One generation's distortion is the next generation's instrument. I love it.
Noise, in a wide, aesthetic sense, is rich. "Clean" is shapeless, soulless.
Simulate cassette tape audio profiles using FFmpeg
71–80 of 81 posts
Re: Simulate cassette tape audio profiles using FFmpeg
#72
Re: Simulate cassette tape audio profiles using FFmpeg
#73Earlier quoted context omitted.
Nostalgia for sure, but it also makes the sound less perfect in a way that can be interesting musically. It adds harmonics, slightly detune everything, compresses, adds noise. It's a good tool to make a sound that sound very artificial, sharp, perfect, into something more soft and perhaps interesting to some.
Ie they sounded like crap. Those of us old enough to live through the tail end of cassettes loathed them. Just like records before tape, every time you played them they sounded a little worse than the last time. And you rolled the dice on whether your player would eat the cassette. CDs were like magic. Nobody should look back.
No, it's not quite...
Re: Simulate cassette tape audio profiles using FFmpeg
#74Earlier quoted context omitted.
Nostalgia for sure, but it also makes the sound less perfect in a way that can be interesting musically. It adds harmonics, slightly detune everything, compresses, adds noise. It's a good tool to make a sound that sound very artificial, sharp, perfect, into something more soft and perhaps interesting to some.
Ie they sounded like crap. Those of us old enough to live through the tail end of cassettes loathed them. Just like records before tape, every time you played them they sounded a little worse than the last time. And you rolled the dice on whether your player would eat the cassette. CDs were like magic. Nobody should look back.
> Nobody should look back
Vinyl has outsold CDs for many consecutive years in the recent past. A strong retro-trend is booming right now with (mostly young) people rebelling against things that are aesthetically too sharp or crisp. The imperfections you decry, are seen as "authentic".
A few people are paying more for their wedding to be recorded on an old SD Camcorder rather than 8k. I suspect it's part of a whiplash against (tech) companies "ruining everything" and a yearning for a simpler time by people too young to have experienced it
Re: Simulate cassette tape audio profiles using FFmpeg
#75Earlier quoted context omitted.
"very" close is subjective. In my opinion it is nowhere near running audio through real tape. The computation capability needed to fully simulate tape in real time is not there yet. To model all subtle interactions, phase etc you'd need to run audio in 10-100+ MHz range.
TAAS ? Tape as a service ? Upload your music and get it recorded to cassette and re uploaded to you ? It’s all a moot point most of the time since it’s going to be compressed to crap by Bluetooth codecs before reaching most ears.
It exists like https://accessanalog.com/product/telefunken-m15/
Re: Simulate cassette tape audio profiles using FFmpeg
#76Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Analog media really were a bit crap. True but I find it strange how many of my favourite recording were made with this "crap" analogue equipment (well before I was born) and how many modern "perfect" recording sound terrible to me. To me the sound of even subtle autotune is "eww". I can't stand the over compressed, "sugary" sound of current pop music. It's just not for me. Perfection is Herbie Hancock's Head Hunter…
Over compression is horrible, but unrelated to this. I grew up with cassettes, but was happy to switch to CDs when I was around 18. The better the recording and playback, the closer it is to what the artist intended, and to how it would sound if the artist was playing right in front of you (if they don't use autotune or compression). It's a fact that people get accustomed to the distortions in music playback, in the…
> the closer it is to what the artist intended, and to how it would sound if the artist was playing right in front of you
This doesn't really bear any relationship to what happens in recording studios.
Almost no "recordings" are a recreation of a single live event. Producers choose microphones, consoles, compressors, limiters, equalisers and FX because of the way they colour sound.
It's a completely artistic set of choices.
When someone like Dave Grohl chooses a studio with a Neve and a 2" multitrack he's not doing it because he wants more fidelity. Again, recording to a DAW would not necessarily improve the end product.
You mention over compression of MP3s, well people have also used bit crushing as an effect for a long time too.
Re: Simulate cassette tape audio profiles using FFmpeg
#77Earlier quoted context omitted.
Ie they sounded like crap. Those of us old enough to live through the tail end of cassettes loathed them. Just like records before tape, every time you played them they sounded a little worse than the last time. And you rolled the dice on whether your player would eat the cassette. CDs were like magic. Nobody should look back.
> Nobody should look back Vinyl has outsold CDs for many consecutive years in the recent past. A strong retro-trend is booming right now with (mostly young) people rebelling against things that are aesthetically too sharp or crisp. The imperfections you decry, are seen as "authentic". A few people are paying more for their wedding to be recorded on an old SD Camcorder rather than 8k. I suspect it's part of a whiplash…
Simpler time my ass. Try organizing anything without email or cellphones. It was hell. Filming your wedding on vhs isnt nostalgia when you also have a hundred iphones in the room. Nostalgia would be using a VHS only to have it fail and your wedding video disappear... forever. It's up their with nostalgia for slide rules and cars without seatbelts: they seems cool now because you do not have to actually rely on such things.
Re: Simulate cassette tape audio profiles using FFmpeg
#78What is "wow"?
Basically, on analog media, playback speed isn't perfect. There's constant speedups and slowdowns. This creates a "waa waa" or "wow wow" effect that's noticeable when playing a constant pure tone.
> Basically, on analog media, playback speed isn't perfect
Thank god we have digital now. My car is able to play music, close to normal quality, at around 16 °C. At other temperatures, the sound is non natural.
Re: Simulate cassette tape audio profiles using FFmpeg
#79Earlier quoted context omitted.
Nostalgia for sure, but it also makes the sound less perfect in a way that can be interesting musically. It adds harmonics, slightly detune everything, compresses, adds noise. It's a good tool to make a sound that sound very artificial, sharp, perfect, into something more soft and perhaps interesting to some.
Ie they sounded like crap. Those of us old enough to live through the tail end of cassettes loathed them. Just like records before tape, every time you played them they sounded a little worse than the last time. And you rolled the dice on whether your player would eat the cassette. CDs were like magic. Nobody should look back.
Tell me you've never heard a good Type IV recording without saying you've never heard a good Type IV recording.
Re: Simulate cassette tape audio profiles using FFmpeg
#80Earlier quoted context omitted.
i don’t think any dynamic range manipulation is being done, beyond the slight variations as a consequence of the other processing. generally 0dBVU is mapped to -18dBFS with VU style RMS metering being used on the digital side as well. but that isn’t some kind of physical translation, it’s rather arbitrary and more a convention.
So no tape saturation? That would be to me one of the most interesting bits of the tape sound, at least for musical applications.
seems so, but there are thousands of good tape sat emulations, both paid and free. and i think some chowdsp ones might be open source.