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Comment by ceuk | Hacker News Reader

Basically the same story here for me. I have a trove of audiobooks I've carted around with me from house to house since I left home which my kids now eagerly pick from each night to listen to at bedtime. I've even supplemented my collection considerably since from eBay and the like.

It's just such a great medium. Fairly resilient, incredibly easy to use, compact, cheap ish.

And of course there's the heady dose of nostalgia for us old gits :)

If anyone has any recommendations I'd love to hear them. Top one from me has to be the BBC dramatised Lord of the Rings adaptation which I myself have been listening to off and on since I was around 5 or 6

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> If anyone has any recommendations I'd love to hear them

For kids: Just William (read by Martin Jarvis) and PG Wodehouse Wooster books (don't recall who read that).

Early Eddie Izzard shows were also memorably good as audio. Very quotable.

There's a gigantic, not always unofficial, archive of Just a Minute online, which is excellent car journey material. This is the first 5 series, but there's 80-plus series of it in total https://archive.org/details/Just-A-Minute

I absolutely loved those just william cassettes as a kid! Completely forgot they existed, must have been lost or broken. Will definitely be repurchasing

Snap. My mates kids have this modern player and I thought it was really cool. You get these cards for it and slot them in to play the different stories and music. You can even get a special card that you can make recordings with. We almost got one for our kid until we realised, wait a min, it’s a tape recorder!

You lose a bit of sound quality but there’s no internet-cloud-based crap to deal with. You don’t need to worry about the company failing and bricking the toy or the Chinese spying on your kids. Also, they’re mostly just mechanical machines with a simple circuit so actually fixable, you can pick up a 30 year old broken player off eBay and chances are a rubber belt has just perished somewhere.

The Harry Potter audio tapes are good. It’s read by Stephen Fry and he’s great!

>compact

since "compact cassette" is the actual trademark®, I can't help but think you might've been unduly influenced here.

https://duckduckgo.com/i/4b7c08d5084dbabb.png

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

Maybe it's just an accurate name? CDs were pretty compact, back in the day: think of how many floppies would fit on a CD-ROM.

My family had a reel-to-reel player, which was definitely not compact. My dad would record tapes from Vietnam and send over the recordings so that our family could hear him. I was afraid to touch it growing up. Instead, I played records on our turntable, and 8-tracks tapes in our car and a couple of 8-track players we had. As a teenager, I played cassettes, which was awesome. Vinyl sounded great and had the best overall experience for things like Christmas records, but cassettes had a warm feel and you could listen to them in your car, a friend’s car, on a boombox, etc. and if you had two tape decks, you could make mix tapes and share them! Or you could just copy a tape for a friend. Those were the days.

My dad had an Akai M8 (7" tapes) that I was not allowed to touch under threat of injury, but then he got heavily into quad vinyl and gave the beast to me: The whole Beatles catalogue on 7" tapes, yay!

>My dad had an Akamai M8

My own dad had a Akamai T19 cloud computing system and he would give me all the oggs and flacs and mp3s off the cloud from his Akamai system

Unlike a CD, a cassette could fit a pocket. Barely, but still. A CD never could.

That is one advantage. Also great in cars if they're not chewed up. Very hard to change CDs in a car.

I still have the BBC Radio 4 version of His Dark Materials on CD somewhere - I ripped them years ago and listen to the digital version. I've experienced HDM in various forms, including the stage version and of course the books, but I am most fond of the Radio 4 version.

John Le Carre’s “Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy”and Umberto Eco’s “The Name of the Rose” were constant companions for me on road trips (sadly no English unabridged “Foucault’s Pendulum” exists)

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