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Vaporwave’s Mini-Boom of Floppy Disk Releases

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Re: Vaporwave’s Mini-Boom of Floppy Disk Releases

#61

Post by acomjean »

KozmoNau7 wrote: post #42
21 wrote: post #31

> Cassette players, they’re not really manufactured anymore, and the prices are going up on used ones Tascam just released a new deck cassette player, with USB: https://ask.audio/articles/tascam-announces-202mkvii-dual-ca...

They probably mean quality cassette players. Even that Tascam is made using standard cheap mechanisms, it only has the most basic noise reduction (Dolby B) and no tape type selection. To even come close to justifying its $500 price tag, it should have a proper high-quality direct drive 3-head mechanism, Dolby B, C and S, as well as HX-Pro, at the very minimum to take the cassette tape seriously as a medium for music.…

>A Type IV "metal" tape with Dolby S and recorded using HX-Pro can sound seriously good

We had one of those 3 head tape decks growing up. The one we had a yamaha with dolby hx-pro,b,c and dbx. We used to tape cds and try to a/b compare them.

The 3 heads were erase, record and play, which meant you could monitor the recording as it was happening and adjust levels and such. (and results in the weird behavior of the "tape monitor" button on amplifiers).

With Cr2 tapes (not as good as metal, better than normal) and dbx noise reduction it was really hard to tell the difference between cds and tapes.

The quiet parts on tape clearly had hiss without the noise reduction and the dbx noise reduction made the tape sound like crap in your walkman, so we just used dolby C most of the time. The walkman was always the weak link, without cleaning those rubber rollers you could get some weird speed ups and slow downs on playback ("tilt a whirl effect").

Re: Vaporwave’s Mini-Boom of Floppy Disk Releases

#62

Post by acomjean »

Wasn't Mini-discs music on a floppy? IN the US as s format mini-discs weren't very successful, but I used one in grad school. Put my CDs onto discs. Energy efficient, didn't skip, remote on the headphone extender cord and sounded great. The blank disks were fun colors. I have a mini home stereo with a minidisc changer, I tried a few recently and they still work.

Mageneto Optical technology.

MP3s killed them. People wanted better than 1 cd->1 disc, but the companies were so worried people wouldn't use them if the quality wasn't great. Sony who owned a record company really seamed hell bent on preventing piracy to the detriment of the technology. The little disks only made it to computers later in life.

I was going to toss them, but maybe I should hold onto them.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MiniDisc

Re: Vaporwave’s Mini-Boom of Floppy Disk Releases

#63

Post by klodolph »

CrazedGeek wrote: post #38
ynniv wrote: post #30

I'm impressed with the state of 32kbit AAC streams. You could fit almost 6 minutes of that onto a floppy, and the quality is much higher than an 8-bit MP3

How's Opus for this sort of thing?

In listening tests Opus typically outperforms HE-AAC by a fair margin. This is for 64 Kbit/s and under.

Re: Vaporwave’s Mini-Boom of Floppy Disk Releases

#64

Post by wkubiak »

KozmoNau7 wrote: post #42
21 wrote: post #31

> Cassette players, they’re not really manufactured anymore, and the prices are going up on used ones Tascam just released a new deck cassette player, with USB: https://ask.audio/articles/tascam-announces-202mkvii-dual-ca...

They probably mean quality cassette players. Even that Tascam is made using standard cheap mechanisms, it only has the most basic noise reduction (Dolby B) and no tape type selection. To even come close to justifying its $500 price tag, it should have a proper high-quality direct drive 3-head mechanism, Dolby B, C and S, as well as HX-Pro, at the very minimum to take the cassette tape seriously as a medium for music.…

Quality/higher-end cassette players for playing generally lo-fi music? Something's wrong here.

I mean, in the article one guy says that he managed to compress and put 3 songs onto 1 floppy and was satisfied with the listenable end result.

Re: Vaporwave’s Mini-Boom of Floppy Disk Releases

#65

Post by Apocryphon »

michaelbuckbee wrote: post #3

My mind just can't accept that this isn't a parody / publicity stunt.

It's an aesthetic, or as they call it, an a e s t h e t i c. There's nostalgia in that style, when internet was 90s and simpler. When malls were flourishing and it looked like we were heading towards a comfortable consumerist end of history rather than a hyper-optimized automated dystopia. The Windows 95 phone could be considered vaporwave:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17405219

Re: Vaporwave’s Mini-Boom of Floppy Disk Releases

#66

Post by 32qwef »

poisonarena wrote: post #29

I get the cassette thing because that was an audio format people used for albums, but in the 90s nobody released albums on floppy discs, so this is like all gimmick

The whole gist behind vaporwave is that is's a vision of the future that never came to pass. So it's appropriate that music was not commonly released on floppy disc.

Re: Vaporwave’s Mini-Boom of Floppy Disk Releases

#68

Post by samfriedman »

badpenny wrote: post #58
nerdponx wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Isn't this the album that started vaporwave as whole?

That's Chuck Person's Eccojams Vol. 1.

Yes, which was interestingly a side project of Daniel Lopatin, better known by his experimental electronic moniker Oneohtrix Point Never.

Re: Vaporwave’s Mini-Boom of Floppy Disk Releases

#69

Post by [deleted] »

TremendousJudge wrote: post #60
vertexFarm wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm sorry, those are bad. The first is a joyless dissection of wordy music theory, which is to production of music as Freudian literary analysis is to writing. That's all made up post-hoc by the academics, the artist never has any of those intentions in mind when they make music and it describes nobody's creative process. And by the way it's synthwave, not vaporwave. The second immediately parroted that stupid myth t…

Yeah, not sure what the "vaporwave is a criticisim of consumerism" came from. It's a thing now though, since most people started listening to the genre _after_ this theory came out, and many interpreted the music with it. To me, it was always about the feeling of finding weird, old stuff. You listen to this music on streaming, and you don't know who made it, or where it came from, and then you just never find it agai…

[deleted]

Re: Vaporwave’s Mini-Boom of Floppy Disk Releases

#70

Post by poisonarena »

32qwef wrote: post #66
poisonarena wrote: post #29

I get the cassette thing because that was an audio format people used for albums, but in the 90s nobody released albums on floppy discs, so this is like all gimmick

The whole gist behind vaporwave is that is's a vision of the future that never came to pass. So it's appropriate that music was not commonly released on floppy disc.

I am going to declare there is no unifying theory to Vape wave
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