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Comment by 🍀 gritty

Re: "Just exploring going back to cassette tapes as a useful..."

In: s/music

I bought a cassette player a couple years ago. I was really into it for a while but then like everything else, I forgot.

It was fun and I might break it out again.

🍀 gritty

May 16 · 8 weeks ago

9 Later Comments ↓

👻 darkghost · May 16 at 23:35:

My obsession for personal, portable music is Minidisc. Not exactly a low cost endeavour, but my old recorder is still going strong and so are my 25 year old discs. I think we have a moral obligation to have ownership over music like this (Minidisc, cassette, CD, whatever floats your boat) and not be hitched to the whims of streaming services, which could drop your favorite band off the face of the Earth at any time due to behind the scenes licensing issues.

📡 Queen_City_Nerd [OP] · May 17 at 00:06:

@darkghost I looked at them. I couldn't affort it then and can't justafy it now ;-) A lot of this is the issues I have with cloud based music. I lost a lot of music to iTunes. Music I had on a 4th G iPod touch that when sync'd after years they wiped. Music I collected, stuff I ripped from CD's and collected as MP3's that were not in the listing at iTunes. There there were artists that superseded versions of tracks I had and iTunes overwrote them w'out asking. Not again, I'm taking back my music. I'm returning to collecting music in/from the wild.

😎 decant · May 17 at 00:47:

Mashallah fellow music lover, for embracing the physicality. I personally use archival grade cd for music and other small files. And yes, never trust the cloud.

🚀 blah_blah_blah · May 17 at 01:03:

We all know the real reason why people dabble in vinyl and cassettes and things is social, to belong to some group. They want to show how they know something other people don't, and how they have better taste. And they want to share something with their ingroup, like sharing a cigarette during lunch break at high school. Unfortunately for this reply, I have no concept of why that would be interesting at all. And so I answer you with anti-social autistic precision.

Re: Ownership: 16TB drives are about $200 USD refurbished. That's a lot of ownership. Buy two, and you get backups. Adventure concluded.

Since media ownership is not your real interest, I continue.

I find it hard to imagine going back to tape would be very useful.

1. Cassette audio aesthetics aren't really that interesting. They just degrade. You need a vintage reel-to-reel to get quality tape aesthetics in real time (as opposed to waiting 15 years for the tape to degrade in uninteresting ways). They do not, as vinyl purists try to claim of their favorite, sound /better/ than CD. If you hate booming bass and crispy treble, just buy an EQ.

2. You may have the best mix tape ever, but who is going to listen to it besides you? Maybe you already met punk rock girl, in which case have at it.

3. The primary virtue of cassettes was their recording ability. Today, you can use any number of devices to record sound, including your smart phone.

4. While cassettes are portable, digital is more portable.

5. Vinyl provides better cover art. Cassette covers are tiny and underwhelming. Both are, admittedly, better than the inconsequential jpeg album thumbnail of digital.

The only use I can think of for cassettes is archival recordings. A box of tapes is probably more secure than a harddrive, unless you are careful with backups.

Accumulating mix tapes can have a nostalgia value. Tapes can be stored more efficiently than vinyl, which makes them easy to hang on to longer. You don't constantly dip into tapes like you probably would on MP3s. The degradation /does/ add a layer of transformation, a patina of time.

To ensure you have a working tape deck in 20-30 years, buy a new machine of the most popular model for which you are assured parts and repair services in the future.

I'm dealing with that right now. I've got 60+ year old 8mm film I need to get transfered. That means I have to wrangle an 8mm projector, which may not be easy.

The only remaining good reason to bother with cassettes is if there is any social benefit from dabbling in it. But only you know if there is a social scene where collecting and using cassette tapes has some cache. I wouldn't spin up a cassette collection hoping that one might turn up. Unless that's your bag, in which case you should probably wear specialized clothing that signals you belong to some other as yet undetermined social category. Maybe wear a ball cap with a cassette tape on it. And talk about cassettes all the time. Remind people about the importance of the past. Tell them how good cassette tapes sound, and suggest it was a music industry conspiracy to stop bootleg recordings that led to the artificial rise of the CD. Play back hours of you doing mundane tasks, like washing dishes or shopping, and explain how this is much better, and more real and authentic than life logging using digital devices. Subtly suggest the idea that their lives will be worthless without cassette tapes. Finally give them the ultimatum: "In order to be my friend, you have to use cassette tapes."

If someone said to me "In order to be my friend, you have to use cassette tapes," I'd probably say yes.

Now that I think about it, it would be fun to do a podcast exclusively on cassette tape, distributed by hand. Unfortunately, society has degraded to the point that there are no obvious social networks capable of making that even a nominal success. Maybe going to Phish concerts or political protests and handing them out? (I'd suggest posting your cassette tapes to Gemini, but then it wouldn't be a cassette tape anymore.)

It used to be there was a counter culture. We used to have Loompanics. We used to have the Grateful Dead. We used to have people who knew things that weren't on TV. Google destroyed all that. Wikis destroyed all specalized knowledge. Just as recorded music destroyed the music we used to make at home, just as industrialization destroyed a lot of home made things, and left us empty handed culturally, feeling worthless and alone.

That's why your hand is shuffling around in that box of dusty old cassette tapes.

🚀 stack · May 17 at 05:03:

An observation: shipping a cassette tape to a friend within the US with any hope of reasonable delivery costs about the same as buying a fast micro SD card capable of holding my sizable music collection, all the books I own, and my entire collection of almost every computer magazine from the 80s and 90s... And a shid of photos. I have one in my phone. /

📡 Queen_City_Nerd [OP] · May 17 at 11:24:

@blah_blah_blah it's a nice op-ed piece. @stack it's not about sharing or capasity but thanks for the opinon.

I grew up with 8-track, I know the score. I find there's a fairly common opinon in engineering that assumes survey grade is the best. It's the most accurate, but the best is the accuracy you need for the job at hand. The job at hand isn't quantity, or archival quality, or social longing. The job is to sample/playback audio a reasonable quality and cost and to maintain the audio minus the pyramidal systems of reliance the modern digital age requires.

🍀 gritty · May 17 at 12:40:

@blah_blah_blah nice write up there. I can't refute most of what you said but my take is this: I like the nostalgia factor - it makes me feel good - and I prefer physical media, be it books or cassettes or whatever. I'm an out of sight out of mind person, and when terabytes of music sit on a HD, it just feels...like it's too much and forgettable. When I look at my DVDs that I hand picked, it's for a reason, and usually isn't disposable and forgettable in the sea of digits. Physical media, to me, feels like it has an assigned purpose that I connect with.

🐙 norayr · May 17 at 13:00:

heh, i was using tape casettes for storing my tinkering, my programs on them, as a child. whenever i would get some money, i would buy a tape casette to have some storage space.

here's some restored from the tape program, actually armenian font for oric/pravetz-8d:

— norayr.am/retrocomputing/Oric/old/arm/paruyk.gmi

there are bulgarian games i have transferred from my old tapes:

— norayr.am/retrocomputing/Oric/old/homepage/bulgarian_games.gmi

i still have the original casette tapes.

for audio, i was astonished when i saw a cd reader drive. i think it is incredibly cool. now i tend to buy cds for the music i like. though i don't use a cd player usually, i rip them.

📡 Queen_City_Nerd [OP] · May 17 at 14:12:

@norayr I grew up doing the same. TI-99 used a tape deck for the storage medium. I do keep some blacnk CD's around but I'm more inclined towards USB drives or CD when it comes to computer now. I haven't bought a CD for music in ages, and apart from a few older computers don't have a CD player anymore. It was THE thing when I lived in Prague in 2000. Having a Diskman clone on the trams made the city even more enjoyable. Then again back then you could tell an American on a tram because our cell phones didn't largly have ringtone support. If you heard a Nokia ring instead of U2's All that You Can't Leave Behind odds were good!

Original Post

🌒 s/music

Just exploring going back to cassette tapes as a useful medium. Never thought I'd be doing that having been at the tail end of the 8-track till today's streaming but I want to own my music again and I like the ease of use and low expense of it. Anyone else looked back at the cassette?

💬 Queen_City_Nerd · 10 comments · 1 like · May 16 · 8 weeks ago