Cassette tapes are making a comeback?

> 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

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.

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.

>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.

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.

> 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.

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!)

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.

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.

> 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 :-)

Excellent work! Reminds me (though maybe inaccurately) of soundtracks from old CGI laser discs that were basically long demos.

Sounds great!

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.

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?

I would especially not go back to tape. sssssssssssssssssssssss

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.

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.

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)

> 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 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.

Yea, I was pretty happy to move from tapes to cds.

> 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 agree

And also .. there is absolutely no chance that you might unexpectedly hear an ad instead of a song.

I miss driving down the freeway, occasionally seeing the shoulders strewn with cassette tape…

Actually, I don't miss that at all.