FR, why were they all suddenly making Tiktoks using the wolf transformation filter and saying they were gonna rise up last month? Was it like a collective midlife crisis?
And the portable MP3 players are most likely still gonna work nowadays. Most of the them had AAA batteries so no need to worry about flat batteries, iPods have a lot of replacement parts as well as upgrades, ex. SD card conversion kits
I don't think anyone actually misses them. The only people I've seen that are actually into them now are way to young to be nostalgic for them.
Cassettes seem to interest people pushing back against the trend of instant gratification singles. They like being forced to listen to an entire album. Sometimes it's just the object itself as merch. and has no relation to listening to the music. Many people buying records and tapes have no means to play either. It's also all ancient retro tech to them and a tape is just a portable record that won't skip. Similar to the resurgence in popularity of film formats in photography. There is even an artist out there that released their new single on a wax cylinder format that is damn near impossible for anyone but the curator of an audio format museum to play properly. If you're nostalgic for the trappings of a time that you never experienced, is that nostalgia or some other thing?
Cassettes wear out. I did that with a couple back in the day. Whereas a record or CD is a solid master copy.
Unless it’s that trendy decor thing people Hoover up albums for, not to listen to, but to hang on their walls. Maybe they’re trying cassettes now to try to be unusual en masse.
Eh. The more you listen though, the worse it gets. Tapes are an inherently temporary medium. If that's your jam, it's cool. But I don't want my music degrading over time.
I don't wish we'd go back to using cassettes as a primary music medium, but I think it would be fun to revisit that era of tech and play with them for a little while. Like I think if my 10 year old niece discovered a box of cassette tapes and asked "what are these" I think we could have an hour or two of fun playing with my old boom box.
I still buy CDs, and I still rip them myself (usually 320kbps CBR; I've noted that 320kbps VBR sounds really bad in comparison), and manually put them on an SD card that goes into my phone. Sometimes I even use a set of Shure headphones with a <<gasp>> CORD!
If you rip the CD yourself, no digital platform can reach into your home and take that from you. When you 'buy' digital licenses to listen to music on streaming platforms, changes in licensing can mean that Spotify, or whoever, can remove your ability to listen to it.
I also love album art. Bands like Clutch make interesting artwork that conveys the vibe of the music is interesting ways. It's part of a concept, not just the songs. But I'm lazy and now I let the small number of CDs that I still buy stack up until I have a bunch to rip all at once rather than on the day I get them.
Since I usually buy my CDs at concerts, I usually have 4+ to rip in one go.
I still need to re-rip Fallujah, Dawn of Ouroboros, Persefone, and Vulvodynia CDs; I ripped them as 320KBPS VBR, and the sound is muddy, with all of the bright edges and crispness gone. Everything that I've ripped to 320KBPS CBR is fine, so I assume it's something about a variable bit rate that's trashing the sound. It's unlistenable to me; it's so apparent compared to anything else I listen to that it's completely distracting me from the music itself.
Favorite band of mine was running a kickstarter for their next album. They had lots of add-ons you could also purchase, from T-shirts and such to copies of their previous albums on various formats. I bought a total of five albums on CD, ripped them all to FLAC and now the discs sit safely in my CD rack and I can listen to the music on any device I own. To deprive me of my music you would have to commit a burglary.
I need to figure out a new system for acquiring tunes. Tricky bit is while I want to buy stuff outright, I would never financially recover if I paid $1 per tune. I DJ, and mix with a very wide, relatively niche catalogue. What I'm spinning is still only a fraction of what I listen to and would want in the personal collection.
Anyone know of a decent service that grants access to tons of music, downloads and transfers enabled, without demolishing my bank?
Otherwise, I know there are potential means of sailing the seas again, which some may take under consideration...
You'd have to be mental to replace vinyl with tapes of all things. Going digital, no media, or subscription can kind of make sense for accessibility and other reasons.
I never had a record collection. When I was growing up they were considered old fashioned and obsolete, audiophiles were still clinging onto them muttering about how they sound "warmer" or whatever. My parents had records that I wasn't really interested in.
Cassettes were kind of my childhood. I owned a series of tape recorders and/or boom boxes with cassette decks, and went from children's programming on cassette tape to recording music off the radio. Though I really did catch the tail end of the format.
By the time I was a teenager, digital audio was all the rage. CDs were the gold standard of audio quality, maybe you still had a cassette deck in your car, and mp3s were the hot new thing. Everybody was pirating music on file sharing services. Everybody was playing around with Windows Media Player's visualizer settings. Soon people were buying music from iTunes or subscribing to Pandora or Spotify.
But given I remember hi-fi stereos in the late 90's coming with turntables, cassette decks and CD players, you'd have to have been an idiot to repeatedly throw away your music collection as each format comes out especially given you could record mix tapes from vinyl and cassette, and it's been fairly trivial to rip from all three formats to mp3 for pretty much the entire 21st century so far.
Look, you can buy music on vinyl, CD or digital and own it forever. You can also subscribe to a service that has every song ever made by man on demand for like $10 a month. It can be both!
At the end of the day, it's just a great time to be alive if you've got ears and can listen.
I'm not a mad genx. I skipped mp3 and directly ripped my cds to flacs. Still have all my flac from 20-something-years ago.
I also skipped silly streaming. I grew a massive library and use MediaMonkey. No need for stupid spotify.
Tape was superior in theory, but i hated the noise, no matter how great your equipment was.
In short: i welcomed every change, despite the last one. Instead of better quality we got lousy streaming (except tidal).