Nostalgia for Physical Media

Misses a couple of the main things about vinyl: reduced temptation to skip tracks, and side-based thinking about and listening to your albums. It's a format for albums, or at least for halves of albums. You put on a side, and you play that side. If there's a single track that gets listened to on its own, it's probably track one on side A or B of an album. It affects how you experience and live with your music.

This would remain true if they sounded just like CDs but otherwise worked like vinyl.

At least pertaining to vinyls, this seems to mostly discuss practical and technical aspects, but misses the more "ceremonial" aspect which in my opinion explains its popularity. Buying a physical record requires some intent and choice which you don't have in a spotify catalogue of millions of tracks. And playing a record has this physical action aspect a lot of people cherish: I enjoy it because it feels like a treat I set up for myself.

I would love it if someone (let's be honest, nintendo) would bring back large physical cartridges for games. It's such a pleasure to put a large piece of physical media into a console to start playing, an opportunity for artistic expression, etc. With todays hardware you could make the games boot up instantly.

The "thingness" of older hardware had a pleasure all its own.

Also, you owned it.

EDIT: I tapped into this nostalgia in a way when I released htmx 2.0 on 5.25 & 3.5 floppy disks for the first week: https://swag.htmx.org/products/floppy

Ah, minidiscs, they still have a kind of futuristic cool to them even now! When I was younger only the kids from Hong Kong had minidiscs and minidisc players.

One important aspect (to me, at least) that the article doesn't mention is that physical media comes with actual ownership rights (first-sale doctrine), and that by whatever lucky coincidence publishers weren't able to introduce widespread DRM to physical audio media.

I use 4K Blu Rays when I can, for the best possible quality. And I continue to be staggered at just how bad the UI/UX is, compared to DVDs (which was arguably somewhat worse on average than VHS).

If I didn’t know better, I’d think the manufacturers were actively trying to sabotage physical media. That the default UX should be “insert disc, wait three seconds, hit play” is not exactly rocket science.

I love Minidisc but I did feel like it was slightly less good sounding than CD. I wish CDs had followed the form factor of Minidisc and had the little integrated holder for it. It tickles my cyberpunk retro futurism cassette cool tendencies to be putting something like that in and out of the player when you load it.

I've been buying CDs and LPs for a while, based on what media the music was recorded for, and I've really been enjoying the things that other commenters have enjoyed about those formats. However, the one thing that this article doesn't mention - in my experience CDs scratch / degrade too, and when they do they become almost entirely unplayable because sometimes it's impossible to skip past the scratch / defect depending on the player. The one huge advantage of digital media is that it doesn't degrade in any meaningful way (aside from random tracks being accidentally deleted, which Apple iTunes Match decided to do to my library a few years ago, after which I never really trusted it again).

We have a 3 year old and came back to CDs for night time stories. I know now every company under the sun sells these special NFC equipped speakers where you buy little statuettes of your favourite characters, you put them on the speaker and it plays a story. But even ignoring the cost of the speaker, the figurines cost a fortune, like £15 each usually. You know what doesn't cost a fortune? An old Sony CD player and an album of 100CDs with Disney(and other stories) from eBay. And my son has as much fun picking the story to listen to with CDs as they always have a colourful label on them.

After Netflix et. al. cancelled/didn't renew about a dozen shows I was either in the middle of watching, or really wanted to watch I ragequit and decided to funnel all my streaming service money into physical media.

A few years, lots of eBay auctions, and many bluray and DVD rips later, I've got my own expansive library that's just as convenient to watch but the no missed earnings targets can take away from me.

Next on my list is music. I've built a respectable digital library but I'd like to have that backed by CD's where possible. Vinyl is nice for my absolute favourite albums but it's not an everyday kind of listening experience IMO - bit hard to listen to my records while I'm going for a walk!

For anyone getting into physical media I would highly suggest;

- Buying secondhand. In a lot of cases this is the only option anyway, but you can get bulk lots of CD's, DVD's, and Blurays for about the same price as a month of Netflix or Spotify.

- Backing up your physical copies. An old PC with the appropriate DVD/Bluray drive is very cheap, easy to automate, and you get to have the best of both worlds.

One big caveat is that "older" formats like cassette, VHS, and vinyl are not as simple or cheap. But it's not impossible to obtain and back them up, it just takes a little more time and equipment.

This seems to be conflating nostalgia with performance characteristics, isn't it?

For example, CDs are listed preferable to vinyl because the sound quality is better. That's not my understanding of how nostalgia works. People who grew up with vinyl records may be nostalgic for them not because they're a superior format, but because they evoke a memory of former times.

For myself, personally, I'm only slightly nostalgic for vinyl (we didn't have a record player in my house, but my babysitter did), but I have a ton of nostalgia for his lowest-ranked format, 8-tracks. That's what my dad had in his 60s-era Chevy pickup with an aftermarket 8-track player. I think of riding next to him on the bench seat and pulling out a tape from the black leather case that fit under it, containing a total of, I think, 6 options. We could both sing every song on them, and would do that in the parking lot when we waited for my mom to get off work. It was a terrible format, but the nostalgia factor is through the roof.

CDs, I can take or leave, I guess. For me, the CD was a thing I could burn MP3s onto and play through my CD player, attached via cassette interface to my 1987 Beretta.

SD-Cards are a currently widely used physical media.

Even my streamlined slimed-down minimalistic MacBook Pro has an SD-Card slot.

We can make SD-Cards with music and movies on them a reality, we just have to walk to our nearest convenience store, grab a 64Gb version for 10 bucks, put stuff on it, and give it to a friend.

I think OP is overly focused on sound quality. When I was a kid, I didn't appreciate any material difference in sound quality between vinyl, CD, and cassette. I listened to music on cheap walkman headphones or a small boombox, or in a car with standard cheap speakers. Cassettes were better than vinyl because you could play them in your car and because they were writable: you could record songs off the radio or make mixtapes on them. CDs were better than vinyl because you could play them in your car and better than cassettes because you could replay or skip tracks with a push of a button.

Cassette tapes are underrated. They sound great on my cassette desk, and they will always be cheaper than the other formats. If you sold your physical media a long time ago, or are building a collection for the first time, consider getting some tapes.

I find interesting that the slow fading of physical media is one thing sci fi has gotten wrong for the last hundred years or so. Even the most futuristic visions involved some kind of physical media and/or connection.

Somewhat related: Anyone recognize the keyboard in the header image? Looks extremely similar to an HP 95LX series but isn't one I recognize.