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Cassette tapes are making a comeback?

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Re: Cassette tapes are making a comeback?

#241

Post by RiverCrochet »

tom_ wrote: post #71
RiverCrochet wrote: post #61

My cousin had many old tapes from 1994-1995 of radio recordings. They've been put up for years and he's been recently listening to all of them. Most still work. He says that 30-ish years is the longest time he's seen a storage medium last. So he's been recording YouTube audio he wants to keep over them. The article is also wrong on several points regarding the attributes of the medium: > Meanwhile, cassettes break an…

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!)

Really thinking about it, maybe they're not more fraglie. CDs scratch easily but tapes are still exposed on the bottom, so you really want to keep both in their cases.

I still think it's wild that portable (as in the Walkman sense) CD players were a thing - a spinning disc with a precision optical pickup with very little separating it from the outside world that b1umps around on your hip as you walk. I guess it's equally crazy to have a tape motor on your hip, but it just seemed less fragile to me.

My musical habits for the past few years have been long mixes of songs on YouTube, that I don't really skip around in. I think YouTube's ads that annoyingly hit between every video nudged me in that direction; but that's why I made mixtapes back in the day when you bought an album but there was only 1 or 2 good songs on it.

Re: Cassette tapes are making a comeback?

#242

Post by Ringz »

Hackbraten wrote: post #175
cellularmitosis wrote: post #124

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/…

> The cassettes available today are Type I, Type II ("high bias") and Type IV ("metal") That statement feels a litle misleading. The only type of cassettes produced today is Type I. Everything else is new old stock, where you might end up with a decades-old, chemically degraded cassette.

I have sealed TDK MA-XG in mint condition. Stored in a dry, dark place. Do you say that they are degraded now?

Re: Cassette tapes are making a comeback?

#243

Post by 4k93n2 »

xg15 wrote: post #20

I find it depressing that there seem to be only two ways to distribute media and manage one's audio collection: Either ultra-convenient but fully locked down streaming services - or analog "vintage" media like vinyl or cassettes, which do give you a physical medium under your full control, but also require you to forego all the progress we made with digital media. The one thing that's absent: Plain old audio files th…

syncthing is a very useful utility for this. just install it on 2 devices, add a folder, then the files will sync over the network whenever both devices are on.

if you have an old phone or laptop lying around gathering dust you can set up syncthing on that and have it act as the always-on server. something simple like a raspberry pi with an external drive would do either.

every syncthing folder has a .ignore file where you can add patterns to reduce the overall size of the folder, which can be useful if youre going to try and sync your music library to your phone. its very basic but it can be useful in some cases. like adding *.flac would ignore all .flac files and only sync .mp3 does. or maybe if you have a few artists with very large folders you could ignore them and sync the rest. i havnt found a good solution to that problem yet tbh

Re: Cassette tapes are making a comeback?

#244

Post by Aldipower »

cellularmitosis wrote: post #124
jackdoe wrote: post #105

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…

> 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/…

I just produced an album release on Type I cassette. High quality Type I (ferro oxid) is almost comparable to Type II, but you need the correct bias settings while recording. Practically the 8bits/50db is non-sense. Really. Maybe on a very bad tape deck you have a signal-noise-ratio of 8bit from silence to the first noticeable noise? But the actual music you are playing has much more dynamic range possibilities. Tbh my recordings on tape sound more dynamic then on Spotify.

Re: Cassette tapes are making a comeback?

#245

Post by Aldipower »

cellularmitosis wrote: post #239
bondarchuk wrote: post #145

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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. Source? AI content without it is less than worthless.

Did you actually try any searches? Or is this just an excuse to broadcast your feelings about AI? The author of the Ogg format claims a bit more pessimistic range of bit depth: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cIQ9IXSUzuM Here are some measurements of type I, II and IV: http://www.ant-audio.co.uk/Tape_Recording/Measurements/HD3_v... http://www.ant-audio.co.uk/Tape_Recording/Measurements/HD3_v... http://www.ant-audio.c…

The measurements you are linking to are showing the level of distortion (HD3 v level) not dynamic range! The Y-axis on the graphs is showing the 3rd harmonic in dB in relation to the mV given in on the x-axis. This has absolutely nothing to do with dynamic range and it is also not the signal-to-noise-ratio. The fundamental frequency in those measurements was at 315 Hz. HD3 refers to Harmonic Distortion at 3rd level.

Re: Cassette tapes are making a comeback?

#246

Post by tracker1 »

moosedev wrote: post #101
tombert wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

> CDs never had any DRM Oh, but they did, and quite infamously :D https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sony_BMG_copy_protection_rootk... https://arstechnica.com/uncategorized/2005/11/5549-2/ https://www.networkworld.com/article/715376/network-security... https://www.researchgate.net/publication/240779158_Lessons_f...

"Hey, I can't burn my presentation to disc."

I still refuse to buy Sony labelled products from that one. When you have to go through several dozen computers to wipe their rootkits off... even though creating a custom deployment image was faster, it was still a massive time consuming pain I'd never put on anyone.

If they'd have released a simple, single download, then maybe I'd have been less burned... but having to install custom uninstaller per machine, with an email address, and that software itself left another security hole... I'm out.

Re: Cassette tapes are making a comeback?

#248

Post by parineum »

lloeki wrote: post #111
parineum wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't understand vinyl either. Tape is worse but vinyl has all of the same downsides, sonically. The "Warmness" people are always talking about is a symptom of fragility. Unless you're going to get a laser player, your vinyl gets worse with every listen. And if you're using a laser, you loose the garbage that is referred to as "Warm". Nevermind if they get left somewhere warm. It's objectively worse than lossless d…

> your vinyl gets worse with every listen Worn out vinyl grooves are typically caused by an unbalanced tonearm or damaged stylus. Realistically if the tonearm is adequately balanced and the stylus is kept clean you're looking at hundreds to thousands of listens before it has any kind of even slightly discernible effect. There's a much more likely chance of vinyls being damaged by simply handling them.

How many people are performing proper maintenance on their record players?

The point stands either way. Vinyl isn't durable. It gets worn by proper usage and worse by improper usage.

My FLAC files are as perfect as the day I got them and are backed up both at home and remotely. Vinyl is an inferior format but people like rituals and hobbies but then they tell themselves lies about how it's actually better.

It's fine if you find it romantic and pleasing to pull out the vinyl, put it on the player then read the liner notes while listening to the album. That's awesome. It's the same for lots of hobbies I have but let's not act like it's technically superior in any way.

Re: Cassette tapes are making a comeback?

#249

Post by asdff »

usefulcat wrote: post #93
bagels wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I grew up in the 80s, and was a prolific user of both video tapes (mostly VHS) and cassette tapes. I can't recall ever having a tape get eaten by any deck, either video or audio. Not saying it never happens, but if it was common I absolutely would have encountered it many times over.

I think it happened more as the players aged and wore out. In the 90s and 2000s I remember it happening pretty commonly although cd or dvd skipping was way worse. A couple years ago we took the old family vcr player out of the parents attic and tested it out. It was a great vcr at the time, sony with all the bells and whistles. But it immediately at the tape and I mean ate it. Had to take it apart and route the tape out myself and I'm pretty sure its ruined the tape. We spent 2 hours on youtube with it taken apart and gave up the project indefinitely.

Re: Cassette tapes are making a comeback?

#250

Post by asdff »

glimshe wrote: post #26

I remember being SO HAPPY when I got rid of all my cassette tapes and vinyl discs for CDs. I was an early adopter of digital and, to this day I don't regret it. There's no way I'm going back. What's next? VHS?

VHS is still the only way to watch the star wars you grew up with. Lucas lost his mind and started meddling with the finished product again in the DVD era.
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