The Cassette-Tape Revolution | Hacker News Reader

The Cassette-Tape Revolution

newyorker.com

91 pointspseudolus142 comments

https://web.archive.org/web/20231119211253/https://www.newyo...

Cassettes are coming back in a big way. They never totally died in the underground metal world, especially black metal, but they’re bigger right now that at any time in my 20-ish years of recording and releasing music. They have a few benefits: extremely cheap to make and ship. Easy to store in a small apartment, car, pocket. More durable than a CD. Imperfect and grimy in a way that feels appropriate for underground music that celebrates rawness. My new album was released at the end of September and it’s selling well across all formats but the only ones where we’re sold out: limited edition vinyl colors and — you guessed it — cassettes.

After years of fighting it, I’m finally getting a new tape player for Christmas. I’m a digital audio guy but so many albums that I want to listen to can only be found on YouTube or tape and I want to support the bands directly. I can get a modern unit complete with rechargeable battery and Bluetooth for $160. https://www.wearerewind.com/ Finally, I can use my AirPod Max headphones to listen to a $6 raw black metal cassette as the Dark Lord intended.

New tape decks are poor quality, even wearerewind which puts it in a cool package uses the only new mechanism still manufactured, same as everyone else: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WleZGWAebsY&t=33s . It may be fine for some genres though ;)

The only way to play cassettes with high fidelity is to use a vintage tape deck, some of them are amazing.

> More durable than a CD

This irks me. Not that it's not true, but that tapes come with protective packaging intrinsic to the tape itself, whilst CDs are the raw media that you actually touch with your fingers etc.

CDs, way back when, were touted as the future not only because of their increased capacity for sound quality but also, ironically, their durability.

Would CDs be actually more durable if they were also packaged with a small plastic exterior that was insertable into the player, like tapes?

(Tape as raw medium isn't very durable if treated the same way as a CD. Tape needs that plastic exterior to even be viable).

This actually existed; I remember, back in my youth, handling an optical disc for a Sun machine that was packaged the same way that floppies were - within a hard plastic enclosure with a little sliding mechanism that was activated by pushing the package into the slot (exactly the way 3.5" floppies worked).

Yeah, my first CD-ROM drive was like this [1], the enclosure could be opened to place the CD inside.

The drive came with one enclosure, I'm not aware that anyone (including me) ever bothered buying additional enclosures. This surely wasn't helped by the fact that Audio-CD's (with their mechanical trays) were already widespread and produced at large volume without such a cartridge-enclosure...

[1]: https://www.clous.cz/wp-content/gallery/creative-cr-521-c/Cr...

Also DVD-RAM, when in the writer, had a shell. The single sided ones could be removed from the shell easily and put in a DVD drive (I do not recall if they worked in a regular DVD player)

One of the biggest wastes of money, for me. I got way more use out of my minidisc stuff, which is another optical disc in a case. In fact I still have my net-MD recorder/player, and it works fine.

Oh, if only they hadn't jacked up MiniDisc with all the copyright-related stuff. A beautiful replacement for the convenience of cassettes (portability, battery life) with most of the benefits of CD (better sound, can't be eaten by the motors). Unfortunately expensive and never took off in the US.

CD caddies existed for a brief time. I think early drives were much more sensitive to dust and scratches.

https://www.vintagecomputing.com/index.php/archives/842/retr...

CDs seem to be pretty resilient compared to tapes, from my experience buying used media. A small percentage of CDs will be unrippable, but a fair number of tapes are torn or self-destruct, and the players can have tape-destroying failure modes, aside from being mostly collections of belts that inevitably stretch, melt, or snap. One I was fiddling with managed to wrap several metres of tape around the capstan shaft so tightly it had to be cut off with a penknife.

VHS tapes seemed to be even worse at this. We had several dozen incidents of "tape stuck in player" and we were pretty careful with them. Fast-forward to the 2020s, when my wife has been trying to rip some VHS to computer, and it requires considerable babysitting of fragile tapes and players to get it to work reliably.

Personally experince was that DVDs became unplayable way more often than VHS tapes, especially if kids had any part in the handling. It's all anecdotal but I really soured on CD/DVD media due to the apparent need for clean-room handling to keep them playable.

CDs can crack pretty easily.

What do you do to crack a CD? Play frisbee?

I grew up with CDs and never knew of one cracking. With sufficient scratching it was possibly to get them the skip, but even friends who kept CDs unboxed in piles round the CD player didn't have this problem.

Sit on them. Because it's inside a bag, or under a blanket.

Parent was talking that CDs are less tolerant of abusive handling.

OK.

There's a whole level of carelessness that never occurred to me as a teenager who grew up with CDs.

No, but if you manage to scratch the aluminum foil layer on the backside, the CD instantly becomes useless. Or when you store cd's in large unboxed stacks, they can stick together, which can also damage the backside.

> No, but if you manage to scratch the aluminum foil layer on the backside, the CD instantly becomes useless.

Which is/was pretty hard to do on PRESSED CD's as they were covered with a thick coating, and sometimes quite easy to do on CD-R.

> Or when you store cd's in large unboxed stacks, they can stick together, which can also damage the backside.

Also, I only ever experienced that on CD-R, never on pressed CDs.

And to be fair: If you store all your tapes unwinded on a large spool, they also might see some damage over time ;)

Fair point, my experience is mainly with cheap CDR's. These eventually all became unreadable.

I agree. Sure CDs don't like to be sat on, but they don't tangle up like tape either.

Both are more stable than a modern counterfeit sd card from Amazon though :P

It seemed to me the main risk was those CD cases with the little plastic fingers on the centre; they seemed to require a big force to get the CD in or out.

Agreed.

I was there for the late 80s and 90s and my personal experience is mixed!

Now if a CD fails with a horrible scratch, it fails completely sometimes.

However, CDs often got kicked around the interior of cars for months and you could pick them up, wipe them off, give them a polish and they’d still play!

Tape would degrade naturally through usage.

Tape twists and stretches. Tape players can and would destroy tapes.

We never purchased new cassette tape audio. It was purely a portable disposable medium for the original Vinyl or CD. A way to copy music and play it in the car!

That you are describing is called MiniDisc.

>Tape needs that plastic exterior to even be viable

Reel to reel players would like a word!

Hah! Nice call out, but they even required the 'reel' to keep them somewhat manageable.

My dad had a reel to reel player. First time I heard Hocus Pocus by Focus was on that device. Still one of my top ten favourite songs. He's probably still got it too.

Most modern CD players have cheap mechanisms. The oldest, heavy duty CD players can often read right through damage that would result in skips on a modern player.

Caveat Emptor. The "We are rewind" player is absolutely awful quality. There are any number of reviews of it around, here's one from a respected YouTuber:

https://youtu.be/WleZGWAebsY

Remember when we had a recording industry, back before cassette tapes destroyed it? None of the artists were able to make money, and now no one makes music anymore.

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

> no one makes music anymore

Certainly not true. Is this sarcasm?

Slathered in sarcasm, see his link

In 2008, an Estoian artist and indie theatre house made a spinoff of sorts from this: a play and book entitled "Homefucking is killing prostitution": http://krismoor.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/10/raamatu-kaas....

IIRC, the "play" was actually never performed (part of the concept was doing PR, interviews etc about a project that's never going to happen -- you can generate quite a bit of public fluff fairly quickly in a small society like Estonia). The book was real, though.

According Wikipedia (1), Lou Ottens, the inventor of the compact cassette also formed a team to develop the compact disc.

(1): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lou_Ottens

Cassettes were horrible. Anyone saying otherwise is likely too young to have ever lived with them. They sounded bad and broke easily. They got stuck in machines. They were slow to use. CDs were like getting starlink broadband after decades of dialup.

We can salute them and give them pride of place in museums, but releasing them back into the wild is a big mistake.

No, cassettes were amazing. They were mechanically imperfect, had non-flat frequently response, tended to let loose some tape and started to screech when worn.

For all that, they were recordable.

You could exchange music with your friends. You could make mixtapes. You could record radio and TV, skipping uninteresting parts. You could record your own voice, or your own guitar. You could interview your classmates. You could even store the programs you wrote for your 8-bit computer, and read them back. All using some trusty and well-worn TDK or Sony or BASF cassettes, and a portable cassette deck.

The CD felt like a big step forward in sound quality, but a big step back in agency. It felt like a piece of immutable alien rock that required an expensive device to play. It took about a decade (say, 1987 to 1997) between the times when CDs became accessible and when CD-Rs became accessible. (Soon after, mp3 and flash players took over.)

Yep. CDs sounded better, when they worked. The early players were vulnerable to skipping or going off-track. Especially the ones in cars. The discs had to be spotlessly clean and one scratch could render the whole disc unplayable. I never liked them as a medium, even though in the best case they sounded better.

The mass-produced cassettes released by the record labels weren't great. You could do much better dubbing from a vinyl record to a high quality cassette with a decent tape deck. Those sounded quite good.

> The mass-produced cassettes released by the record labels weren't great. You could do much better dubbing from a vinyl record to a high quality cassette with a decent tape deck. Those sounded quite good.

This. The mass produced prerecorded cassettes were garbage. But copying vinyl to a high quality TDK or Maxell… very nice results.

I still have quite a few mix tapes that I recorded from FM radio in the 90s. Including Future Sound of London's 'Lifeforms' that I captured in the middle of the night and that took a while to work out what it was! CDs were so expensive and felt like an investment. I had a CD burner quite early and made a few friends with local DJs who would burn downloaded songs bartered for other stuff.

I started listening to music just after CD-Rs were affordable, so CDs are great. My tapes were off this like the Thomas The Tank Engine audio book, and I remember the problems with them.

Maybe you are 5-10 years older.

5 years younger and it would be MP3s on small players.

Roadsides used to be littered with miles of unspooled tape, fluttering from the stinging nettles and hawthorn like the ragged banners of a decimated battalion.

Fun fact, a lot of tapes were recorded from either CD, vinyl, or FM radio. The audio quality objectively cannot be better than the source material and most people wouldn't have used high end recorders. In case of cassettes sold commercially, they would have been recorded from some master; usually the same as the vinyl or CD master. The cassette was the cheap mass market version of the same usually. Intended for people with a walkman or a car with a cassette radio built in, as was common in the eighties.

A lot of commercial cassettes would have had masters similar to other CDs optimized for playback on cheap consumer devices that teenagers could own. So that means lots of distortion, amplified bass, and wall of sound, etc. The pop music of the nineteen eighties used all the tricks there were to make music sound great on crappy hardware.

Using cassettes actually wasn't that bad. My first computer was a commodore 64 with a cassette deck as the only storage. Painfully slow but it worked. I taped songs from the radio to create my own mix tapes. Later I recorded full CDs as well. I never owned a record player. They were obsolete by the late eighties. I got rid of my cassettes fifteen or so years ago after realizing that I 1) did not own a cassette player anymore, 2) had not listened to any of them in ten years. I did not break a lot of them that I can recall.

This the only correct assessment

I used tapes and loved them, but they did break or like wear out. I naturally moved on to CDs and CD-R bridged the gap. But tapes were cool and almost magical in that you could just record on to them, rewind, record over it. It was really cool to make instant recording with no computer or other conversion involved, just whatever was going on in the cassette recorder.

Recordings, making mix tapes with your own voice, rapping over instrumentals was all really fun. CDs caught up with people making mix CDs too but they were never as cool. Mixtapes had background noises that added a touch of realism. It also took a while for cd-r drives to become common so there was a several year gap where everyone had CDs but no one could make mixes.

Then again, for me personally, being the first person with a CD-R drives was basically a money printing machine.

Not if you had a Philips drive which coastered every second CD-R, which were $5 each even in bulk. It was a lovely introduction to the futility of class action lawsuits.

Actually the CD-players always seemed to skip and pause whenever I walked too fast, jumped or even in the car when going over some pot-holes.

Cassette-tapes were also very easy to reuse. I also used them to save and load BASIC code.

That's why portable CD players added 30 second anti-skip or whatever, basically read a big chunk of the track into RAM so that the read head skipping around didn't affect playback. Tapes were definitely more stable.

Until the battery started to lose its charge, and the music would start playing at a slower tempo.

Cassette tapes were better than vinyl which seemed old to young people although they were cheap. I bought a John Lennon 45 when I was 12 years old all I knew of were 45 records. But yeah cassettes were whiny you got used to it due to their convenience.

I couldn't wait for CDs I got a CD player as soon as I could about four years later with my first paycheque (well several cheques). The only problem was I needed an amplifier too so I found a broken jukebox and ripped out the speaker.

And yes it was like the future amazing crystal clear audio and best of all no rewinding or waiting between songs.

It's a bit too late for that. Cassettes are picking up steam again (particularly because they're cheaper than anything else out there) even among people that don't have any nostalgia for them. People want something tangible.

Pre-recordered cassettes were generally bad. But buying the vinyl album and recording it yourself was a different experience. The blanks were higher quality. The quality of the recording also noticeably better.

I loved cassettes and a tape recorder. So incredibly tactile and mechanical. Makes me sad my kids don’t have them actually. They did have downsides of course.

Yup, and even worse: the 8-track.

https://youtu.be/XLZS0Sj9-1U

At least with 8-tracks you could skip tracks with a button.

tracks yes, not songs, though :-)

Remember when people played their digital audio through tape deck adapters?

Why not build a digital audio player that has the cassette tape formfactor? Put whichever flash media directly into the cassette. Transmit audio over the cassette head like those old line-in to tape adapters. Use the wheels of the cassette to charge the device and control playback.

All of the hipster cred of the cassette formfactor combined with the quality of digital audio.

Funnytoday365 Retro Car Telecontrol Tape Audio Cassette Sd Mmc Mp3 Player Adapter Kit + Remote https://a.co/d/isD9VEg

I've had this exact thing for years!

It does work as described. I also haven't found a good use for it in the 10-15 years that I've owned it.

Has existed for over 20 years: https://www.cnet.com/reviews/digisette-duo-review/

>Why not build a digital audio player that has the cassette tape formfactor? Put whichever flash media directly into the cassette. Transmit audio over the cassette head like those old line-in to tape adapters. Use the wheels of the cassette to charge the device and control playback.

I've had a device like that for about 10-15 years. It did exactly that, except for charging (it had an internal USB-charged battery that lasted long enough to not care much about it).

Ultimately, I didn't use it for the same reason I haven't used an MP3 player in a long time: if I wanted to play MP3s, I already have a device in my pocket that does it better, and has a screen.

One of the appeals of the cassette and vinyl is the finiteness of it, and the idea of having a dedicated physical object for a particular piece of information. It's the idea of "I hold this thing to experince that sound".

To get that, one could simply distribute music on cassete-shaped MP3 players that only hold one album... but at that point, might as well do an actual cassette tape.

This could find a use for having entire compilations on a cassette; e.g. one magic cassete with all the albums by a particular band, or 12 hours of lofi chillhop to study to. But at that point, using your tape machine's controls to control playback becomes very tedious (do you really want to fast-forward through hours worth of audio, or hit the "next" button 236 times to get to the track you want?).

You can limit yourself to, say, only 90 minutes worth of audio per physical medium... at which point you're back to the original cassette.

Even my car's MP3 CD player doesn't run into the same problem, because its controls allow it to navigate folders: up/down scroll through folders, left/right scrolls throuh files.

I can comfortably click through 10-20 items (which is how many songs fit on a standard audio CD), so I can easily navigate through 10-20 albums with 10-20 songs on an MP3 CD - which is the entire capacity at reasonable compression levels.

Audio cassette players simply don't have enough buttons for that; so you're limited to about what the standard cassete can hold before you start putting things on a new cassette.

Quality-wise, there's no gain either.

But yeah, if you are so desperate to look cool while also going the extra mile to avoid being cool - sure, it would do the job.

A bluetooth cassette adapter seems like an easier solution though.

There was never an issue storing digital audio on tape. In fact, tape is still quite popular as a digital backup medium.

I bought an as-is cassette deck and have about 20 tapes of vaporwave and other synth-heavy music

Just like tube amps add 'color' and 'warmth' to sound, so too do cassette mechanisms add 'wobble' and 'flutter' which really makes vaporwave come into its own

Cassettes were perfect for 8 bit micros. They were a bit slow, but cheap and somewhat reliable.

Ten year old me bought a metre of stereo cable and two male audio jacks so I could copy tapes using my dad's 3-in-1 and my tape player.

You could get 7-minutes-a-side tapes that allowed one game on each side.

> Cassettes were perfect for 8 bit micros.

My Commodore had a cassette reader/writer but I never managed to copy a cassette. I was only a kid and tried hard to copy cassettes at my best friend's place (his father had a back then insane Nakamichi stereo rack) but I never succeeded.

Then I discovered 5"1/4 floppy disks and never looked back!

I've heard the Commodore mechanism has a signal processing model that's pretty different from an audio deck, even if the tape transport and heads are comparable. I suspect this is a combination of "saving a nickel" and "the characteristics best for nuanced analog audio are irrelevant or worse for data"

It was also nice for cars at the time. There were 8-track car head units, but those were very bulky and only held ~80 minutes of audio.

I remember when having a cassette tape for something started being very uncool - when CDs were getting big. They still have a time and place for me, picked up some bargain cassettes a couple weeks ago - Hendrix and the B-52s. My car has an original tape player and I like listening to full albums

> I remember when having a cassette tape for something started being very uncool - when CDs were getting big.

I was there... Thing is: the difference in sound quality was night and day between a typical cassette and a CD.

It was as if I was born a second time and I still regard that Philips/Sony joint venture (creating that 16 bit/44.1 kHz/stereo format and the associated CD) one the biggest invention of my lifetime.

I remember when I first saw one of those aux to cassette deck adapters, it was amazing to be able to plug in into an mp3 player or laptop and have your entire music collection available.

The newer cars that only had a CD player seemed like such a downgrade.

Rose colored glasses history and all that, but goddam, were cassettes awful, even when brand new.

Good-quality cassettes on a reasonable cassette deck sounded "good enough", especially when played on the same equipment as they were recorded on. They may not have given 100% reproduction of the input signal and may have introduced some noise - although Dolby B/C noise reduction mostly dealt with that problem - but that did not matter. Cassettes made it possible to record what you heard - music from the radio, those LP records you borrowed from friends or the library, later even data - and reproduce it more or less as often as you wanted, when you wanted it.

To this day I remember which song came after some random song I hear played somewhere because I happened to tape that on my cassette deck when I was in my teens, fingers poised on the play + record buttons on my cassette deck, waiting for that song to start. I do not remember the less than 100% fidelity, tape hiss, wow and flutter or other similar defects because they mattered far less than the fact that I got to record 'my own music'. I still have those tapes in the barn somewhere as well as the cassette deck I used to record it, it'll need new rubber belts before it can play anything again but one day I'll get those and play those old tapes again. Not for the fantastic reproduction but because of the fact that these are my tapes. Cassettes made that possible.

Now pre-recorded cassettes, yes, those were less than optimal. They were not popular where I lived (the Netherlands) and I never got one, preferring to buy LP records which sounded better and came in nice sleeves etc.

I think this argument is interesting because the people buying them are largely young people who never had them as kids so there's some aspect of it that isn't nostalgia.

I have a modest collection of vinyl and it's mostly just me not needing another band t shirt and wanting to throw some money at bands I like.

It's just your standard back to basics, reject modernity part of the cycle that always comes after technological advancement

Late 70’s and early 80’s vinyl was pretty awful too.

Just going to crank up my favourite song… HSSSSSSSS

It's the second one, so FFWD FFWD, nope looks like it's the 3rd one, FFWD FFWD, crap too far, REWIND REWIND, shit, this is the wrong cassette, EJECT, aagh the tape got stuck and now it's everywhere, I need to find an octagonal pencil so I can spool it back

We lost a pretty awesome record label in my city at the beginning of the pandemic. They released exclusively on cassette and hosted a lot of experimental music events.

Cassettes and tape are my favourite medium right now. Nebraska was my favourite Springsteen album. The Beetles recorded on four track. It blends well with experimental/electronic music. It has become a symbol for the DIY/indie spirit in modern art.

I hope it sticks around and I hope someone finds and licenses the recipe and process to make those Maxwell Type-II’s again.

My favorite way to listen to "While My Guitar Gently Weeps" is how I originally heard it via cassette. My tape was second-hand and well used by the time I got it, and often unravelled. The introduced distortion was amazing.

I've heard it said that people remember media not for it's fidelity, but for it's flaws.

I've come to appreciate over the last several years that seeming imperfections often improve a medium in ways that are difficult to quantify or to convey. For instance I've noticed it's much more comfortable for me to read eink than to read from an LCD, and I think it may be because the eink has imperfections. I think the balls don't always rotate, and it creates a subtle noise texture in the background.

It reminds me of comfort noise that's played on telephone systems.

eink doesn't use rotating balls. You're confusing eink with gyricon from Xerox. That product died ages ago.

Thank you for the correction, eink is a more diverse and interesting set of technologies than I was previously aware.

To me, Sting's / Eric Clapton's It's Probably Me always ends about 2/3 into the song. Because it was how it was recorded on the cassette I heard it for the first time from.

And ELO's Twilight will always have "twilight's gone awaAaAy" because the tape was stretched around that syllable :)

The Beatles may have recorded on 4-track very early on, but they were certainly known as a group that pushed the limits of technology in the studio.

yes, one of the many ironies here is that the groups people associate with the nostalgia for outdated recording tech would absolutely choose the new stuff if they were recording today.

I’m biased and collect and restore 4-track machines. I’m currently working on a restoration of an RCA SRT-301 mono reel-to-reel. And I absolutely do record on them.

I use digital DAWs and often “finish” songs in Ableton, but I mostly write, record and mix on a 424.

I was thinking the other week, I wouldn't mind having a nice physical copy of a lot of my data. There was something "human" about flipping through my CD collection looking for something to put on. Or browsing the bookshelf, looking for a book to read.

I think it needs to be bigger than Micro SD, more surface area for art than a thumb drive, but a CD is too big I think.

A game boy cartridge would be a good size I think, or perhaps a credit card.

I would love a box of credit card size memory sticks. I could could flip through them, share one with a friend, carry them around. More physical that just moving files on and off my phone.

One card for each band perhaps, or each author. All of Tools albums, or the collected works for G.R.R. Martin.

It would be nice if you could just place the card on you phone and the phone just reads the data and plays the music. Or rest it on your laptop and browse it like it was a drive.

It would never take off, but nice to dream about.

> It would be nice if you could just place the card on you phone and the phone just reads the data and plays the music

With NFC you could embed a unique ID into the card and the phone accesses that data from it's own storage or from your online drive. I know it's cheating, but it's doable today.

I built this for my niece when she was very young. A raspberry pi and a little amp and some speakers with a usb nfc reader. Wrote NFC stickers and stuck them to little cardstock 'album covers' that I laser printed. When she put the card in the little box with the nfc reader it would trigger a python script to load the proper playlist into vlc and play the album. If you took the cover out of the box it would stop and clear the playlist.

Uh, GitHub link? This sounds awesome!

Never bothered, though I've found several similar projects that are running on less hardware.

I recently bought a dedicated device like that the other day for my kids.

https://us.yotoplay.com/

Techmoan has a review of this that's upcoming (it's on early release for Patrons), since they have released cards for the Beatles and Queen.

It seems like a pretty well-thought out system!

Thanks for the link. Seems like a well built ecosystem. The pixel art pairing with the card/audio is a nice hardware touch.

On one hand, feels like extra work to purchase and duplicate existing Spotify lists.

On the other hand, I’m attempting to keep my kids in “physical” world as much as possible. This is the best solution I’ve seen for audio. Could be worth some ongoing dollars.

Have your kids enjoyed it? Any sense of how often you’ll be buying new cards?

We bought about half a dozen to start with. We have a few more on some Christmas wishlists shared with family and there will probably be one in the stockings.

So far it's been popular. Not an every day toy yet but it is becoming more popular. My oldest is well under 5 years old so I imagine they have a few years to really grow into some of the rest of the content.

We originally got it as another option for some kind of media that wasn't always too high-energy as we got later into the evening. We're trying to ensure they don't stay glued to the TV until just before bed. They like having this as an option alongside books or other music. They haven't really figured out or cared for the streaming media content. We use it as a night time noise maker and nightlight for one child.

I do get it's kind of weird buying content based on nfc tags. It really showcases the hyper-drm landscape for this content. But in the end it's a decently built and high quality product that's incredibly smooth for a child to operate.

All makes sense. I currently use the Hatch for bedtime light and noise. Don't feel any need to replace it.

I'm picturing this as more a daytime thing. Kiddo is likely too young to appreciate the "choose yourself" aspect of it, so I'll revisit around age 3-5.

I think the Minidisc[1] is what you're after - 68mm×72mm (2.7in x 2.8in), 80 minutes of audio/~300MB of data.

I'm always confused by my desire for slightly inconvenient physical formats like this to make a comeback - I suspect it's some combination of 90s nostalgia (I'm mid-40s) and a psychological reaction to the enshitification of culture now being an endless subscription service.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MiniDisc

It's the right size for sure, but you can buy 32GB of Micro SD for about $10. And and an SD card reader is a lot easier to find. The are just a little too small. :)

It's not just nostalgia. I think when you start looking for them there are a lot of good reasons to start doing this.

Physical backups, privacy of not having so much life online, less subscriptions required (dropbox), easier sharing without gate keepers.

SanDisk should make something. A credit card with a few small raised bumps for the connection so you can just rest it on a surface rather than having to plug it in. Then a simple little USB reader that is just a flat surface you can place on your desk.

Just before flash-based MP3 players came to dominate, I had a second gen "Hi-MD" MiniDisc player. Each disc was 1 GB, you plugged the player into the computer and it showed up as regular USB mass storage, just drag and drop the MP3s over.

The downside with larger disks like the 1 GB Hi-MD is that you can fit 200-400 songs, depending on bitrate. So you no longer get the physical connection "this disk is album X".

If anyone is looking to purchase, beware: first-gen Hi-MD devices (IIRC) were crippled by needing to use Sony's DRM management tool called SonicStage for transfering songs, it was slow as shit and annoying, probably only usable on WinXP or something today.

the good thing about miniDisc is that its relatively easy to get the tracks back off it again. like if you wanted to share a disc with a friend, they could copy the tracks onto their computer using webminidisc or some other software. all the software is a bit old and janky but it's quicker than having to copy a tape!

There is still a pretty thriving mini disc community

Credit cards would be nice. But you need an angle, something they'd do that you can't do with Spotify. Otherwise they'll never take off.

Don't invent a new format, but create a credit card-sized adaptor for microSD — like the microSD to SD adaptors but bigger. Call it 'macroSD'. Build NFC into the adaptor.

Edit: smart cards would be ideal if they had more memory. AFAIK they only have a few MB.

Why not just use the SD card size?

Well people do. Just lacks NFC, and a bit small.

You can get business-card shaped CDs. Mentioned here: https://wikipedia.org/wiki/Bootable_business_card

But then you need a CD reader, which is kinda hard to get these days.

USB CD/DVD drives are cheap and available.

How about never delete your stuff because contract terms changed in the backend?

I spent many hours reading and looking at the inserts that came with CDs.

> the cassette “puts a smudgy fingerprint on everything it touches,” adding noise and hiss, the sound quality degrading with each playback.

This applies equally to phonograph recordings. The only real virtue of LP vinyl is that it largely prohibits loudness war nonsense.

> The only real virtue of LP vinyl is that it largely prohibits loudness war nonsense.

Actually the loudness war started in the 40s with vinyl.

https://www.npr.org/2009/12/31/122114058/the-loudness-wars-w...

The part about digital compression is nonsense though. That’s not now digital audio works. Not sure why the article author asked a psychology professor to explain digital signal processing.

LP vinyl had another virtue in permitting large-format artwork. For example, the work of Vaughan Oliver for a number of albums on the 4AD label, is now regarded as such original design that it is exhibited in art museums completely separate from the music. However, once CDs overtook vinyl he and other designers found the small size of the new format very limiting.

This is one major reason why vinyl had a comeback in the new millennium: so many of the people buying that vinyl didn’t even own a turntable, but they wanted something to exhibit as home decoration, and hanging vinyl records up on the wall has long been a favourite DYI project.

I would add that physical media has its own charms beyond simply the art (which I love). Removing vinyl from the sleeve, finding the perfect spot to drop the needle, flipping the record- this is all very pleasing if you enjoy physical objects that are engineered yet beautiful.

I have reel-to-reel, minidisc, digital audio tape, and cassette in addition to CD and vinyl. I find reel-to-reel hardware fascinating. Well-built machines are heavy, with tactile switches and buttons that are very pleasing. I can get better audio quality from a minidisc player the size of a deck of cards - but with r-to-r you get this lovely machine spinning about, counting time while VU meters dance.

Obviously the hardware is part of the experience for me.

FWIW - cassette can actually sound fantastic. They often did not, but the capability is there. The Sony Walkman’s I still enjoy are delightful to listen to and operate. Just for fun I bought one of Taylor Swift’s new releases on cassette (yes, she sells cassettes) and was a terrific audio experience.

>The only real virtue of LP vinyl is

I disagree. As a former DJ that played vinyl, it truly was a tactile experience. The loss of that with the switch to CDs and now digital media is truly something that's not appreciated.

Yes. Including the haptic + visual element of searching for the next one when going through the sleeves. CDs at least still had that, while digital file lists are just much harder to navigate.

(This is also why I keep buying physical books despite enjoying the convenience of an e-reader)

ctrl+f in the list is still a lot easier to find something even if just file name, but most systems use id3 tags so artist/track/album are accessible.

Ctrl+F is efficient. Fingering through disks and books is visceral. The latter is a special pleasure for some, and an easier way to orient in a multitude. (Not for me, but I can appreciate the difference all right.)

Don't get me wrong, I love digging through crates of vinyl. There were times where one might find oneself with insufficient funds for new vinyl. There was something quite satisfying to walk through all of the 12"s in the crate and play all of the B-sides of the 12"s that you didn't play because the A-side was always the one you turned to. It was just like going to the record store, but at home. Can't recreate that by scrolling through a file listing. I'm all about that physical experience, but doesn't mean one can't admit the pros of another format.

99% of the time I listen to music digitally but I buy LPs for the art and liner notes. My connection with the music I listen to is bigger when I see more of the art and design and read what went into making the album.

I recently built a new PC. For the first time it has no CD drive.

I have a modest vinyl record collection.

I lost track of my cassettes when we got a CD burner. But my dad still has a collection of tape media and the associated hardware.

I wonder what will drive the nostalgic revival of CDs.

> I wonder what will drive the nostalgic revival of CDs

When AI implants require you to submit biometric prints of your nostrils to launch Microsoft Windows 12?

Part of the magic around format revival is the inconvenience and imperfection triggering nostalgia. Vinyl is unwieldy, fragile, non-portable, requires maintenance, and the sound has a moderate noise floor. Cassettes require vintage equipment, need to be rewound, have fragile tape, and (except in ideal situations) are significantly audibly compromised.

Compact disc is easy to handle, can withstand some abuse, has no format-induced artefacts, and compatible players are still available brand new for as low as $15. There’s about as much nostalgia to find in there as there is for a Parallel ATA hard disk.

Actually, one of the more interesting things is that CDs are more fragile in many respects compared to records. Many records from 50+ years ago can still play fine even with a bit of scuff, but CDs from 20-25 years ago can be a gamble in my experience. Especially CDs earlier on that spectrum; disc rot can be a problem because of poor manufacturing not to mention damage from earlier CD players or general misuse.

In comparison to cassettes I'd say they're about even when it comes to proper care if we're talking modern CDs. When you start really digging into the average lifespan and durability of the various formats, it starts to become apparent that CDs were fairly overstated even when stored and managed properly.

At Thanksgiving this year my 8 year old nephew played music on my grandfather’s ~100 year old portable record player. My sister and I reflected that no music playing device (cd+tape) we owned as teenagers survived our 20s.

I would draw a distinction between fragility and the risk of defective manufacture.

CDs have to fall out of favor first, it is still standard procedure for albums to come out on CD and they are still sold in most music stores.

Within seconds of loading the page, a giant toast taking up half the bottom of the screen, and a separate modal overlay with some other message to subscribe pop up and completely obscure the article. And that's with ad blocking.

https://deathtobullshit.com/ more relevant than ever.

Usage of thi addon is becoming the only way to browse the web correctly: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/activate-read...

however this always gives me pause:

> "This add-on is not actively monitored for security by Mozilla. Make sure you trust it before installing."

You can have a look at the code, and disable auto updates.

The blog is ironic a medium and a tumblr link, both of which completely obscure the content on load in landscape, with bullshit.

For the price of a single cold brew grande at Starbucks you can use lightsail or whatever the darling tiny VM service of HN is this week, and if you can't afford that, then put a patreon up or something.

Yes, a domain name can cost a bit, but you can get 5+ years at a discount some places, and it's cheaper than any driver's license I've had to renew, I believe.

I grew up with tapes and have reconnected with them in recent years. I have plenty of vinyl as well, but tapes have a nicer nostalgic feel for me (and don’t require as much careful handling). I particularly like shopping for tapes. In most shops used vinyl is many times picked over and overwhelming. But tape sections are smaller and more efficient to browse. For me, there is a certain feel to the old tapes I want (and certain labels, particularly Moon Glyph, for the new stuff) and finding a fit has a very specific thrill I don’t get elsewhere.

The 90s were awesome: https://www.mixcloud.com/chromeclass/

I've heard that Heavy Metal fans like the official studio released cassette tape mixes of many 70s and 80s albums.

I am looking forward to the CD revolution, USB stick revolution, mp3 revolution, etc.

“Home taping is killing the music industry! We’ve left the other side of this cassette blank so you can do your part.”

Watch there now be a cassette renaissance like there was a record renaissance, despite the cassette having horrible audio quality compared to a CD.

You can buy them from Barnes and Noble and Taylor Swift is releasing her new stuff on them, I think the renaissance has begun (and possibly already peaked)

https://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/bleach-nirvana/29210673?ean...

https://store.taylorswift.com/collections/cassette-shop

There's been a resurgence for a while! There are countless tape labels releasing interesting music (see: https://daily.bandcamp.com/tape-label-report and Marc Masters' book "High Bias," which is mentioned in the piece).

The NYT won't let me see TFA, so I hope it mentions that cassettes, via samizdat, also shook things up on the other side of the Iron Curtain.

FWIW this publication is The New Yorker, not the New York Times, and the linked article didn't have any sort of paywall or preview feature when I clicked through.

I don't think trying again will bring you any joy, though, since none of the words samizdat, iron, curtain, soviet, nor USSR appear in the text.

Thanks, my bad. I'm still paywalled, so I went to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cassette_tape#Cassette_culture where TIL tapes also played a role in the 1979 Iranian Revolution.

Tapes indeed played a role in the Iranian Revolution, but it was largely a negative one in making Khomeini popular enough that he could return from exile and immediately marginalize the broad coalition that had overthrown the shah. But after 1979, smuggled cassettes also allowed Western-leaning Iranians to maintain contact with the pop culture that they had been cut off from due to the new regime.

The fax machine also played a role in bringing down the Iron Curtain

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