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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?
May 16 · 3 months ago · 👍 norayr
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.
👻 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 There there were artists that superseded versions of tracks I had and iTunes overwrote them w'out asking.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.
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.
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.
@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.
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!