'Why I Quit Streaming And Got Back Into Cassettes' (404media.co) 144
"In the age of Spotify and AI slop, tapes remind us what we're missing when we stop taking risks," writes author Janus Rose in an article for 404 Media. Here's an excerpt: There are lots of advantages to the cassette lifestyle. Unlike vinyl records, tapes are compact and super-portable, and unlike streaming, you never have to worry about a giant company suddenly taking them away from you. They can be easily duplicated, shared, and made into mixtapes using equipment you find in a junk shop. When I was a kid, the first music I ever owned were tapes I recorded from MTV with a Kids' Fisher Price tape recorder. I had no money, so I would listen to those tapes for hours, relishing every word Kim Gordon exhaled on my bootlegged copy of Sonic Youth's "Bull in the Heather." Just like back then, my rediscovery of cassettes has led me to start listening more intentionally and deeply, devoting more and more time to each record without the compulsion to hit "skip." Most of the cassettes I bought in Tokyo had music I probably never would have found or spent time with otherwise.
Getting reacquainted with tapes made me realize how much has been lost in the streaming era. Over the past two decades, platforms like Spotify co-opted the model of peer-to-peer filesharing pioneered by Napster and BitTorrent into a fully captured ecosystem. But instead of sharing, this ecosystem was designed around screen addiction, surveillance, and instant gratification -- with corporate middlemen and big labels reaping all the profits. Streaming seeks to virtually eliminate what techies like to call "user friction," turning all creative works into a seamless and unlimited flow of data, pouring out of our devices like water from a digital faucet. Everything becomes "Content," flattened into aesthetic buckets and laser-targeted by "perfect fit" algorithms to feed our addictive impulses. Thus the act of listening to music is transformed from a practice of discovery and communication to a hyper-personalized mood board of machine-optimized "vibes."
What we now call "AI Slop" is just a novel and more cynically efficient vessel for this same process. Slop removes human beings as both author and subject, reducing us to raw impulses -- a digital lubricant for maximizing viral throughput. Whether we love or hate AI Slop is irrelevant, because human consumers are not its intended beneficiaries. In the minds of CEOs like OpenAI's Sam Altman, we're simply components in a machine built to maintain and accelerate information flows, in order to create value for an insatiably wealthy investor class. [...]
Tapes and other physical media aren't a magic miracle cure for late-stage capitalism. But they can help us slow down and remember what makes us human. Tapes make music-listening into an intentional practice that encourages us to spend time connecting with the art, instead of frantically vibe-surfing for something that suits our mood from moment-to-moment. They reject the idea that the point of discovering and listening to music is finding the optimal collection of stimuli to produce good brain chemicals. More importantly, physical media reminds us that nothing good is possible if we refuse to take risks. You might find the most mediocre indie band imaginable. Or you might discover something that changes you forever. Nothing will happen if you play it safe and outsource all of your experiences to a content machine designed to make rich people richer.
Getting reacquainted with tapes made me realize how much has been lost in the streaming era. Over the past two decades, platforms like Spotify co-opted the model of peer-to-peer filesharing pioneered by Napster and BitTorrent into a fully captured ecosystem. But instead of sharing, this ecosystem was designed around screen addiction, surveillance, and instant gratification -- with corporate middlemen and big labels reaping all the profits. Streaming seeks to virtually eliminate what techies like to call "user friction," turning all creative works into a seamless and unlimited flow of data, pouring out of our devices like water from a digital faucet. Everything becomes "Content," flattened into aesthetic buckets and laser-targeted by "perfect fit" algorithms to feed our addictive impulses. Thus the act of listening to music is transformed from a practice of discovery and communication to a hyper-personalized mood board of machine-optimized "vibes."
What we now call "AI Slop" is just a novel and more cynically efficient vessel for this same process. Slop removes human beings as both author and subject, reducing us to raw impulses -- a digital lubricant for maximizing viral throughput. Whether we love or hate AI Slop is irrelevant, because human consumers are not its intended beneficiaries. In the minds of CEOs like OpenAI's Sam Altman, we're simply components in a machine built to maintain and accelerate information flows, in order to create value for an insatiably wealthy investor class. [...]
Tapes and other physical media aren't a magic miracle cure for late-stage capitalism. But they can help us slow down and remember what makes us human. Tapes make music-listening into an intentional practice that encourages us to spend time connecting with the art, instead of frantically vibe-surfing for something that suits our mood from moment-to-moment. They reject the idea that the point of discovering and listening to music is finding the optimal collection of stimuli to produce good brain chemicals. More importantly, physical media reminds us that nothing good is possible if we refuse to take risks. You might find the most mediocre indie band imaginable. Or you might discover something that changes you forever. Nothing will happen if you play it safe and outsource all of your experiences to a content machine designed to make rich people richer.
Cassette lifestyle? (Score:5, Funny)
Just fucking shoot me.
Re: Cassette lifestyle? (Score:2)
Does Android have a music store? (Score:4, Interesting)
This guy should just buy music and play it on his phone
Does Android even have a music store anymore? Last I checked, Google got out of sales in December 2020 when it replaced Google Play Music with YouTube Music, and Google Play's cut of in-app payment for download services made it cost-prohibitive for third parties like Amazon to run a music store.
Or are you talking about using iTunes Store? Last I checked, iTunes had problems in Wine, though I'm not sure whether those are limited to iPhone sync. Is there anything other than Amazon for someone who doesn't own a computer that can run current Windows or current macOS?
Re: Does Android have a music store? (Score:3, Informative)
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Buy on bandcamp, and either stream directly from the app or download the files as FAC or 320kbps MP3. Save to your Poweramp folder or whatever your favorite Android player is.
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Hopefully not and never. OS-specific music (?!) stores are a very silly idea.
As a [reluctant, but what else is there?] Android user, my music comes from the same sources it would come from if I owned no phone at all.
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Hopefully not and never. OS-specific music (?!) stores are a very silly idea.
I agree that it is a silly idea. What ought to be the workaround for the phone operating system publisher taking 30 percent of all in-app purchases and the record label taking the now-standard 70 percent, leaving zero percent for hosting the download store?
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Just... buy it from Amazon in a browser. Why do you need an app to do everything?
But aside from Bandcamp as others said (and if you go to the websites of artists you like, they'll probably list anywhere else you can purchase), there's also the option of ripping physical media yourself, so then at least you don't have to carry all the physical media around. I'd rip CDs p
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You can buy music on Amazon and either stream it or download the .mp3 files to your phone or PC. There are many Android .mp3 players that one can download.
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It's no friendly than the people choosing the interior to CD vinyl.
I was just saying the exact same thing to my bud just the other day!
Literally, I said to him "It's no friendly than the people choosing the interior to CD vinyl," and then my bud goes "Huh? Did you have a fucking stroke?"
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I right no your way here too.
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Really? A memory from 2010 - a 10 min report on the latest phones. After 9 min, the interviewer asks, "How's the voice quality?", and the answer is that two were mediocre, and the rest lousy. I hear my wife's smartphone.
You *really* want to play music on that? So, you don't actually like music, it's just sort of background noise for you.
Re: Cassette lifestyle? (Score:4, Insightful)
Re: Cassette lifestyle? (Score:4, Informative)
I have to say the reel to reel tapes my husband still plays do sound amazing. Cassettes, not so much.
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I have to say the reel to reel tapes my husband still plays do sound amazing. Cassettes, not so much.
Cassettes were designed for voice, they'll never be all that good. Reel to real can indeed sound amazing. Just using RTR is fun.
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They fit a need for playing recorded music in a car or with a portable radio.
They did have 45 rpm 7 inch record players for cars before that.
Or 8 tracks. I'm not saying that cassettes have no utility, they are indeed portable. But their fidelity is lacking, they are subject to wow and flutter, and to getting "eaten" by the transport mechanism.
Perhaps people who never experienced the world of cassettes never experienced them. But really - this "cassette lifestyle" has a strong hipster vibe. Like typing everything on old Underwood typewriters claiming it is so much better, an organic experience.
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I have a couple of old decks that will match any R2R.
Don't use them any more, but they sound great with good tapes.
No, I didn't buy them at Walmart.
Re:Cassette lifestyle? (Score:4, Insightful)
What a Bozo. They should simply download the .mp3 files.
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I hear it's all on Anna's Archive now...
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Got one more reason to go there.
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Sound quality that is shit - can't get much shittier than cassette tape
Tape getting jammed in the player and getting destroyed in the process
Tape deteriorating every time you play it, no matter how careful you are
When digital media media didn't exist cassette tapes were the only form of portable media. And I am so glad we have progressed beyond that garbage.
Re:Cassette lifestyle? (Score:5, Funny)
Maybe this will cause a boom in the pencil industry.
Gotta rewind the sag out somehow...
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Maybe this will cause a boom in the pencil industry. Gotta rewind the sag out somehow...
Evolution gave us a pinky finger
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Shutting down streaming media and forcing everyone back to cassettes is a lesser-known side quest of Project 2025.
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Of all the formats why did they choose cassette? Just buy the digital music, put it on your device, and go. No shitty cassette experience. Backup the files on a long term hard disk that sits in a drawer unused except when you buy new music.
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Just fucking shoot me.
Hey man - when it sounds like the music is underwater - that's Love!
Okay (Score:2)
He's welcome to move back to buggies, so long as he remembers to clean up his horse shit from the roads.
This has nothing to do with tapes (Score:5, Informative)
So I'll assume the "tapes" part is clickbait. Or that tapes are the author's first experience with physical media.
Cassette tapes are (arguably) the worst music storage media ever made. Every time you use them, they degrade — and you can't tell by how much, because you can't see or understand the mechanism by which the player works. At least you can see it (the reader contact9ing the media) with vinyl, and CDs/DVDs didn't involve physical contact. Never you mind the possibility of the machine eating the tape. Tapes really are the worst media music was ever stored on.
Now... physical media instead of digital? That, I get. If you want to quit streaming, by all means, I'm with you. But for the love of all things holy, don't go back to tape media.
Reply to add (Score:3)
This article reads like AI slop, which is... ironic...
Re:This has nothing to do with tapes (Score:4, Insightful)
"Cassette tapes are (arguably) the worst music storage media ever made."
Have you ever tried storing those original Edison cylinders?
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The Dead Sea Scrolls would like a word.
Re:This has nothing to do with tapes (Score:4, Insightful)
Now... physical media instead of digital? That, I get.
Yes, in the sense of a 2TB SSD for holding your FLACs, but that wouldn't score you any points within your social group. This recent obsession with retro media formats is obviously just a fad. The media sovereignty angle is just window dressing.
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Cassette tapes are (arguably) the worst music storage media ever made.
You obviously didn't live through the 8-Track era.
Although I admit I enjoyed owning one of these [ebay.com] back when I was a young stupid kid... but who in their right mind thinks splitting a song across two tracks was a good idea?
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8 tracks are just badly designed cassette tapes.
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No, they are considerably different. The author of the article most likely does not even know what an 8 track is.
Originally, the sound quality of cassette and 8 track were not really different, but 8 track was endless loop. But companies invested in making cassettes sound much better; given that they were also much smaller 8 track was doomed.
Cassette was vastly superior to 8 track, and it had nothing to do with "bad design".
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Re:This has nothing to do with tapes (Score:5, Informative)
Cassette tapes are (arguably) the worst music storage media ever made.
You must to be too young to remember 8-track then. When I was really young at least 2 of my relatives had Victrolas with 78 RPM shellac records. Cassettes were much better sounding and way more durable. If the heavy needle mechanism slipped out of your fingers, it would shatter the record if you were unlucky.
Type 2 and Type 4 cassettes sound a lot better than most people seem to realize. I still have my Dolby-S tape deck I bought in the early 90's. Granted, I haven't used it in years and prefer CD's for the most part. However, by the time you hit your 30's the frequency response a CD or Vinyl have over a cassette doesn't matter as you can't hear above the 17kHz limit of a cassette anyway. Type 1 tapes have a lot of hiss. But it's negligible on Type 2 or 4, especially if it used DNR-S. A lot of the cheap stereos I've seen have more amp hiss anyway.
Would I purchase a cassette today? Unless it's the only way to get the music I want, No. But it's far from the worst option. Besides, folks were listening to 128-bit MP3's for years on 10 dollar earbuds. I'd argue that was no better than a decent cassette as far as sound quality.
Re: This has nothing to do with tapes (Score:2)
This.
Chrome or metal tapes with dolby-c/s and HX-Pro are pretty good. Not quite CD quality but you definitely needed a half decent sound system to tell the difference.
I've still got my old deck with Dolby C and HX pro. I've probably got a few chrome tapes left somewhere. I even ponied up for a new metal tape recently to test out the quality of my deck. Sadly, all the rubber belts and rollers have corroded and I can't find suitable spares for all of them.
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https://www.nesselectronics.co... [nesselectronics.com] this looks promising.
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"...such as AZIMUTH problems..."
No shit! And with a misaligned head, not only does frequency response go to hell, dolby calibration does too. The problem was so severe one company made its reputation on an automatic solution to it.
People who talk about how good cassettes became do not appear to actually have used them. Cassettes held on for a while with children, their original audience.
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Type 2 and Type 4 cassettes sound a lot better than most people seem to realize.
Especially when dealing with late '80s/early '90s rap/metal/etc (any genre where the majority of sales were on cassette). A lot of people don't realize this stuff was mixed/mastered specifically for cassette. Which is why I laugh when I hear someone bragging "I got a original mint copy of 'Paid in Full' on vinyl!!!"
"Congratulations, you got yourself a cassette master cut onto cheap, translucent vinyl."
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By now, that cassette from the 80's/90's has degraded sooo much that you are much better off with a NM vinyl most likely.
Maybe...
As an example, a couple years ago I happened upon a stash of cassettes from about 88-91 still in the shinrkwrap. All cutout promos from the basement of a hood record store that shuttered. Surprisingly, every one I listened to sounded... good. Some of the music itself was terrible, but the quality of the media was crisp and dynamic.
That said, any cassette from the same era that's received even moderate play is going to sound like there's a pillow over the speaker.
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The laborious, linear interface is of course another limitation of all kinds of tapes -- digital or analog. But getting rid of this also changes human behavior. People don't listen as much to long form collections; they don't even necesssarily listen to entire songs.
A mix tape is essentially a long format program manually and personally curated for you by another human being, unmediated and indeed untracked by any third corporate party. Losing the mix tape was a real cultural loss. Sure they didn't soun
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Good call.
We were talking the other day about the ritual of rolling a joint and sharing with friends.
Now everyone just pops their own private gummy.
The behaviour has changed, human engagement is lost, but hey: convenience!
Re: This has nothing to do with tapes (Score:2)
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Right, and the author is too stupid to know that what he really means is "album", not "cassette". The experience he is talking about is not the shitty media experience, it is the album listening experience. He started out with "easy duplication" and "mix tapes", but CDs offered that too and streaming didn't replace those features.
The problem is that artists are no longer oriented to producing albums, they make them but so what? No one expects albums to get played end to end. The format is lost, cassette
TL;DR (Score:4, Insightful)
Buy a fucking MP3 player you pretentious twit.
Re: TL;DR (Score:2)
Have you tried 8-tracks
Re: TL;DR (Score:2)
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Now you have a choice between $30 cheap junk that may or may not work for a week, and Sony players that are probably pretty good but the price will blow you away.
I got one of the $30 ones, it's been working for a while now, and I'm happy with it. The interface is a little clunky. I was wondering whether I was just lucky and looked it up. I has over 7500 reviews and an average 3.9 star rating; that seems pretty solid. Looks like they've been making it for several years now.
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Reasonably priced and good quality MP3 players are surprisingly difficult to find now.
No they're not. We just call them "phones" now.
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For background music, just get a Raspberry Pi and a good Bluetooth speaker and run an MP3 player app on the Pi.
Or just run an MP3 player on the laptop or desktop machine you're using anyway.
Re: TL;DR (Score:2)
Majority mp3go is the spiritual successor to the Sansa Clip, the DAC is rubbish but it has a decent screen and Bluetooth. Sansa really like stepping their own dicks offering either Bluetooth or expandable memory. But man , the sound quality of the old clip was pretty awesome. If you go to $50 range , the Fiio products start coming in, and they are quite nice.
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Sony players that are probably pretty good but the price will blow you away.
I dunno, I got the Sony NW-E394 at B&H around a year ago for $65. Only 8gb (which is fine for me as it takes about 10 seconds to dump old music/add new, when one has the inkling. But I realize that people nowadays demand to go for a 30min jog with absolutely every album ever recorded in the history of human endeavor in their pocket, and nothing else will do).
It seems to have a tank-like build (especially compared to sandisk clips) and the price didn't exactly blow me away.
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You know (Score:5, Insightful)
Phones can actually execute these fancy .mp3 files, and .ogg and even .flac ones, and some even have headphone jacks.
And on the third case, it will literally sound better than streaming (and keep playing if you have no internet)
I buy nusic (Score:5, Informative)
FWIW I don't 'stream' music, I buy the MP3s from Amazon, , download them to my PC, and copy them to my phone and other devices.
(I don't use the Amazon music player to play them, on the phone I use Musicollet , and on the PC I use Clementine and Foobar 2000)
(Of course some of my MP3 collection was ripped from CD's that I own)
sorry but this is bs (Score:3, Informative)
This is just a guy flexing on zoomers. If they said CDs or mp3 players, that would have been more believable
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This is just a guy flexing on zoomers. If they said CDs or mp3 players, that would have been more believable
Right. Honorable mention for minidisc players. I had one of those before flash memory became cheap and remember it fondly.
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Clean and maintain the tape deck and the tape wont jam.
Rewinding and fast forwarding is annoying, so I usually don't do it, just just listen to the tape from the beginning to the end, flip it over (or the deck does it for me) then listen from the beginning to the end. Then insert a new tape and repeat the process.
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I don't think I ever cleaned or maintained my tape players and I don't recall having a gnarly (or any) jam.
And I was listening probably 2 hours a day 5 days a week, on the bus to and from school. Also I had a Pentium 133. nyaaaa nyaaaa.
Rewinding and fast forwarding is annoying,
A bit. I remember upgrading to one of those walkmen (not Sony) which ran off 1 AA battery and had a remote control on the headphones. It even had a mode where it would FF to a 5 3 second gap in the audio, so you could skip songs easil
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Heads need to be cleaned once in a while so the deck sounds better and a dirty pinch roller can cause the tape to be "eaten", though it depends on the tape - some run very lean, some get the heads dirty a bit.
I can understand how fast forwarding and rewinding can be annoying if someone wants to listen only to some songs on the tape (or when making a mixtape) especially if the deck does not have any of the cool features (or the tape is recorded in such a way that the track skip function does not work), but n
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Wrong. If you had a POS player that you didn't maintain: that's on you.
Especially if you used shitty pre-recorded tapes.
Good decks, regular cleaning, and good media are very reliable and sound great.
album experience (Score:2)
This is dumb as hell (Score:3, Informative)
People just want to be different and then somehow convince people that it's cool.
I lived in the cassette era. It sucked.
Re: This is dumb as hell (Score:4, Informative)
Really? I lived in the cassette era and it was great. Sure, cheap cassettes and decks sounded pretty bad but chrome tapes in good decks were nice.
Did you not have any friends? Some of my best memories are sitting around with friends trying to work out the best mix of songs and the best way to fit them onto a cassette so they filled both sides with no little blank bits to wait out or skip over before changing sides.
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Exactly. Good quality cassette decks and media sounded great and were very reliable if used properly. Better than any mp3!
And the rituals around selecting good music, removing them from the case, putting them in the player, and waiting for the music: you thought about what you were doing, rather than hitting 'random play', followed shortly by an increasingly frustrated series of stabs at the 'Meh' button...not an engaging or joyful process.
For me, the best thing about streaming is (Score:2)
..obscure bands in less popular styles
I like prog rock.
In the 70s, there were a handful of choices. Record companies determined that the stuff had a limited audience, so they limited the supply.
On spotify I can find abundant bands, all really good. Most are hobbyists with few followers, but they are all available.
In the past, the only way I could have heard them would be to visit the local clubs where they played.
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On the flip side, being into DIY hardcore punk in the 90s, there are so many bands who were on tiny local labels who went defunct before any of the rights to the records they put out could be transferred to a streaming platform. I'm really thankful for my physical media collection and that I took the trouble to preserve most of that stuff digitally. Some of these bands went through the trouble to upload their music to their own websites, so they were available for a time, but as those websites go away, or
Why not digital? (Score:3)
... tapes are compact and super-portable, and unlike streaming, you never have to worry about a giant company suddenly taking them away from you. They can be easily duplicated, shared, and made into mixtapes using equipment you find in a junk shop.
Given that old, slow computers are also available in junk shops, and that USB sticks are a lot more portable and hold a lot more music than cassettes, why not just use music files? The "easily duplicated, shared, and made into mixtapes" requirement is also satisfied by digital music. What's more, a "mixtape" can be a text file in m3u format, so you can have multiple mixtapes with songs in common, on a single stick, without actually duplicating the song files.
Additionally, USB sticks are probably cheaper than cassettes, even when you don't take into account the vastly longer playing time. Duplicating the contents is fast and doesn't decrease sound quality. They can also be "played" on many Android phones. And if you can side-load files onto the phone, then it's both the storage medium AND the player.
I just wish these people would be honest with themselves and say "I enjoy retro tech and the vibe it gives me". I'm totally down with that, as I appreciate and work on old tech of various kinds. So just stop with the spurious justifications. You like it and think it's cool - no additional sales pitch is required.
FWIW, I have a fairly large music collection. Except for occasional explorations on YouTube, I don't do streaming of any kind. And on those occasions when music is simply unavailable from other sources, YouTube and yt-dlp FTW.
As for "You might find the most mediocre indie band imaginable. Or you might discover something that changes you forever", I recommend going down the Bandcamp.com rabbit hole. Even if you transfer the music to cassettes... ;-)
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Agree that old school digital is the way to go if they want to avoid streaming. Personally, I use a dedicated MP3 player and hook it to my computer with a USB cable to update songs / playlists. I buy MP3s or rip them from CDs. Talks, podcasts, or audio dramas, I'll find some way to convert to MP3.
Good point with USB sticks if they want removable media. Usually those don't plug into players though. I did have one player with the USB plug built in! It showed up like a drive, but it also had a headphone
Tapes are not great (Score:2)
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I miss minidisc. It was really cool. There was a short window of time when the disks were much cheaper than flash memory offering an equivalent play time.
Maybe we're not playing it safe. (Score:2)
So he likes wasting time (Score:2)
I think that there are better ways to waste time than rewinding cassettes. I mean, really, if a person is advocating low audio quality media that can easily break and wastes time, that person has issues. Trying to claim that this is a lifestyle and somehow offering this as a good thing?
Struggle to find any advantages to cassettes (Score:2)
OK, you used to be able to get dual tape decks for easy copying as part of "music centres" decades ago, but other than that, I struggle to think of what advantages cassette had of any of the formats that followed it (DAT, CD, minidisc or mp3 downloads). Cassettes still needed to be flipped over half way through (a terrible inconvenience carried over from vinyl), it's the hardest format known ever to skip one or more tracks, copied tapes would often introduce audible hiss and don't forget tapes getting jamme
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I struggle to think of what advantages cassette had of any of the formats that followed it (DAT, CD, minidisc or mp3 downloads).
Well, writable CDs didn't really become practical for most people before about 2001 or so. I was a moderately early adopter (not very early), when the rewriters became expensive but affordable and the media was OK. A few years after the recorders and media were dirt cheap. Also the software was shonky as fuck.
But CDs weren't as portable (larger, prone to skipping albeit less of a
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Minidisc was quite successful in Japan, people who say Minidisc was a failure are Americans. And Americans didn't buy Minidisc because they found CDs "portable" enough.
"I think by 1996 neither my hifi or walkman (what's the generic name?) needed that. Two way players were pretty common."
And they (auto reverse) sounded like shit because the heads were never aligned.
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That's an odd take that the only two places in the world are America and Japan...
They had limited success in the UK. They weren't unknown but they weren't common either. At one point Sony had an advertising campaign about how they weren't for pirating music nudge nudge wink wink. But even so they were still kind of niche.
I dunno think I ever handled a mini disc.
As for sounding like shit, that's not my recollection. They had tape players pretty well figured out by then I think. Maybe in a really good hifi, b
Father Ted quote (Score:2)
Streaming cassette tape (Score:2)
It's possible and fun. Back in high school when your girlfriend makes you a mix tape of gay love song crap, the only useful thing you can do with it is remove the reel of tape from the cassette and then drive around streaming the unreeling tape many yards behind you.
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You had a beard back in high school?
A real maker... (Score:2)
cuts his/her own wax cylinders. This is fun and very doable with readily available materials, while maintaining your own bug farm to harvest shellac can be some pain and is only recommended for real nerds.
lots of advantages to the cassette life..lolol (Score:2)
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Well, maybe he means digital cassettes - DATs.
Cassettes were awesome ... (Score:2)
... but given that these days MP3, FLAC and audio players the size of a matchbox that can store and play back a lifetime worth of premium grade audio content and cost less than a meal at a diner, I consider someone yearning for 70ies style cassette tapes to be a little coocoo in the brain.
What are Pop, Crackle, Snap, and Hiss? (Score:2)
Strangely, I now have Tinnitus - it sounds just like the evil hiss of a cassette tape. It really does seem like life is not without a sense of
What a load of BS (Score:2)
Music used to be expensive to buy. You could listen to the radio for free. But only with the radio was playing, and you have ads. To hear something different I had to stand in the music store wearing their headset to listen to samples.
Today is so much more awesome than it ever used to be when it comes to listening to music. It's comparatively cheap and you can find almost everything. Then listen to it almost anywhere.
Today, I can listen to everything for free with ads. And I mean everything. Most of the
Disappearing material (Score:2)
Yes to MiniDisc... (Score:2)
I kept my Sharp MD-MS702 and am so glad I did. My fetish for portable music extends from before the Walkman.
When I started skating outdoors in 1977, I knew I wanted music, being a rink skater for so long. No solution to that.
Ah, well, I grafted together a pack of 20 Ni-Cd batteries, solder, duct tape, and an Radio Shack under dash cassette player. An unholy bulge on my waist, awful, and Koss Pro 4AA headphones that isolated me from the world at the nonzero risk of bad accidents due to lack of warning. But I
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Dying batteries were another problem
I always looked at that as a feature. Drop new batteries in your walkman and listen to the original version of the record. A few hours later you listen to the 'screwed' version.
and handheld cassette player/recorders were somewhat fragile
I still have my Sony TCM-359V [radiomuseum.org] (from "1990??" according to the site. I think I acquired it in maybe '93? I didn't need to look up the model number because it's still in front of me on my desk). I can't comment of the difficulty in servicing it because it still works (and I use it at least once a month)
Re: (Score:2)
I see that model as one of a long lien of lackluster iterations on the Walkman theme, generally introduced to maintain novelty, variety, and interest, and persuade us to buy another one... When the features and variety focused on such as auto reverse, radio tuners, and shrinking form factor, they were compelling, sort of. MegaBass sucked me into one, but it was not enough to satisfy my fetish for all that bass.
Good on you for keeping yours nimble and fit. Not easy.
My dying battery comment was actually aimed
Re: (Score:2)
Good on you for keeping yours nimble and fit. Not easy.
While I'd like to take full credit, I haven't really done anything except abuse the crap out of it (i.e. the battery door is currently duct tape) and swab the head and rollers down with rubbing alcohol every five years or so.
Why not CD? Or digital audio files? (Score:2)
Everything you describe could be had with CD or just general digital audio files archived in your own library/storage. Nobody needs cassettes for that. And you get no degradation and can access individual songs.
If you want the vibes, vinyl has cassettes beat easily - nicer, bigger sleeves for awesome album art, and the mastering has to actually be selective and well-done to even get the music onto such a flawed medium like vinyl.
For me tape sits in that awkward middle ground without any real justification o
Pretty good 4/1 article (Score:2)
The summary makes the article sound a lot dumber than it really is. But it is dumb, and the core dumbness from which the rest of the article derives is here:
He knew real the solution to all his problems, but like he says, "I got lazy," and so he went to his comical Plan B. Despite weird statements like this..
Possession is 9/10ths of the law (Score:2)
Everyone should have their music bits stored locally. Streaming services stop working you stop paying them, they go out of business, or they get a court order to stop providing service.
When your music bits are local YOU have control. The only real responsibilities you have are keeping adequate backups, and adjusting the levels of the music files so that playback volumes are similar.
cassettes suck (Score:2)
They have poor sound quality, they have tons of wow and flutter, and they come unravelled and aren't sold with a pencil to reravel. CDs are a much better choice if you really want to go retro, or try reel to reel with half-inch tape.
He's not wrong... (Score:3)
about the corporatization of music. That's always been the trend, but it's worse now than ever.
And AI slop music? What has happened to human creativity and the range of emotions we try to express through music?
Music has become a commodity exactly as he describes. I'm not sure that cassettes are the answer, but people are obviously trying to find alternatives. Good on them.
Why cassette? (Score:2)
"Why I quit using email and now use a relay team of horse riders to deliver my mail."
WTF would someone choose cassette? I absolutely get bot wanting to use streaming, but there are several jumps in between streaming and cassette that make way more sense.
Not the media - the sound system (Score:3)
Arguably, a major that reason people used to listen to music with more focus was not so much the media on which the music was stored, it was the system that played it back.
Both play a part, but through the 1970s and '80s, people would fine-tune their ever improving stereo systems - large speakers, amplifiers, and turntables. The system was designed and set up so that the listener could put on a record and sit at a particular location in the room to enjoy the music.
With that sort of arrangement, you are less likely to flit between tracks, and more likely to listen to a whole album. You're likely to hear it in better quality, and (deserved or not) listen with more reverence.