Hacker News Reader

Comment by badgersnake | Hacker News Reader

CDRs just make more sense here in every way. Higher quality, cheaper to produce and les degradation. Fucking hipsters.

Most of the artists I'm familiar with that release on cassette tapes are vaporwave or adjacent and sell their work as DRM-free lossless FLAC files on Bandcamp as well, so there's really no downside for the artist or the audience.

i love vaporwave on cassettes, because the medium lends itself to the art

you never know if that flutter / wow effect was originally in the song or coming from the deck

Art has to be deliberate surely? What you’re describing is just noise I would say.

But we’re getting philosophocal.

Art has to be deliberate?! Don't tell Duchamp!

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

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

> Types of readymades

> Readymades - un-altered objects

> Assisted readymades - putting several readymades together taking away their use

> Rectified readymades - an altered or marked readymade

> Corrected readymades

> Reciprocal readymades - a unique art work presented as a mass-produced utilitarian object

Choosing a medium that carries particular characteristic can be a deliberate choice.

Like film grain or contrast. Still love the look of pushed kodak tri-x.

With an art definition from before the first world war, maybe.

Only if you assume people are after the music and not a cool artifact, memento or souvenir.

How is a CD-R not also an artifact, memento, or souvenir?

It misses the "cool" bit

To follow-on:

Niche physical releases are cool because they're intentionally obscure and for fans, by fans, and explicitly for certain subcultures or even collectors within those subcultures. I've seen floppy disk and Nintendo DS cartridge releases.

There are even more formats out there you can (re)release on:

https://www.dookiedemastered.com/

Previously on HN (788 points 16 days ago 205 comments):

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41790295

>Niche physical releases are cool

Um, CDs are also "niche physical releases" these days. They're not quite as old-fashioned as cassettes or vinyl, but they're still generally considered "obsolete" now with streaming music services.

Not nearly niche enough for some hypebeasts, but nothing wrong with CDs in and of themselves. I think finding ways to recontextualize the experience of owning and listening are worthwhile.

I am a musician myself and I have frienda who live from touring — they told me there have been tours where they haven't sold a single CD while they sell 15 to 20 LPs on a small concert.

Killing the most ubiquitous format for free lossless digital audio and replacing it with analogue sources that degrade with each play or DRM and subscriptions purely because it’s not cool enough seems like a terrible idea. Apparently that’s where we are.

You missed the part where I mentioned download codes, right?

Cassettes are more expensive and worse quality, but significantly more robust in typical use until you put it in a bad device (or hands) that gets the tape out.

I've given cassettes to a 3 year old, and they all still play fine except for that one where the tape got out (cheap player). I don't think CDRs (or commercial CDs for that matter) would sound as nice after the rough treatment they got.

CDR degradation can be total and I don't know of any tools to recover them.

I have a box full of unreadable CDRs from 20 years ago and a box full of perfectly playable cassettes from 40 years ago.

The cassettes sounded awful on day one, and rest assured they didn't get better with age. (Neither did the capstan in your cassette deck, which I'd suggest checking to make sure it isn't turning into goop that will literally ruin your tapes for good.)

Meanwhile, my CD-Rs are still fine, but then I didn't buy the cheapest ones I could find.

Out of all the 80s artifacts that hipsters could resurrect... wow, just wow. Cassettes. They could have brought back designer jeans, off-the-shoulder blouses, normally-aspirated V12 Ferraris, and cheap cocaine... but no, they decided to rehabilitate cassette tapes. This truly is the worst timeline.

You are aware that there are people who like the sound of tape noise and the saturation comes with it?

As a medium it also one of the few that gives listeners a high incentive to not skip songs.

These are valid artistic choices, just like you know guitarist who run their guitar through amplifiers that distort. On persons "mistake" can be another persons goal.

Also: if the thing includes a download code to a lossless flac, why would someone even consider to buy a CD? So they can listen to the exactly same thing, but with worse ergonomics? With the casette you get at least a different variant of the thing.

I wouldn't use it myself if I made classical or choir music, but that is not what I do.

> These are valid artistic choices, just like you know guitarist who run their guitar through amplifiers that distort. On persons "mistake" can be another persons goal.

Sure, if that’s what you want to do, do it and the record it on a better medium.

You are aware that there are people who like the sound of tape noise and the saturation comes with it?

Great. They can get that with a DSP plugin. "They" being the artist, if that's what they want their music to sound like.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com