hdd these days to quadruple up on bits per domain, that it should be possible.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digital_Audio_Tape
I think this used a spinning head, similar to video? The trick would be to use a static head and still record 4 or More digital tracks on a 4mm tape, with enough headroom for robust ECC. I’m pretty sure it could be done at ~kbps with contemporary recording head litho at 8 tracks per mm. That makes 16 tracks per side, 32 for the full 4mm (both sides). It would even be possible to convert existing tapes to digital in one play/pass using a 2 head system, or a read-store-record setup.
A friend’s daughter (young adult) told me about five years ago that cassette tapes are “cool” again. I was surprised because I always considered them to be the worst physical medium for music. I still have the cassette deck that I bought in the 90s for my hi-fi separate system but I haven’t listened to it in years. In the mid-2000s, I gave away most of my cassettes to a friend who had bought an old car that only had a tape deck. I only held on to recordings that were only released on cassette: demo tapes, bootlegs of live concerts that I had attended and some DIY releases from 90s’ punk bands that didn’t have (nor want) a record label.
Good cassettes played with a good tape deck are actually really good for music. It naturally saturates and compresses the audio material which often leads to much more homogeneous musical experience. Also the frequency spectrum tends to soften too harsh recordings, which is also cool. It all depends on the genre of course. The typical high resolution classic concert is probably better to be listened from HQ flac or whatever.
Back in the days the only way poor bands could achieve some sort of release was on cassette, paired with car radios and kitchen players this for sure wasn't the best experience to listen to music. And unfortunately many professional tape productions weren't that great either. But this was a management and production problem.
Yeah, it’s wild to me too, but I then remember purposely obtaining an eight track player in the 90s. My daughter has taken to vinyl for a time and now has a discman and it seems like a push back against the Illusion of Choice that music streaming “provides”.
That and she’s clearly genetically predisposed to hipsterism.
> I was surprised because I always considered them to be the worst physical medium for music.
That's a big part of why they're cool.
Imperfection is beautiful. We feel this intuitively when it comes to loving someone, or when it comes to impressionistic art. It really is the same thing with music.
I believe the typical response is that you can simulate that imperfection on digital media... but cassette lovers would argue this is tantamount to putting a photograph through a 'Da Vinci' filter in Photoshop. It's missing the point. There's more to music than what it sounds like. Where it came from, what you did to play it, these are all part of the experience. The context of a piece of a media, the means by which you listen to it, where it came from -- these change how the music feels, even if there is no difference in how it sounds.
Back when vinyl or cassettes were the only option, sure, the response is "screw your romanticism". But now that we have perfect digital media always available, there is romance in getting to choose something fragile and imperfect and precious. People like that feeling.
Vinyl resurging, I can understand. But cassette tapes were always so fragile. I can't count how many got twisted up in the player and lost forever.
Their only redeeming quality was the mix tape.
>Vinyl resurging, I can understand. But cassette tapes...their only redeeming quality was the mix tape
their ONLY redeeming quality? mix or not mix, did you ever try to record a vinyl?
That and piracy.
You gotta love the cahones of the guy that, in the 1970's, opened a record rental store in a college town… and sold blank cassettes as well.
But what a quality that was!
I don't understand vinyl either. Tape is worse but vinyl has all of the same downsides, sonically. The "Warmness" people are always talking about is a symptom of fragility. Unless you're going to get a laser player, your vinyl gets worse with every listen. And if you're using a laser, you loose the garbage that is referred to as "Warm". Nevermind if they get left somewhere warm.
It's objectively worse than lossless digital in every way except coming with a big artwork surface. I'd rather buy a poster.
I'd rather listen to music as close to was intended and for it to stay that way as long as possible.
> your vinyl gets worse with every listen
Worn out vinyl grooves are typically caused by an unbalanced tonearm or damaged stylus.
Realistically if the tonearm is adequately balanced and the stylus is kept clean you're looking at hundreds to thousands of listens before it has any kind of even slightly discernible effect.
There's a much more likely chance of vinyls being damaged by simply handling them.
How many people are performing proper maintenance on their record players?
The point stands either way. Vinyl isn't durable. It gets worn by proper usage and worse by improper usage.
My FLAC files are as perfect as the day I got them and are backed up both at home and remotely. Vinyl is an inferior format but people like rituals and hobbies but then they tell themselves lies about how it's actually better.
It's fine if you find it romantic and pleasing to pull out the vinyl, put it on the player then read the liner notes while listening to the album. That's awesome. It's the same for lots of hobbies I have but let's not act like it's technically superior in any way.
Even when I was a kid an cassettes were the height of tech I hated them. They sound like crap and you can't even try to skip meaningfully and rewind is a nightmare.
Well, they kind of never were the height of tech. To be sure, the cassette Walkman was a kind of height of tech (probably in spite of the format though).
Been following people who have been making electronic music mixes between two cassette decks and a mixer which are worth a listen. The thing that's interesting is that you can pitch up and down in ways that sound nice:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Kzsa1M7s1sk
Anyways, here's the mixes:
Trippy Ambient Cassette-Only Mix by Bop | Rewind Ritual 01
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=feHvyc69xe4
Cassette-Only Drum & Bass Set by BOP | Live at SK1 Records
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CHmBcBPV-3U
DnB mix with cassette tapes (DJ Ponkachonka)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r8jp5TcherI
Cassette mix drum & bass (2005 - 2010) (DJ Ponkachonka)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Cpqui0lo-v4
What's crazy is that at least the portable cassette decks aren't cheap anymore. Look on eBay at prices and be amazed
@ooedotech https://youtu.be/urGmmkUDi20 etc.
Music sounded different when there were physically moving things that produced it. Live music, turn-table, cassette spindle that have a visible action. It's not fidelity. It's about connecting the sound to real world. We know tape is not producing the sound, but we know that it moves and movement causes sound.
Sound without any visible action or movement is a bit weird for our animal instincts.
Personally, I’m holding out for the CD comeback.
I still have a Nakamichi in storage
Another consumer deck I loved was made by Philips, who I once read "invented the tape deck"
I still have a Sony portable line level deck and powered stealth mics, too, for live taping. Concerts are way too expensive these days, though
Heck I still have a HHB CDR850 for converting from analog to digital
I gave away my Digi001
I still have 100 or so tapes, I gave away the rest
I remember buying 100s of Maxell XLIIs, Tower Records became the goto source
I'm not sure I have the ears anymore to notice the improvements, if any, of modern equipment over "vintage"
But most music produced today sounds like crap to me anyway. Too loud
Did people just forget the era of CD burning? Cassettes sucked.
Normal non-tech people were ripping CDs with iTunes. "Rip. Mix. Burn." was a nationwide if not worldwide advertisement.
All of this still works, if you have a CD drive.
If you're going to bother buying a cassette player... what's the allure for that over a CD-R and a basic CD player. CD players in cars are going away, but they're still around in houses and inexpensive small boomboxes.
But then... what's the allure of that over say any old audio player that takes SD cards or just a USB stick. A lot of modern cars and also stereo receivers and TVs will take a USB stick and play files from it. These players are incredibly prevalent and very easy to use. And loading the music from a computer or even a tablet is easy.
Of these three, cassette is the absolute least likely to be available anywhere.
You can still have the experience of making a playlist and even putting the files on a USB stick for someone. Importantly, they can actually play it on their own listening device.
CDs skip very easily so they're not good for portability. So that limits their use to in the house, and they're you're competing with vinyl. Cassette fill a niche in the nostalgia world being something you can more easily use on the go.
There were many portable CD players with enough buffering that they'd never skip. Panasonic Shockwave (IIRC) for example. And car heatunits.
You had to get a very old or seriously cheap portable player to get skipping.
Cassettes get distorted too when moving (.e.g running). There’s very cool tech in some models that prevent this distortion but they are more expensive.
I had lots of CD and mp3-CD players with good anti-skip. Some would even buffer enough or the song to stop the CD for several seconds at a time, especially so on my later mp3/ATRAC CD players. The crappier ones added crappy audio compression to fit it's tiny memory, but better ones could do the raw data and had no (at least to me) loss in quality and later the mp3/ATRAC ones would just buffer the actual file data.
I don't think I've ever experienced a car CD player skipping due to shock. I'm sure it could happen, but I don't do much trail driving at high speeds personally.
I listened to my CD players while biking, hiking, and more. No reason to leave the CDs at home unless you already upgraded to one of those fancy hard drive mp3 players.
Yeah it was probably around 2003 I listened to all my music on MP3 CDs I made and it had like 30 seconds solid of buffering that I never managed to hit unless I sat their purposefully shaking my player in my hands to watch the buffer meter go down.
Not for me, analog audio is bulky and expensive compared to whats available today. The choices I see are, pirate a decent collection to manage and store on my computer that I can load onto a phone or "dedicated mp3 player", pay money for a subpar streaming service, listen to free radio streams, or just pick one of the billion playlists off youtube. I keep 2 MP3 CDs in my car for the rare times im in deep BFE and don't have reliable service, but I doubt 99% of people experience even that these days.
Its the same hipstery thingie like LPs are with similar talk about quality, experience and whatnot. People still do it, heck people do a lot of seemingly weird stuff that is far from optimal behavior.
Who cares at the end, somebody likes gardening and somebody likes analog music thingies (that they usually didn't grow up with before - this seems to remove most of the lure of these gizmos).
There is that fact of another plastic stuff playing more (rather fragile) plastic stuff polluting the planet at the end, but since this will be fringe activity and many folks reuse their old collections its not the worst offender.
I might use audio cassettes if I want to record my own audio temporarily (and later copy it to a CD if I decide to keep it; I have done this before), especially if the higher quality of CDs is not needed. For most uses I would probably not use audio cassette tapes; I prefer to use CDs.
(One feature of audio cassettes is that it will stay where it was left off (even if it is removed and used in a different player), although this can be both an advantage and a disadvantage (for one thing, each cassette has only one position). At least, you can easily rewind it back to the beginning. There are other advantages and disadvantages as well)
Pretty clear-cut example of the Submarine[0] genre.
[0] https://paulgraham.com/submarine.html For those who aren't up-to-date with their HackerNews lore.
Strong disagree. This trend has been underway for a few years already. There are a few reasons for this:
1. Musicians love tape. We like the frequency roll-off, we like the imprecision - but these are nostalgia. What we like most is the with tape your options are largely reduced to Record and Play, because doing anything more complicated (eg editing via punch-ins with synchronization) is such a PITA. They're a great tool for just making you commit to a performance instead of editing it to death.
2. In similar fashion, young people are fascinated by a medium you have to sit through by default, because skipping around is inconvenient and might damage your tape. Not being able to listen nonlinearly promotes a different sort of engagement with the material from the fragmented one provided by streaming. To a lesser extent, music on tape has better dynamics not because the medium is superior, but because maximizing loudness over the entire track means the whole recording will be saturated. This is desirable in some genres (metal, some kinds of dance music), but most cassette recordings avoid maximizing loudness which sounds refreshingly different to people who grew up during the Loudness War.
3. Chinese bootlegs. In the 80s and 90s China was a target country for first world garbage disposal, so unsold CDs and cassettes would be damaged by being run through a table saw and then shipped to China in bulk for recycling, sold by weight. While publication or importation of western music was heavily restricted by censors, garbage imports were uncontrolled, and enterprising minds soon observed that damaged media could often be rendered playable, at at least in part. This led to the emergence of a "dakou" (打口 - saw cut) music scene, with parts of albums being sold to enthusiasts in semi underground stores with no regard to release date, genre, or marketing campaigns. This had a big impact on China's domestic music scene.
4. Differing media preferences. Other countries (but Japan in particular) never lost the taste for physical media the way Anglosphere countries did. Japan was always record collectors' paradise because industry cartelism kept the price of physical media high, but buyers were rewarded with high production quality of CD mastering, vinyl grade, and printed media, and labels would typically add bonus tracks exclusive to the Japanese editions of albums. A combination of Japanese taste for the best-quality version of something and 30+ years of economic stagnation meant Japanese consumers were more into maintaining and using their hifi equipment; if you watch Japanese TV dramas a fancy stereo is still a common status marker, much like expensive furniture. Record stores are still a big deal, and music appreciation its own distinct hobby and and social activity in a way that fell out of fashion in other countries.
5. Developing world and cheap distribution. Cassettes were popular in Africa and other developing economies for decades for reasons that should be obvious, and they're popular again with emerging/underground artists for similar reasons. You can self-release on cassette very very cheaply, at the loss of time efficiency. You won't make much money doing this, but you can make a bit, and it's a way to target serious fans who like collecting things and want to support obscure and cool artists who have not yet got big and sold out. Also making $3 on a cassette sale through Bandcamp or at a show may be easier than 1-2000 plays on Spotify or some other service for artists who are not already famous. Self-releasing on vinyl is also possible but typically you need to invest $1-2000, whereas you can get into duplicating your own cassettes for $50 or a few hundred $ in bulk. Vinyl is the way to go if you need to reach DJs but cassette players are dirt cheap or free for consumers and are less effort to use than a record player.
Physical media are still a Big Deal for people who obsess over music, who care about quite different things from the median consumer.
I could skip around on tapes relatively well on a walkman, you just had to remember the counters or roughly how long it was to rewind/fast forward. It wasn't that inconvenient. It just wasn't as quick as an mp3 player, CD or Winamp.
So are 80s phones! Lol (I hated both)
https://tincan.kids/?srsltid=AfmBOopPdHpavGKB5WUVhZZDk34dKul...
I recently had to look at a particular kind of marketing, as a techie.
And suddenly I realized why Pinterest was so highly ranked on Google image searches.
It's not so much about a useful tool for individual users; rather, it's a marketing venue for manufacturing a lifestyle image that lets you extract money from people.
Like a fashion magazine with a greater illusion of participation.
Of course someone was going to decide that vinyl -- started as fringe genuine/hipster, and turned into marketable lifestyle -- had been milked or moated. The timing is right for you to extract more money for yourself with a new lifestyle twist to sell.
The exact gimmick doesn't much matter. Fire up the memetic lifestyle machine: we've got consumers (producers of money) to milk.
The most interesting thing about this article was the Bow Wow Wow song linked. It's a song about music piracy (including a usage of the word "pirate") from 1980, including this stanza:
It used to break my heart when I went in your shop
And you said my records were out of stock
So I don't buy records in your shop
Now I tape them all 'cause I'm 'Top Of The Pops'
Taylor Swift (and Ed Sheeran) releasing her albums on vinyl is what caused vinyl prices to sky rocket, so not happy to hear she's moving onto cassettes too. I moved to collecting tapes due to vinyls being too expensive to get for anything but my most loved albums.
Some genres just feel better to listen to on tape too: lofi black metal, dungeon synth, hardcore, anything that likes to play with lo-fi sounds for aesthetic sounds nice on tapes and it really adds to the experience.
Tapes stretch. Tone and tempo changes. You can't easily play along the track anymore. Tapes also break. Some players mess up the tape too, destroying precious cassettes. These were actual practical problems way back.
Just a couple months ago I converted to mp3 some cassettes I recorded in the very early 80s of a local band. Not perfect audio, but sounded quite good still. Not bad for a ~45 year old tape.
I'm waiting for the revival of computer games on cassettes.
https://turgen.sourceforge.io/ :-)
Wait no longer; https://www.polyplay.xyz/CPC_1
If you were free to invent a completely new form of physical media for music roughly in the same space as casettes/vinyls/cds, what would you invent?
Casettes save state but you to rewind. Vinyl have a great album art, but are fragile. CDs and Casettes are small and allow saving and making mix tapes at home. Can we mix and match? How?
Why not MiniDisc?
The machines are quite expensive, especially the NetMD models with USB. And for the best choices you need to order from Japan.
I have never experience reel-to-reel. That is the format I would like to get into.
My sense though is that anything made of rubber on these old machines need replacing. I'm a little intimidated about spending so much on a device only to be unable to restore it.
I sold my Studer-ReVox B77 in mint condition to a collector for the price of a new high-quality digital recorder.
The thing was sitting in its original carton, barely used. Between the hassle of hauling it around, and the cost of tapes, I never actually took it anywhere to record anything.
[dead]
My car radio has stopped playing cassettes for a while, I inherited this car with a full library on the glove compartment that I enjoyed playing from time to time. Guess it can be fixed?
A common point of failure is the belt that drives the mechanism, it will deteriorate with time. You can buy the belts off aliexpress for a few cents.
The player can be fixed, but tapes forgotten in the glove compartment tend to all turn into Queen's Greatest Hits.
I have recently learned that in a pinch the band of a condom will do as well.
I will start there, thanks!
If cassettes are still around, then the standard icons for 'play', 'rewind', etc will still make sense for a younger generation :-)
From today : https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46201381
I want consumer digital tape drives to make a comeback, for my backup needs.
The enterprise models are way too expensive.
Should be possible to store digital music on cassettes as well just like you would with a tape backup. Would probably increase both the quality and storage capacity of cassettes.
https://www.soundonsound.com/sound-advice/q-which-settings-s...
According to that article, it looks like the best cassettes (if everything goes right) could have a bandwidth of 20kHz. So a quick calculation of 8bit samples: (20000 * 8) / 1024 == about 156kB/s bitrate. If i did my math correctly, a 90 minute cassette could keep 824 MB (raw)
The article suggests that they struggle to sustain 20kHz, and I assumed you could keep 8 bits per sample cleanly, but the actual data size would probably be much smaller than that. Keep in mind, besides the mechanical wear and tear, seeking in the digital data would be tricky, the data stream would have to lose some of that raw data size for framing + synchronization marks.
What I'm saying has nothing to do with modern DATs of course but iirc the zx spectrum tapes were like 10 kb per minute...
They did have to work with any crap tape recorder and the interface circuitry wasn't much.
Like DCC (1992)?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digital_Compact_Cassette
Cassettes were fairly good for car radios and little else. They aren't large enough to lead in cover art like LPs or even CDs. They are terrible for snapping and getting chewed up.
I still have some cassettes from years ago but definitely not the best format by a long shot.
Question marks are becoming more difficult for native speakers to use?
Are you commenting on the title? If yes, I was about to do the same. I've seen this more often lately on HN and don't understand the reason. The actual title doesn't have a question mark, so the poster decided to add one and I have no idea why. Actual title: "Cassette tapes are making a comeback. Yes, really"
A bunch of things are on their way out among native speakers, e.g. singular vs plural (there is / there are), much vs many (how much people / large amount of people), past vs present tense (build / built), ... as a German we have to pass English classes else we get held back a year, what's going on in English schools?
They aren't. They remain a fringe hipster staple. Like the vinyls.
That's the conclusion the article came to, though without the potentially derogatory "hipster" label.
I buy cassettes and vinyl because it's a more complete sensory experience than just Spotify or MP3s. Listening to music then involves tactile feeling, not just audio. And the ritual of setting up to play a song adds something to the experience, too, even if it's more work than just hitting "shuffle" on your streaming service.
The vinyls are a billion dollar industry. Small compared to streaming, but definitely non-negligible.
https://www.riaa.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/03/RIAA-2024Yea...
Cassettes suck hard. Sorry, but apart from being smaller and failing in a different way to CDs, they suck hard.
Yes they were portable, and if you want a "pure" sound experience (you're not going to get that from cassette, you're going to get tape hiss and pitch wobbling) I can sorta understand. But DAT is where its at if you want that.
Cassettes have terrible dynamic range, and hiss like a mother fucker. Sure it evokes a sound of your parent's youth, in the same way that those tedious fuckers talk about vinyls "warmth" but objectively they both suck bollocks.
The casing though, thats great. I do like the album art. thats nice.
> Cassettes suck hard.
Exactly. We need DAT Walkman back [1] [2].
[1]: https://www.dcaudiovisuel.com/product_info.php/products_id/1...
[2]: https://www.just-cassette.com/post/digital-audio-cassette-da...
Wish i had kept my old Sony walkman! Quite a sturdy guy as i recall ..
Well-timed article. Today I discovered the FM-84 Atlas album.
Great album. I've been listening to almost nothing but synthwave for years.
I find it depressing that there seem to be only two ways to distribute media and manage one's audio collection: Either ultra-convenient but fully locked down streaming services - or analog "vintage" media like vinyl or cassettes, which do give you a physical medium under your full control, but also require you to forego all the progress we made with digital media.
The one thing that's absent: Plain old audio files that you can store on your hard drive and copy to your phone or other devices.
Edit: Ok, there are still more options left than I thought. I take that back then :)
I only buy archival (flac) downloadable files. Some places I've purchased music from..
- https://bandcamp.com/ - https://us.7digital.com/ - https://www.qobuz.com/us-en/shop
If I can't find them there I will grab the audio off youtube or hit the torrents. Used to buy CDs and rip them, but those are getting hard to find (and it was a PITA).
syncthing is a very useful utility for this. just install it on 2 devices, add a folder, then the files will sync over the network whenever both devices are on.
if you have an old phone or laptop lying around gathering dust you can set up syncthing on that and have it act as the always-on server. something simple like a raspberry pi with an external drive would do either.
every syncthing folder has a .ignore file where you can add patterns to reduce the overall size of the folder, which can be useful if youre going to try and sync your music library to your phone. its very basic but it can be useful in some cases. like adding *.flac would ignore all .flac files and only sync .mp3 does. or maybe if you have a few artists with very large folders you could ignore them and sync the rest. i havnt found a good solution to that problem yet tbh
I regularly buy full albums and individual tracks on the Apple Store. AFAIK Amazon also still offers the same, both stores are DRM free
Amazon are MP3 though. :-(
Bandcamp is huge
I buy music either on bandcamp or iTunes, both of which gives me DRM free audio files. I then store them locally.
As far as I know Apple will still sell you individual tracks (DRM free, I think?), though it’s a bit hidden.
Apple has neglected the iTunes store for years. Yes, you can still buy tracks, but it's really crappy. 1) The catalog is nowhere near as extensive as Apple Music. 2) It's AAC 256kbps format only. Not lossless.
Apple goes along with the enshitification of everything and wants you to rent your music, not own it.
I understand the allure, but ultimately they just represent more plastic pollution (along with vinyl).
Digital media is a great chance to not collect more plastic stuff.
OK, why not high res scan all those Picassos then and burn the original paintings? Should be sufficient to have this _piece of art_ in the digital domain.
I don't understand the analogy. Picassos are not mass produced artifacts.
You assume that cassettes are all mass-produced artifacts. But that's not true. Many of them have a limited edition of perhaps 50 copies. But what I wanted to say was something completely different. People like to own art in a physical way. But to implicitly tell someone whether or not they should own something made of plastic is, in my opinion, crossing a line.
weren't we done with this millennial nostalgia hipster bcrap in the 2010s?
Quick! Fins a Nakamichi 550 Portable. Amazing sonic and build quality.
whatever is old is new again. it's a story as old as time.
Anyone have recommendations for a cassette player?
The cheapest one you can find. They all suck, and this way you'll spend the least amount of money.
Actually the price and quality range of cassette players is wider than probably in any other format. The good ones were really good.
How about a Nakamichi Dragon? https://ebay.us/m/zrtUQA
Looks just like mine.
But for $30, you can't beat this:
https://www.amazon.com/Cassette-Converter-Portable-Recorder-...
You can definitely beat that for $30. Hit the thrift stores and you can find vintage machines that will greatly outperform this. You may need to replace a belt on some, but many are working just fine.
I understand the return to vinyl records, cd and dvd.
I do not miss audio or video tapes.
Can confirm. I've bought around 20 cassette tapes over the last 2 years - mostly new releases or re-releases of old stuff from the CD-era. I get way more enjoyment out of tapes than CDs. I think its because they're more hand's on, and I find the sound of my cassette deck soothing.
Simple "mp3" player with terrible screen/interface, low-capacity SD cards with some wav files, decorated like a mix-tape, curated for straight-through listening. Perfectly scratches the retro/disconnected itch for me.
"In many ways, Bob's Big Boy never left, sir. He's always offered the same high-quality meals at competitive prices..."
Ah yes, the record player of the 80s. Hipsters gonna hipster...
Never really understood buying pre-recorded cassettes. It was better to buy the vinyl and make your own tapes.
Yeah, if the cost of the pre-recorded cassette were comparable to a blank tape, okay, fine. (But they weren't.)