191–200 of 273 posts
I don’t think so. I spent a huge amount of time in my youth recording, trading, buying, and selling audio tapes (all from the metal/hardcore/punk underground). It was a lot of fun, but everyone I know was glad when other ways of sharing and spreading music became available. As a niche, yes otherwise no.
My car radio has stopped playing cassettes for a while, I inherited this car with a full library on the glove compartment that I enjoyed playing from time to time. Guess it can be fixed?
A common point of failure is the belt that drives the mechanism, it will deteriorate with time. You can buy the belts off aliexpress for a few cents.
Shameless plug. I've produced an entire album and released it on cassette (as primarily medium in mind). You can listen to it here and watching my tape deck spinning. It is recorded from my tape deck, so you get the real tape sound! :-) https://tonleiter.net/reihenhaus/ BTW this is the final audio chain then. Crazy. :-) Synths, instruments, etc. -> Analogue mixing console -> ADC -> DAC -> Professional tape production…
Shameless plug. I've produced an entire album and released it on cassette (as primarily medium in mind). You can listen to it here and watching my tape deck spinning. It is recorded from my tape deck, so you get the real tape sound! :-) https://tonleiter.net/reihenhaus/ BTW this is the final audio chain then. Crazy. :-) Synths, instruments, etc. -> Analogue mixing console -> ADC -> DAC -> Professional tape production…
Sounds great!
My car radio has stopped playing cassettes for a while, I inherited this car with a full library on the glove compartment that I enjoyed playing from time to time. Guess it can be fixed?
A common point of failure is the belt that drives the mechanism, it will deteriorate with time. You can buy the belts off aliexpress for a few cents.
I'm waiting for the revival of computer games on cassettes.
The answer is so obviously "no" for the general case (making even a tiny dent to streaming/digital) that the article's title amounts to clickbait. That's regardless of the fact that there has always been a vibrant extremely niche cassete scene, the same way there still are 8-bit home computer fans and clubs. At best, on top of the above, a tiny additional niche of more mainstream "hipster" artists and fans might rele…
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.
I stopped using my smartphone for about 1 year now and bought a walkman fiio cp13, it is really cool, but it is really hard to make a good sounding cassette, particularly if you dont know what you are doing (like me). I record stuff from youtube and make mix tapes. I am experimenting with "not getting what I want the second I want it", e.g. "I want to listen to XYZ", 1 second later I click on spotify and its done. No…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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/…
It's less about fidelity, more about portability and customizability. Today we can hear all the hifi we want, it's a trip to see what the imagination can fill in as well. If you're really into walkmans, check out the Panasonic ultra small ranges.
[1] as in dynamic range compression, not encoding
I started getting cassette players working again when I had kids - I had lots of old cassettes with stories still, and after looking into a lot of stuff determined that it is one of the best physical storage formats for that kind of content for kids we currently have. Its major advantage is that it automatically saves state, and the state saving is player-independent. Add to that that players typically have large clu…