Cassette Tapes On The Wane

jonerik writes "The BBC has an article on the current status of the once-popular cassette tape in the UK and elsewhere. It's been a long climb up and a long fall down for the audio format introduced by Dutch electronics giant Philips in 1963. Having sold 83 million units in the UK at their 1989 peak, cassettes sold just 900,000 units in the UK last year. And yet the cassette soldiers on in the West in niche applications - particularly in the audio book market - and in other countries where CD and MP3 penetration hasn't been as extensive. From the article: 'Keith Joplin, a Director of Research at the International Federation of Phonographic Industries, said that Turkey still sells 88 million cassettes a year, India 80 million, and that cassettes account for 50% of sales in these countries. In Saudi Arabia, it is 70%.'"

Comments

Naaaa, really?

[wheany]

Naaaa, really?

Re:Naaaa, really?

[Cobralisk]

CDs can be nice, but I'm really sick of losing media to scratches. DVDs doubly so. I still have most of my VHS and audio cassettes from the mid eighties that work fine. Of course, its not like you had to carry a wad of tape to feed into a player, and manually wind it onto spools (most of the time). I'd like just one good reason why optical media has to be handled and exposed to the elements like this.

Re:Naaaa, really?

[ksaville00]

Finally, I can't stand going to a movie store and seeing that they have more vhs then DVD...common who actually rents VHS...DVD is the superior format, it takes up less room, (they do cost more on average :( ) Last longer (if you are not 10 years old, and use the case) and also have more room ... I can go on for days.

Re:Naaaa, really?

[Momoru]

hehe seriously....since I got my 8-track player, I havn't even CONSIDERED a casette tape!

Re:Naaaa, really?

[hackstraw]

CDs can be nice, but I'm really sick of losing media to scratches.

Keeping CDs in their cases works wonders.

I've lost 2 CDs to scratches over the last 18 years of having CDs.

Re:Naaaa, really?

[Anonymous Coward]

Well they're actually a fuckton cheaper because it's just a little plastic disc as opposed to a huge mechanical casette with a spool of tape inside. That's just marketing.

Re:Naaaa, really?

[Ucklak]

I haven't lost any purchased CD's in the past 20 years.

CD-R's are another story. Don't by cheapies.
About 6 years ago when cheap CD-R's were $1.00 a piece, I bought a hundred of them. Now the foil is flaking off.

Re:Naaaa, really?

[Chess_the_cat]

Last longer (if you are not 10 years old, and use the case)

The problem being that most renters are 10 years old and don't use the case. I've had to return a couple of rented DVDs because they were so scratched they were unwatchable.

Re:Naaaa, really?

[koreaman]

re: your sig

The first amendment says that people have a right to speak. It in now way implies that the rest of us should have to listen. I read at -1, but not because of the first amendment.

Re:Naaaa, really?

[Anonymous Coward]

I'd rather return a scratched/unwatchable dvd than to trash a vcr because the tape was contaminated and destroyed the heads. Yes, it's happened to me and I won't rent a vhs again because of it (not that many places here rent vhs anyway these days...)

Re:Naaaa, really?

[Anonymous Coward]

Yep. One CD-R I have had problems with is those GQ CD-Rs, which become coasters about three months after being burned. I haven't had problems with name brand CD-Rs, though; My Memorex and TDK CDRs from 1998 still play fine.

In terms of CDRs getting scratched, if they aren't kept in cases, but are left lying around like casettes, an average CDR will last maybe a month.

Basically, a CDR needs a case. I get generic case-logic clones for $25 that can hold 250 CDs; CDRs will last years when properly stored.

Also, unlike casettes, a perfect digital copy of a CDR can be made. If a CDR gets scratched, just burn another one.

Re:Naaaa, really?

[Thu25245]

There was a brief and dubious flirtation with caddy-loading CD drives in the early 1990s. CDs were placed in protective caddies, which could be inserted into slot-loading drives designed for them.

People hated them, and the world moved to tray-loading drives.http://www.everything2.com/index.pl?node_id =1729388&lastnode_id=523351

Re:Naaaa, really?

[Anonymous Coward]

why can't we have the digi-ness of the cd without obvious VULNERABILITY of our music-data. it's stupid of you ask me.

Re:Naaaa, really?

[Anonymous Coward]

minidiscs. Same quality and storage size of a CD, smaller foot print, and protection from the elements. I think that they would have really caught on if it weren't for stupid sony placing too many restrictions on their use.

Re:Naaaa, really?

[robertjw]

still have most of my VHS and audio cassettes from the mid eighties that work fine.

Even though I've had my share of CDs get scratched (even had one break one day when I dropped it on the carpet) it was generally due to my own negligence. My experience with audio tapes was not any better. I remember tapes getting stuck in tape players all the time, or sitting in the sun and screwing up the sound.

I agree with you that there should be a better way to protect user optical media, especially when children may be involved in handling the media, but I still think they are way ahead of analog tapes.

Re:Naaaa, really?

[robertjw]

Also, unlike casettes, a perfect digital copy of a CDR can be made. If a CDR gets scratched, just burn another one.

That's mostly due to cassette tapes being analog rather than digital. If you had music recorded on a DAT you could copy it as easily as a CD. Problem was Sony wouldn't license DAT for use with prerecorded movie, thus we are stuck with the CD.

Re:Naaaa, really?

[Anonymous Coward]

You need to take better care of your media. You did pay for it, didn't you?

Re:Naaaa, really?

[Takumi2501]

CD-Rs in general have improved over the years. When they were new, many of them weren't properly sealed, and when exposed to the air, the foil inside would actually rust over time. This has not been a problem in recent years (to my knowledge).

As for the foil flaking off, I've never heard of such a thing. Guess you learn something new every day.

Re:Naaaa, really?

[Anonymous Coward]

I haven't bought a CD in at least five years, so I don't have this problem. I back up all of my music onto multiple DVDs that I subsequently never take out of their sleeves. I really can't imagine why anyone would bother with CDs anymore, let alone cassette tapes.

On a side note, I use to have a TRS80 that had neither floppy drive nor hard drive. You had to load programs into the 16K of memory via ordinary cassette tapes. Talk about a pain in the arse. It took 20 minutes to load a tiny text based RPG called adventureland. And, if the volume wasn't exactly at the right level, then you had to rewind the tape and wait another 20 minutes.

Re:Naaaa, really?

[blackicye]

It was probably not the caddy loading system that people hated, as much as the extortion that occurred when you tried to buy extra or replacement CD caddies.

They used to cost $10 - $20 a piece back in the day of 4x SCSI Plextor and Yamaha CDR Drives. Having to switch all your CDs into 1 or if you were lucky 2 caddies that you owned was a hassle, and in effect caused more wear and tear on your CDs.

If they managed to produce low cost CD Caddies, say in the $0.50 to $1.00 a piece range,so that you could realistically keep your frequently used CDs if not all your CDs in their caddies and store those instead of the bare media.

We would probably all be using them still.

Re:Naaaa, really?

[fordboy0]

the foil inside would actually rust over time.

Actually, I've never known Silver, Gold or Aluminum to rust...

The "flaking problem" is / was quite common with poorly manufactured CDRs. (The OLD cdrecordable.com's discs were notorious for this) IMHO, Always look for the big three (If you do any "tape-trading" you will start to see a trend of what people will and wont accept): Mitsui, Taiyo Yuden and Kodak. Stay away from CMC Magnetics for your archival stuff (Seems to be about every brand out there). CMC has improved over the years, but they are still at the bottom of the scale.

Get yourself an ATIP reader (Windows version "cdrecord -atip" for linux) and you will be able to tell your cheap CDRs from the good ones. For instance, Fuji brand (not FujiFilm) with the spin-on top-holder are Taiyo Yudens ;)

Hope that's useful to someone.

-FB

Saudi Cassettes

[Rei]

In Saudi Arabia, it is 70%

And every last one of them begins with "La illaha il Allah". :)

Re:Saudi Cassettes

[Total_Wimp]

Anyone have an explenation for why tiny Turkey sells 10% more than India? Do Turkish people just like music more?

TW

Re:Saudi Cassettes

[Lehk228]

Isn't India is poorer than Turkey?

Re:Saudi Cassettes

[moz25]

Nope. I've actually lived in Saudi Arabia as a kid in the early 80's due to my father's work there. We regularly bought cassette tapes at the time, including classical and contemporary. So... what you're saying is quite definitely not true and it hasn't been true for at least 20 years.

Re:Saudi Cassettes

[Delifisek]

Because, before the invetion of Mp3 there was a double casette decks, these devices able to copy one casette to another. Also you can mix different songs in one casette.

88 million is not RECORDED, I believe only 20 million is original others just empty casettes.
And of course there was a casette Piracy around here. Also lots of car audio based on casettes.

And I believe this 88 million info is old. Hell we just sell 2 milion news papers per day how can we sell 88 million casettes. Maybe that casettes export to other countries.

Re:Saudi Cassettes

[Anonymous Coward]

I think you need to purchase the second cassette in "Detecting Sarcasm For Beginners".

Re:Saudi Cassettes

[Anonymous Coward]

I think you need to purchase the cassette that says STFU.

Re:Saudi Cassettes

[Anonymous Coward]

oooh burn

Re:Saudi Cassettes

[Anonymous Coward]

Hey, the 80s just called, and STFU yourself.

Re:Saudi Cassettes

[Anonymous Coward]

How many of those were "thomson original"?

Re:Saudi Cassettes

[Tink2000]

Actually, a friend of mine was stationed in Saudi for a few years in the mid to late 80s and picked up quite a few cassettes that were very Western. The wierd thing about them was that the album art had been altered in a lot of cases. For example, the little girl climbing up the mountain on Houses of the Holy had a tshirt and bluejeans airbrushed (poorly) onto her. Beauty and the Beat's album art was altered to show what was the back of the album originally - namely, individual shots of the Go-Gos in bathtubs, but oddly enough wearing black "shirts" just above the waterline. I suppose the real cover (them all standing around in towels) was just too much to deal with.

So anyway, at least in the 80s, there was a definate demand for modern Western music in Saudi.

Re:Saudi Cassettes

[Anonymous Coward]

No, *you* STFU.

Re:Saudi Cassettes

[moz25]

Yes, but I thought I would share some insight nonetheless.

Re:Saudi Cassettes

[abborren]

Yeah I was there 3-4 years ago and also noticed the censoring. I remember seeing a harmless Cher cassette where they had filled in some exposed skin with red color.

Though I think it is not as bad in smaller cities, I was in Riyadh and that's probably the most tightly controlled place in Saudi.

Re:Saudi Cassettes

[Rei]

In Soviet Russia, STFU
And I for one, welcome you S(ing)TFU
I am intrigued by your ideas, and wish you would STFU.

Re:Saudi Cassettes

[Anonymous Coward]

This ain't the USSR baby. Down here, you iz da one who will STFU. If you ain't agreein' wid me, my homies are around the corner baby. You dun wanna cross ma homies so you'd better STFU.

Thank you for STFU'ing.

Penetration

[Anonymous Coward]

Any article that can use the word penetration without a sexual connotation deserves an award.

Re:Penetration

[tempest69]

If they're using THAT word, you need to read between the lines till you see it. It's like smoke coming out of a teenagers room, you know that the smell isnt just air freshener.

Storm

Re:Penetration

[Rattencremesuppe]

Any article that can use the word penetration without a sexual connotation deserves an award.

Hey, this is Slashdot, so this should be the normal case...

Haven't used one in a LONG time...

[Iphtashu Fitz]

Despite the fact that I have a 4-track recorder that I used to use a fair amount to mix sound effects for my theater-related work, I probably haven't used it in a couple of years. These days I do all my mixing on my PC using a software-based 4-track editor then dump the output directly onto a CD or minidisk.

Re:Haven't used one in a LONG time...

[MightyMartian]

I still have a sizable collection of cassettes (about 150), but they're showing the signs of age. I just had one I'd bought in 1994 start going warbly on me, and its a fate I expect from all of them. My tape deck is also nearly twenty years old, and sooner or later it's going to bite it as well.

I've been using P2P to download replacements, but that apparently is evil and nasty. I'll probably end replacing some, but there's just way too much money in those tapes for me to go down to the record store and replace them all. So far I haven't been impressed with any song download services which may sell a song for a buck, but the quality is actually inferior to cassette tape. It's a pity too, because how else am I going to replace Rush's 2112?

Re:Haven't used one in a LONG time...

[Sponge Bath]

...how else am I going to replace Rush's 2112?

8 Track?
Or maybe you could upgrade to 2113.

Re:Haven't used one in a LONG time...

[CRCulver]

It's a pity too, because how else am I going to replace Rush's 2112?

Just get the CD. It's remastered and, since it's part of Rush's Mercury catalog, it's mid-price.

Re:Haven't used one in a LONG time...

[KlomDark]

Um, go to the used CD store and buy a copy, it's probably there. 2112 WAS released on CD.

old school

[bad_outlook]

Cassettes, and even Cassette-singles - a short lived 45 type of try - were so cool back in the day. Get a good Nakamichi tape deck (dragon anyone?) and keep the tapes out of the sun and you had some great quality. Plus, once CDs came out, tapers went nuts getting most of the quality (cds at that time were not well done) at almost no cost. Tape decks were the standard in cars, as most people still have them in any car > 10 years old.

I hope that anything that out'dos CDs come back to a smaller, more portable format as the cassettes, but not their penchance for falling apart after too much sun.

bo

Re:old school

[IAmTheDave]

...and keep the tapes out of the sun and you had some great quality...

I remember when, as a child, I first discovered that tapes magically stuck to the small U magnet I had received as part of a science kit. "Mom, look!" I said as I picked up her new Moody Blues tape off of the coffee table with my magnet that cold Christmas morning. Needless to say, my mom received a replacement tape the next day :)

Re:old school

[foos_guy]

There was a format that was small and portable like cassettes: MiniDiscs. These things never really caught on outside of Japan/asia. They could carry 74 minutes of music, about 1/4 the size of a regular CD, and the optical disc was inside a "shell" for portability.

But with MP3 players now, you've got your SD, XD, memory stick, etc. that's way smaller in size compared to a cassette.

Re:old school

[halleluja]

I hope that anything that out'dos CDs come back to a smaller, more portable format as the cassettes, but not their penchance for falling apart after too much sun.

Minidisc :-) Probably those mp3 players (iPod etc.) will surpass CD's with worm memory or something..

But it can never beat my first-earned-bucks-high-tech-Sony-walkman of the 80s in prep school

Re:old school

[timeOday]

I hope that anything that out'dos CDs come back to a smaller, more portable format as the cassettes, but not their penchance for falling apart after too much sun.

I honestly don't think there will ever be another format as good as CD. The sound quality is as good as the human ear can discern (and I will continue to believe so until somebody has some actual evidence to the contrary), CDs last a very long time (unless exposed to sun) and the song files are easily extracted (thanks to an accident of history). The Internet itself could obviously be a better distribution medium than CD, but it isn't thanks to DRM.

As for actual day-to-day usage (since you mentioned portability), I don't think it matters much, since I see it as just a distribution format. Once you transfer it to your HTPC, IPod, etc., you don't see the CD again until you get some other music storage device.

Re:old school

[Anonymous Coward]

They did come out with a cd-quality, yet armored alternative. It was called the Mini-Disc, but no one liked it. As in the Betamax vs. VHS war, the crappier product won out.

Re:old school

[blincoln]

I honestly don't think there will ever be another format as good as CD. The sound quality is as good as the human ear can discern (and I will continue to believe so until somebody has some actual evidence to the contrary)

Read up about digital audio and the Nyquist frequency.

While CDs have a theoretical frequency range of 20hz-22KHz, the quality of the audio degrades as it approaches the maximum frequency, because it cannot be represented accurately.

For an example, let's say I am recording a violin solo, and part of it takes place at around, I don't know, 11KHz. With a 44KHz sampling rate (like CDs), it's only being sampled four times a second.

A violin obviously has a fairly complex waveform, but if you only get four samples per second, that complex waveform is reduced to something more like a square wave. Your CD player might interpolate data on playback, but with only four data points per second, it's going to look more like a sine wave than the original sound.

That's just the sampling rate. The bitrate is also a factor, meaning quieter passages are much less defined than loud ones (at least, with a linear scale like CD audio systems use).

Re:old school

[ketamine-bp]

i think it's you that need to read up about digital audio and nyquist frequency.

Nyquist theorem
If input signal has _maximum frequency_ (bandwidth) f, sampling frequency must be at least 2f

First, you are definitely wrong about 'for an example... ...four times a second', as when we are considering the nyquist frequency you should look at the frequency domain to see the highest harmonics; and a signal with highest frequency component of 11kHz is always faithfully sampled with 44kHz sampling (by that i mean if the bit resolution is high enough you can reconstruct the signal perfectly, yes. perfectly).

and for your information, a violin actually has frequency ranging from the low end of some hundred Hz to around 8kHz. 8kHz is often quoted in designing a violin to be a soft limit when you are tweaking parameters to get the violin sound good. for violin recording a low pass put at 16kHz usually result in transparent recording.

if you have a 11kHz component in a waveform and you sample that at 44kHz, you are sampling it 4 point per cycle, which is ADEQUATE to represent the original waveform.

and nothing could be reduced to a square wave, it is also not that higher frequency would result in sine wave, it would undergo aliasing and result in a very low frequency waveform.

though, as violin goes, it actually have harmonics that go up to around 30kHz when played sul ponticello, or up to 50kHz when playing double-stop; the reason why CD is said to be relatively transparent is because no Homo sapien can feel those frequency as far as i know from any properly controlled trials, some audiophiles claims they do, so i would wonder if they are in the Canis genus or not.

you're right about the sampling part, though.

Re:old school

[timeOday]

Well, I did say "as good as the human ear can discern ...until somebody has some actual evidence to the contrary." By that, I mean something like a double-blind test showing that somebody can hear the difference.

Nevertheless, my thoughts on your comment: if somebody can't hear a 24 KHz sine wave, then they sure can't hear 24 KHz details on a lower frequency tone, i.e. the stuff that would require 48KHz samples to capture.

Unfortunately for me the question is pretty much moot. Only in my early 30s, my frequency response is already degraded. My kids and wife notice things like keys jangling that I do not. I can hardly hear the alarms on some wristwatches, so I'm pretty sure I don't need 192 KHz SACD.

Re:old school

[blincoln]

Nyquist theorem
If input signal has _maximum frequency_ (bandwidth) f, sampling frequency must be at least 2f

I studied electroacoustic music and digital recording at university. I am very familiar with the Nyquist frequency.

Here, I'll illustrate with a sawtooth wave, sampling frequency 44KHz:

This is a 5512Hz sawtooth wave. As you can see, it is already far from perfect, because the number of samples per cycle means that much of the data has to be interpolated for it to not sound harsh and "digital."

This is a 11024Hz sawtooth wave. By doubling the frequency, I have halved the number of samples per cycle, futher distorting the original shape (and therefore timbre) of the wave. It's almost a rounded-off triangle wave now.

This is a 22048Hz sawtooth wave. By being so close to the Nyquist frequency, all I'm left with is a sine wave, because I'm only getting two samples per cycle. Not only that, but because of which data points were lost, the amplitude has decreased by about half.

The smoothness of these waves is (as I said) because of the interpolation my system is using. Without that, the closer I got to the Nyquist frequency, the more my wave would look like a triangle or square wave, depending on what data points were discarded and the shape of the original wave.

First, you are definitely wrong about 'for an example... ...four times a second',

Sorry, I was in a hurry. Obviously I meant four times per cycle of the waveform.

as when we are considering the nyquist frequency you should look at the frequency domain to see the highest harmonics

Yes, but as we have seen, even below the Nyquist frequency, waveforms are distorted as they approach that limit.

and a signal with highest frequency component of 11kHz is always faithfully sampled with 44kHz sampling

Yes, if the *absolute highest harmonic* is 11KHz, then it will be accurate. Now please show me some commercial music where that is the case.

and for your information, a violin actually has frequency ranging from the low end of some hundred Hz to around 8kHz

My speciality is electronics. It was a hypothetical example. You may replace "violin" with the higher-pitched instrument of your choice =).

Re:old school

[Anonymous Coward]

"but not their penchance for falling apart after too much sun."

Penchant is the word you were looking for.
Penchant

Also I was wondering if slashdotters were stupid enough to fall for your pyramid scheme free iPod bullshit, is that why you have it as your sig and homepage?

I can't believe you losers are still playing into these scams.

Re:old school

[abborren]

Yes, the waveforms become distorted because they are losing some harmonics. Luckliy they are all at such a frequency that you will not be able to hear the difference.

And the amplitude loss you mentioned does not affect the components you can hear, assuming you are sampling at an adequate rate (around 44khz).

Many people seem to believe that because the waveforms look different, it will sound different.

I would be very impressed if you could hear the difference between say an 18khz sine wave and an 18khz square/triangle/sawtooth wave. That would imply your ear is detecting harmonics above the frequency range the human ear is capable of.

Re:old school

[Anonymous Coward]

All of this can be forgiven when compared to the cost to quality ratio that CDs offer the music customer... If you think the Nyquist theorem is important than surely you must acknowledge wow and flutter and tape hiss (even with Dolby NR of any type), and of course siblence and surface noise on LP records.

I have a soft spot for the older formats, I loved cassettes and as a DJ I have nearly 5000 records... But I think the bang for the buck that the CD offers is the highest in terms of quality and ease of acheiving that quality.

I miss the larger artwork of LPs more than I care about the Nyquil Theorem!

Re:old school

[ketamine-bp]

"I studied electroacoustic music and digital recording at university" and "My speciality is electronics" and then you don't even understand that when we're talking about nyquist frequency we're talking about the frequency component, after FFT, DCT, MDCT or [insert your favourite algorithm here], which are sine waves.

in fact, when human are hearing, in our inner ear different frequency compoennt of the sound wave stimulate different region, effectively doing a transform from the time domain to frequency domain, and as the cutoff of human hearing is around 20kHz (in fact, it's much lower in older people who are in their 10s or 20s, by 20kHz we're talkin' about kids)

> You may replace "violin" with the higher-pitched instrument of your choice =).

I'm sorry, but most instrument does not have fundamental frequencies above 20kHz and harmonics above 20kHz are usually too insignificant in terms of energy for them to be heard in reality. feel free to actually do an ABX test on a 24/192 record with and without a 20kHz low pass filter at 24dB/octave.

Yes, if the *absolute highest harmonic* is 11KHz

i thought by highest component i'm talking about an even more absolute measurement of frequency (note harmonics are also complex waveforms which can be broken into their own frequency components).

Here, I'll illustrate with a sawtooth wave, sampling frequency 44KHz:

I'm sorry, but there is nothing such as sawtooth in any natural instrument. if you want to say sawtooth in synth, you're free to do so, but the synth are usually giving you something your kind samples are doing anyway... sawtooth wave has a frequency component of *infinity* and thus cannot be sampled accurately by any commonly used technique.

The smoothness of these waves is (as I said) because of the interpolation my system is using. Without that, the closer I got to the Nyquist frequency, the more my wave would look like a triangle or square wave, depending on what data points were discarded and the shape of the original wave.

by the PCM standard, it will NEVER look like a triangle or square wave which both has a frequency component of infinity; PCM must pass through a low pass filter in order to accurately represent a waveform below nyquist frequency. i'm sorry, but by what you've done, i smell audiophile.

p.s. i'm an audio enginneer; and yes, i'm extremely picky

Re:old school

[blincoln]

I would be very impressed if you could hear the difference between say an 18khz sine wave and an 18khz square/triangle/sawtooth wave. That would imply your ear is detecting harmonics above the frequency range the human ear is capable of.

I used higher-frequency fundamental tones to illustrate extreme cases. The same thing occurs to lower-frequency tones, it's just not as obvious visually.

Re:old school

[blincoln]

in fact, when human are hearing, in our inner ear different frequency compoennt of the sound wave stimulate different region, effectively doing a transform from the time domain to frequency domain, and as the cutoff of human hearing is around 20kHz (in fact, it's much lower in older people who are in their 10s or 20s, by 20kHz we're talkin' about kids)

Yes, I know =).

I'm sorry, but most instrument does not have fundamental frequencies above 20kHz and harmonics above 20kHz are usually too insignificant in terms of energy for them to be heard in reality.

You're missing my point. Even sounds that have a fundamental frequency well below the Nyquist are not represented accurately by digital systems, and this becomes more and more evident as those sounds approach it.

i thought by highest component i'm talking about an even more absolute measurement of frequency (note harmonics are also complex waveforms which can be broken into their own frequency components).

I think we're in agreement here. But again, find me some commercially successful music whose absolute highest component is 11KHz. I don't think you will. 11-22KHz is only one more octave, but the harmonics in that octave are very important for the timbre of the sound.

I'm sorry, but there is nothing such as sawtooth in any natural instrument.

*sigh*

I used a sawtooth because it's easiest to see how its representation becomes less and less accurate as the fundamental frequency approaches the Nyquist frequency.

The *same thing* happens with other sounds, it's just not as immediately obvious in a waveform view.

by the PCM standard, it will NEVER look like a triangle or square wave which both has a frequency component of infinity

I know. As I said, interpolation, blah blah blah. My point here is that whether you interpolate it into a sine wave or leave it as a triangle/square, you are not *accurately* representing the original waveform, and therefore the sound will not be identical.

i'm sorry, but by what you've done, i smell audiophile.

Hardly. But I *can* hear the difference in things like mp3 vs uncompressed audio, so I know audiophiles are not entirely full of shit.

p.s. i'm an audio enginneer; and yes, i'm extremely picky

Not as picky as the professors who taught me, apparently =).

Re:old school

[bad_outlook]

Ah yes, penchant, I knew it was wrong after I posted; penchance? Looking at it now, it's quite humorous. Thanks for the correction.

bo

Re:old school

[ketamine-bp]

I know. As I said, interpolation, blah blah blah. My point here is that whether you interpolate it into a sine wave or leave it as a triangle/square, you are not *accurately* representing the original waveform, and therefore the sound will not be identical.

you are correct if, and only if the absolute highest frequency component is higher than the sampling frequency divided by 2. (I hope to use this wording to clarify a bit, the term 'nyquist frequency' has many meaning depend on which textbook you have read) any signal, which, the highest frequency component is f, when sampled above frequency 2f will be accurately represented provided that there is infinite amplitude resolution. do we have anything disagreeing here? and again, there is no, not even a single commonly used codec can accurate represent anything with a freqeuncy component of infinity.

Hardly. But I *can* hear the difference in things like mp3 vs uncompressed audio, so I know audiophiles are not entirely full of shit.

Ah, the joy of clarification - i think we're just in some miscommunication. Audiophiles are those people who would believe audio cables being directional, or that the design of power supply has anything to affect the quality of sound, or 2+2=5, for extremely large values of 2.

I think we're in agreement here. But again, find me some commercially successful music whose absolute highest component is 11KHz. I don't think you will. 11-22KHz is only one more octave, but the harmonics in that octave are very important for the timbre of the sound.

and i bet no more than 0.01% of all people can hear anything above 22kHz at -20dB with respect to peak CD volume; and any commercial record i've seen do not have anything above -50dB for signals beyond 22kHz. Yes, i'd agree that the timbre of an instrument is related to its harmonics, but what i'd recommend you to try is to place a low pass filter starting at 18kHz, and see if you noticed anything in a reallife record. I once played around with some audiophiles with one single digital recording with and without 20kHz low pass and i've yet to see anybody could reveal this in a properly carried out ABX test.

I know. As I said, interpolation, blah blah blah. My point here is that whether you interpolate it into a sine wave or leave it as a triangle/square, you are not *accurately* representing the original waveform, and therefore the sound will not be identical.

i would be glad to tell you there is nothing such as a perfect triangle, square wave or so, be it naturally generated or electronically generated. anything that could be generated could be represented, though not everything generated could be heard; those that could be heard is provided in CD, and CD provided just that. codecs like musepack, or AAC provide even better compression on audio because it further take out the inaudible components of audio.

secure storage

[Anonymous Coward]

I store my files on them

Re:secure storage

[Rei]

Hey, don't joke about that - back when I had a 286, we had a tape drive that took actual audio cassette tapes, and stored data on them via alternating tones. :)

Re:secure storage

[failure-man]

Most people who have anything worth backing up do. (At least after they realize that these cute little recordable DVD's aren't nearly as reliable as one might hope. * Voice of experience. *)

Re:secure storage

[Anonymous Coward]

I should have elaborated...I store my commodore 64 files on them ;)

Re:secure storage

[failure-man]

You could do that on a 286? I've never seen an audio-tape tape-drive on anything younger than a comodore 128.

My old 486 could use VHS though.

Re:secure storage

[Anonymous Coward]

Heh, I didn't know that our 286 was so leet. :) I still am ever so impressed that it could run a 3d video game, though (A10 Tank Killer). Those coders were skilled ;)

Re:secure storage

[Deinhard]

Perhaps you need to look at this.

How long before CDs and DVDs?

[gremlins]

How long before CDs and DVDs?

Re:How long before CDs and DVDs?

[Leroy_Brown242]

Nothing on the horizon. Nothing really has the size efficiency, and quality of DVDs and CD.

I could go for smaller discs though.
Same quality, but 1" discs.

I'd worry about losing them though.

Re:How long before CDs and DVDs?

[angle_slam]

A long, long time. When people talk about the death of the CD, they always point to the 5.25" floppy. But the fact is that the cassette was used as a computer storage medium at the same time as the 5.25" floppy. I remember because my Atari 800 had both. Higher capacity floppies (and random access) killed the cassette as a computer storage device. But the fact that it was still used for music distribution means that the cassette is still viable today. (It is trivially easy to find a cassette deck to play music).

I predict the same will be true of the CD. Because it is used as a music storage medium, it's life will far surpass compact flash, USB drives, ZIP drives, etc. Moreover, even when CD dies, it looks like manufacturers want to maintain backwards compatibility. For example, even though I don't own any working CD players (that is, CDs only) in my house or office, I can still play CDs through my PS2, my DVD player, or my computer's DVD+/-R drive.

Oh that's too bad

[Rosco P. Coltrane]

I just love it when I'm driving down the freeway, the stereo goes plop-plop, the cassette pops out and the entire dashboard looks decorated like a christmas tree with overflowing tape. It's just not as festive with CDs...

Re:Oh that's too bad

[rubycodez]

to get festive with a CD requires a microwave oven, and it's much prettier.

Re:Oh that's too bad

[ignorant_newbie]

ya, but more distracting to the driver. not to mention the difficulty installing the dash-mounted microwave.

Re:Oh that's too bad

[dj245]

I just love it when I'm driving down the freeway, the stereo goes plop-plop, the cassette pops out and the entire dashboard looks decorated like a christmas tree with overflowing tape. It's just not as festive with CDs...

Apparently shoddy cds can shatter at high speeds. I've never seen or heard of it from my friends though.

But anyway, it is almost cunningly smart of these countries to rely on this old proven technologies, and skip technologies that are redundant. Iraq, for example, seems to be skipping landlines in their technological development and moving to a society where everyone will have a cell phone. By the time they get widespread DVD's in these countries, every player is/will be region free and support mp3/dvd+-r. They don't get the hassles of the format wars and probably never will as long as they remain half a step behind. If we should be so lucky to not be a giant beta-test site for the rest of the world.

Re:Oh that's too bad

[rubycodez]

using a 120VAC cigarette lighter adapter, you can just put the microwave in the lap of your drunk and/or stoned friend on the passenger's side and let the hilarity ensue. if that's just too much hassle for a good time, you can always just heat up the lighter and toss it in said wasted friend's lap.

Re:Oh that's too bad

[Anonymous Coward]

Wow, you actually found a perk of living in Iraq over just about every other country, the fact that the don't have much! Wow, if they could only stop the daily suicide bombings, civil unrest, and the fact that for decades, the ruler of the country used and abused them then I'll be the first in line buying the beach front propery there because the region free dvd's with mp3 support will be worth it.

Re:Oh that's too bad

[Mr.Radar]

Most cigarette lighter outlets in cars are limited to 15 amps, or 180 watts @ 12VDC, which is not sufficient to power even the lowest-powered consumer microwave ovens even with the most efficient alternaters available. That's not to say that you couldn't wire the alternater directly into the car's power systems, bypassing the cigarette lighter socket, but that would take a lot more work.

Re:Oh that's too bad

[Thud457]

It's been years since I've seen a cigarette lighter in a car. Can you even special order them any more? Oh, you were talking about "convience power points".

Re:Oh that's too bad

[Anonymous Coward]

You've never seen a vagina in real life, have you?

Re:Oh that's too bad

[Gangalino]

That's why mini-discs rule (except in sales...).

Re:Oh that's too bad

[saskboy]

I've seen the aftermath of a CD shattering in a CDROM drive. There were only tiny bits of it left, and the drive somehow still worked after it happened.

I like that tapes are on the decline, it makes it easy to snap up tape players and music tapes that would cost at least $1 on CD, for pennies at garage sales.

Sum

[823723423]

[1]
The music industry itself, however, remained concerned about cassettes, in particular the ability of people to record music on them

[2]
However, while cassettes are disappearing quickly from the music stores, they are clinging on in the UK in bookshops

[3]
However, terms such as fast forward, rewind, record and pause, everyday words bequeathed to us from the tape era, ensure that in the English language at least, the legacy of the cassette will survive

Re:Sum

[Rosco P. Coltrane]

The music industry itself, however, remained concerned about cassettes, in particular the ability of people to record music on them

No it isn't, because there's a major difference between analog recordings (especially slightly crappy ones like on bootleg cassette tapes) and digital ones: the sound quality decreases rapidly with each copy-of-a-copy. Which means only professional piracy, from a master tape or CD, is to be feared.

However, terms such as fast forward, rewind, record and pause, everyday words bequeathed to us from the tape era, ensure that in the English language at least, the legacy of the cassette will survive

Damn, you sound like a broken record...

Re:Sum

[Anonymous Coward]

Sum? From your numbering, I'd say the answer is 6.

what about...

[MoistVomit]

....the countries that still use 8 Track Tapes?

Re:what about...

[Antonymous Flower]

I hear there's a big push to get an 8-track in every hut in the congo by 2007.

Re:what about...

[Dan Up Baby]

What, Funkytown?

Re:what about...

[Anonymous Coward]

I am from the Congo sir! I resent that implication that we will be to use those awful 8-tracks! Our current use of slot-loading 45rpm players is quite sufficient, and the warmth and tone of them cannot be beat by an 8 track.

Next format?

[turtled]

Man, I have bought albums on cassette, then CD, then the remastered CD, then the DVD Audio... then MP3... and I am young, I am sure there are some of you that had some on record and 8-track...

New formats, old formats.

Re:Next format?

[winkydink]

Don't forget cylinders.

Re:Next format?

[soupdevil]

Or scrolls from player pianos...

Re:Next format?

[soft_guy]

Or sheet music...

Re:Next format?

[kotj.mf]

Dude, seriously. They still sell vinyl. And a used LP is likely half the cost of the used CD version.

The primary advantage of vinyl is that it makes the hipster girls all wet when they see your sagging bookshelves crammed with a couple thousand LPs.

The primary disadvantage of vinyl is that you will eventually end up marrying one of those hipster girls, make several moves over a few years, and discover that those very same LPs have a density greater that a neutron star.

Blanks

[decipher_saint]

I can see this, I haven't had to buy a new blank cassette since I bought my bulk demagnetizer...

Yay!

[RickPartin]

Good riddance! Cassette tapes allowed easy duplication of music between friends that destroyed the music industry! Oh wait no it didn't.

Re:Yay!

[jumpingfred]

I was just looking at a book about mix tapes in the book store. In the intro the author talks about how records at that time came with warning stickers saying that home recording was destroying music.

Re:Yay!

[purple_cobra]

This is true; I still have a bunch of old LPs in storage and on the rear of the sleeve was a small boxout containing the phrase "home taping is killing music". It didn't, of course, and neither will this decade's bogeyman, the MP3.

Re:Yay!

[Hoi Polloi]

Bow Wow Wow dedicated a song to it, "C-30, C-60, C-90 Go" (the numbers refer to tape lengths).

Re:Yay!

[lucmove]

Good riddance! Cassette tapes allowed easy duplication of music between friends that destroyed the music industry! Oh wait no it didn't.

Yes, very funny. But very distorted.

Sharing cassetes (which had a cost and imposed some limit) with a dozen friends is one thing. Sharing zero-cost mp3 material with millions of unknown people from all over the world is entirely different.

You surely understand that I consider mp3 files "zero cost" because hardly anyone has a computer just to use mp3 files, but for many other reasons. In other words, you'll have a computer anyway, with or without song swapping.

No, it won't kill music, of course. But the two things have completely different degrees of impact. It's like comparing someone blowing a little sand at your eyes with a desert sand storm.

Analogue formats will never die.

[Anonymous Coward]

For at least as long as DRM exists.

Re:Analogue formats will never die.

[grub]

Macrovision is an analog copy protection system.

Re:Analogue formats will never die.

[Anonymous Coward]

Yeah but there's the other easy part about them; the decoded output is trivial to tap and re-record.

Philips?

[PCM2]

It's been a long climb up and a long fall down for the audio format introduced by Dutch electronics giant Philips in 1963.

Lucky thing it was Philips that invented the compact disc, too, or they might be pretty steamed.

cassettes are great

[Anonymous Coward]

no DRM, you can drop them on the floor and they dont break, you can scratch the case and they still play

and the best of all thing is they are analog just like you

Re:cassettes are great

[Quiet_Desperation]

Can get tangled up in your player and not only ruin itself, but take out your player in the process.

Signal degrades with every use.

Impossible to make a perfect copy.

Re:cassettes are great

[goodie3shoes]

Cassettes deserve to die a painful death. They are a horrible medium for music, as they were designed for voice recording. The tape speed is too slow and the tracks are too narrow; the intrinsic signal to noise ratio is poor, and the wow and flutter are intolerable. Hacks like Dolby noise reduction never worked in practice since they required the deck to be properly adjusted and aligned, which they rarely were. But as ever in the marketplace, "convenience" trumped quality, as we witness with compressed formats like MP3 as compared to lossless coding.

In other news

[Anonymous Coward]

The advent of the "horseless carriage" portends the decline of horse-driven buggies on our city streets.

Cassettes...

[White Shade]

Just like vinyl, which has been on the wane for decades, cassettes aren't going anywhere anytime soon...

Sure they're not the most high fidelity or durable or anything, but when it comes to just throwing down a quick recording of something, they're perfect, and the sheer number of cars and people with tape players and whatnot guarantees that there will always be a market for them..

and heck, 900,000 units ain't bad...

don't throw out your tape deck yet, that's for sure!

Re:Cassettes...

[Dan Up Baby]

Didn't people say the same thing about those little things that, uh, with the metal thing on the bottom and the... oh, yeah, floppy disks?

Only a matter of time

[Leroy_Brown242]

It was only a matter of time before this format fell out of favor.

It has a very limited life.
The audio qualiy is poor
and it has a very inefficient size and shape

Oh well, RIP cassette tape.

Re:Only a matter of time

[Anonymous Coward]

It has a very limited life.
The audio qualiy is poor
and it has a very inefficient size and shape

sorry are we talking about CD ?

Re:Only a matter of time

[decipher_saint]

It has a very limited life.
The audio qualiy is poor
and it has a very inefficient size and shape

The "official" lifespan of a cassette is somewhere between 10-15 years. Though much like a compact disc it's longevity can be promoted through good storage.

Audio quality has a lot to do with the quality of the device that records and plays it.

I would argue that it's size and shape are actually quite efficient, considering that it contains moving parts and a few hundred feet of tape.

Personally, I find cassette tape handy for recording dictation and radio broadcasts.

Re:Only a matter of time

[Leroy_Brown242]

"The "official" lifespan of a cassette is somewhere between 10-15 years. Though much like a compact disc it's longevity can be promoted through good storage."

Storage time, or being used?

I had tapes blow up after the span of just over a year back when I used tapes.

Re:Only a matter of time

[decipher_saint]

Storage time, or being used?

I don't know, that's all I could find based on a few Google searches. However, that being said I have cassettes from the late 70s that I still play on a regular basis that still sound pretty good (full range, little to no noise). Maybe I'm lucky because of where I live (Alberta), it's dry here and for the most part the most extreme temperature ranges my stuff will go through is between 17C and 35C outside of direct sunlight.

Didn't See That One Coming

[Anonymous Coward]

I wonder if this could happen to floppy diskettes too?

Re:Didn't See That One Coming

[Anonymous Coward]

(sliding a fresh 8 track tape into my stereophonic component hi-fi system) Nah, that'll never happen.

Re:Didn't See That One Coming

[rubycodez]

I'm coyping all my floppies to punched tape just in case.

Re:Didn't See That One Coming

[shredluc]

It definitely can. I have not used a floppy at least for 2 or 3 years now. It's usage will slowly fade and some time in the future, they will just stop making them.

Re:Didn't See That One Coming

[QuantumRiff]

All Dell desktops come by default without a floppy drive. You have to pay an extra $13 for one when you configure it. And all their laptops, if you purchase a floppy drive, come as a USB attachment. It is slowly happening

Re:Didn't See That One Coming

[prionic6]

Notice that for most people it wasn't the CD-R oder CD-RW that killed the floppy. Even worse were attempts like ZIP disks. Only the cheap USB-Flash-stick came in to fill almost every aspect that floppys were used for.

Why? Simple: every modern computer can use it without a special drive.

Re:Didn't See That One Coming

[civilizedINTENSITY]

Yeah but its a pain doing the reach-around and blindly searching for the USB on most of the computers at my school. At least the ZipDisk is on the front. CD-RWs? Must be nice! Some teachers actually require homework to be submitted on 3.5" floppies.

Re:Didn't See That One Coming

[Anonymous Coward]

dear god hasn't your school heard of e-mail accounts for teachers?

Re:Didn't See That One Coming

[BorgHunter]

::makes "joke went over your head" motion::

Re:Didn't See That One Coming

[Guppy06]

You can have my floppy drive when you give me a new media that is as disgustingly easy to make bootable as a floppy is.

Optical doesn't do it, and so far for me key drives don't do it.

Re:Didn't See That One Coming

[Anonymous Coward]

Optical boots fine if you are using anything built this century

Re:Didn't See That One Coming

[Guppy06]

"Fine" is one thing. "As easy as a floppy" is something else. I will continue to complain until making a CD-R bootable is as simple as sys a:.

I've got a slipstream CD-R of Windows XP, and I actually use boot floppies to install it because they're easier to make than trying to make that CD-R bootable.

Re:Didn't See That One Coming

[hitmark]

i just wish a media would show up that have the size and cheapness of the floppy.

those minidiscs from sony in hi-md format is close as they can store data (a bit slow of the write tho). but they are not ubiqitous the way floopys was (as you knew that every pc would come with a floppy drive).

yes a usb stick is nice for personal use but it dont have that hand-me-of that a box of floppys have (buy a box of 10, ends up giving 9 of them away for some reason or other).

Re:Didn't See That One Coming

[dagr8tim]

I've seen new computers sold without floppy drives. My floppy drive has been broken for like 2 years I'm too lazy to fix it. Why use floppy when I have a 512mb flash stick I can carry around in my pocket?

Re:Didn't See That One Coming

[Anonymous Coward]

you mean like the embedded .gif at http://sheise.de/?1757

Re:Didn't See That One Coming

[prionic6]

You could try Mini-DVD-Rs (or +, whatever). They are smaller than floppys and can store 1.4 GB of data. Everyone with a dvd player that is not slot-in can read them. Cons are obvoisly the same as any optical media, the burn process (though it is getting easier to just put some files on them), scratches and they dont have the nice "snap-in" feeling that floppys or minidisc have. And they destroy slot-in-drives if you don't know about it.

Re:Didn't See That One Coming

[Blkdeath]

Yeah but its a pain doing the reach-around and blindly searching for the USB on most of the computers at my school.

Whenever your school gets around to purchasing new(er) computers, dollars to donuts says they'll have anywhere between 1 and 6 USB ports on the front (alongside Firewire, speaker/headphone and microphone jacks I'd wager). There's also a nifty invention known as a USB extension cable which can be locked at the back and secured to the side of the PC to allow easy access. There are also USB expansion brackets that connect to either 3.5 or 5.25" drive bays. Deluxe models include temperature readouts and fan speed controls.

At least the ZipDisk is on the front.

ZipDisk was a ... an idea. More storage, but the media is slow and bulky and it suffers from the chicken-and-egg problem; not enough people use them so not enough people will use them. In the end, you wind up bringing a USB Zip drive around with you which gives you the same problem as above. At that point you may as well opt for the 1GB USB flash drives.

Also; wait until your Zip Drives suffer from the infamous Click Of Death. It happened to a friend of mine and I found myself transferring googols of bytes of data to CD-Rs for him. (He now uses DVD-R(w))

Re:Didn't See That One Coming

[hitmark]

maybe, but its not that easy to find them at your corner store the way full size cd and dvd media is.

and dvd drives are more rare then usb 1.1 ports...

Re:Didn't See That One Coming

[civilizedINTENSITY]

Every single computer in every computer lab (and the library) at this university has ZipDisks. Don't know why...maybe they don't fail and just keep getting moved over to the new boxes?

good for storage

[zedenne]

i remember the first time i took hi humungous 'hi-fi' seperate tape deck to pieces (it was an akai i think).

it was only then that i learned despite its rather massive space comsumption in my pile of stereo gear the actual mechanism inside was about the size of a large walkman.

been using it to store stuff ever since!

;->

I'm new at this, but...

[OakDragon]

Turkey still sells 88 million cassettes a year, India 80 million, and that cassettes account for 50% of sales in these countries. In Saudi Arabia, it is 70%

In Soviet Russia, cassette tapes you!

Re:I'm new at this, but...

[richdun]

Not bad.

We would have also accepted, "cassette wanes you," "cassette still sells you," or "cassette eats you" (for all those annoying times the tape deck destroyed your tape).

Of course, other statements could have included:
Yes, but does it run Linux. (for those who never had a TRS-80 or other computer with a real cassette tape "drive," not a backup tape but a standard audio cassette tape, though "listening" to them in a cassette tape player was less than pleasant.)
Can you imagine a Beowulf cluster of these cassette tapes?
I for one welcome our new cassette tape overlords.

Re:I'm new at this, but...

[grungebox]

In Soviet Russia, cassette tapes you!

Since you're new, I'll forgive you. But here are your problems:
1) The previous statement said "Turkey sells 88 million casettes..." Your retort is not parallel. The correct response is, "In Soviet Russia, casette sells you!" or something equivalent.
2) I noticed you're sitting pretty a score of 1. To increase that score, you nowadays can't just make a lame Soviet Russia joke. Throw in those now-popular old people in Korea, perhaps. Maybe write "I know I'll get modded down for thus but..." and then whatever. That's a surefire way to get to 5. Or you could say something that alludes to "In Soviet Russia" without actually writing it. For example, "You know the editors are just baiting us by saying 'In Saudi Arabia...'", except say something funny instead of that.

By the way, I know I'll get modded down for this whole spiel.

Re:I'm new at this, but...

[rbarreira]

Don't forget this one... In Korea, only old people use cassette tapes

Re:I'm new at this, but...

[rbarreira]

What about this too- In Soviet Korea, a beowulf cluster of old cassette overlords sell you!

Re:I'm new at this, but...

[richdun]

Whoa whoa, that'd be a slashdotgasm (hmm...new word...eh, let's see if it catches on).

Re:I'm new at this, but...

[rbarreira]

I don't think it's hard at all to spread a new meme here in slashdot, if it's funny enough of course (funny as in funny for geeks, which is obviously a very distorted concept) :)

Re:I'm new at this, but...

[glsunder]

"I know I'll get modded down for thus but..." I can't resist:

In Saudi Arabia, the camel rides you!
In Saudi Arabia, the sand blows you!
In Saudi Arabia, the dessert eats you!

"That's a surefire way to get to 5."
we shall see, because the jokes sure arent funny enough for a 5.

And yes, spelling errors are intentional

Re:I'm new at this, but...

[dkf]

By the way, I know I'll get modded down for this whole spiel.

Not really; that particular paragraph really merits an Insightful...

Don't you mean...

[Anonymous Coward]

Don't you mean "Allah Ackbar!!!"?

Re:Don't you mean...

[Anonymous Coward]

Didn't you watch Team American? It goes like this:

Durka Durka Durka Mohammed
Durka Durka Durka Durka Jihad
Durka Durka Allah Durka Durka

Re:Don't you mean...

[JudgeFurious]

"Allah Ackbar!!!"?

"IT'S A TRAP!"

In other news...

[jjohn]

Che Guevara is still dead.

Exactly who thought cassettes had a bright future? Are they speculating in Texas oil companies and Californian gold mines too? Jeez...

Re:In other news...

[Anonymous Coward]

Or, to bring in an obscure pop-cultural reference, "Generalissimo Francisco Franco is still dead."

Re:In other news...

[Spock the Baptist]

It may be obscure to you young whipper-snappers, but us old dawgs have no problem catching the reference.

Chevy Chase thanks you for remembering.

mp3 is king

[scotty777]

the king is dead! (cassette tapes)

long live the king! (mp3)

Re:mp3 is king

[Rosco P. Coltrane]

the king is dead! (cassette tapes)
long live the king! (mp3)

The king isn't dead.

Music?

[geophile]

You can store music on them? That's cool.

I used to use them for mass storage on a TRS-80. And my 4.77 MHz, 16k IBM PC supported cassette storage. Didn't need it though, thanks to the two 5" floppy drives, which stored, I believe, a total of 720k.

Re:Music?

[richdun]

I tried listening to the "audio" on them after storing data from my TRS-80 on them...ouch.

Re:Music?

[halleluja]

And my 4.77 MHz, 16k IBM PC supported cassette storage. Didn't need it though, thanks to the two 5" floppy drives, which stored, I believe, a total of 720k.

Might be a good time to upgrade your computer to a 286 with 10mb harddisk. Available at your local scrapyard.

Playing King's Quest III continuously swapping floppies is soooo annoying.

Re:Music?

[badfrog]

I was the hero of the local CoCo club when I was 12 because I managed to make a "backup" of the Zaxxon game casette tape, which had semi-copy protection and couldn't be resaved from memory like most other TRS-80 games could.

In one of the biggest forehead slappers ever, the cries of "Wow, how did you do it?" by the older grizzled computer geeks was replied to by:

"I put it in my boom box and dubbed it."

Re:Music?

[RichardX]

Not a fan of Merzbow or Japanese Torture Comedy Hour, then?

I used to love wandering around with a C64 or Acorn Electron tape in my walkman.

I tried to RTFA...

[Tezkah]

I tried to RTFA but it told me to flip it over to side B and then all the tape came out of the case.

Guess I'm going to have to buy the white album again...*sigh*

time for computer upgrade

[yagu]

With the threat of cassette tapes going away, what does this mean for me and my TRS-80? Are there CD Burners for the TRS-80? Help!

Re:time for computer upgrade

[Rosco P. Coltrane]

With the threat of cassette tapes going away, what does this mean for me and my TRS-80? Are there CD Burners for the TRS-80? Help!

Okay, dig this, I have the solution for you:

get one of these so-called "MP3 to cassette" adapters (which are just a generic way to feed sound to a cassette deck from some device with a regular 3.5 audio jack) and feed it your programs on CD.

I have all my ZX-81 programs stored on CD and it works just dandy. MP3'ing them should work too, so you can store your TRS-80 programs on *gasp* a real hard-disk :-)

Re:time for computer upgrade

[tepples]

If you can use a standard tape deck with your TRS-80, then you can use a home audio CD recorder. In fact it might even be easier than tape, almost as easy as with a floppy disk drive, because you can add up to 99 index numbers to separate individual recordings on a disc.

Re:time for computer upgrade

[rubycodez]

get the 80k one-sided diskette drive, and with a paper punch and scissors you can use BOTH sides of the diskette! Screw Linux and BSD, TRS-DOS rulez!

Re:time for computer upgrade

[hackstraw]

this may help

Back on topic. Good riddance! I'm glad tapes are gone. When CDs first came out, I liked the fidelity of them and that they could play more than 20 minutes before flipping them over, but I didn't like that they did not record.

Even "back in the day", I thought tapes were only useful for making portable (possibly pirated, yes this is not new) recordings of my LPs so they could play in my car or walkman. I always hated tapes because of the lack of indexing songs (no the "listen for a quiet enough passage" does not count). I hated that eyeSSSccc! sound of your tape getting eaten (optionally thrown on the side of the road for miles of brown tape litter fun). Good fidelity from a tape costed a ton of money (people who know what a Nakamichi Dragon is know what I'm talking about). I also was very active in trading music via snail mail with cassette copies.

Now with burnable CDs that I can burn in a couple of minutes with almost zero difference between that and the original CD or file on my harddisk for a whopping 25 cents a piece, remind me what is cool about cassettes again? I used to pay something like $1.25 for a cassette.

I'm not saying that digital recordings are better than analog ones (they aren't), but they have gotten to be "Good Enough"(TM).

Re:time for computer upgrade

[Anonymous Coward]

Well, I never had any real problems with cassettes. On the other hand, I looked after the damned things. I still have a 20-year old pre-recorded tape that is in pretty good condition for its age.

Looking back, I think they got a bum rap from people who left them lying on the floor of their cars, baking in the sun, out of their cases and covered in dust.

Sure, vinyl (before CDs), gave better quality if you looked after it, but cassette was *never* as bad as some people made out; particularly with advances in the technology.

If people had treated their vinyl LPs even a fraction as badly as they treated their cassettes, they would have been unplayable. Cassettes' convenience was turned against them.

Anyway, cassettes are still more portable than CDs; not by a large amount, but by enough that you can't stuff the discs nor the player in your pocket in the same way you could with cassettes or the Walkman.

Four or five years ago, I considered getting a CD burner and (possibly) an MP3-compatible portable CD player. Now it seems like a stupid idea, when a solid-state/HDD-based MP3 player would be far more convenient. Once I'd encoded my CDs to MP3, I got used to the convenience very quickly, and CDs now seem almost as annoyingly old-fashioned as the cassette and LP before them.

Don't get me wrong; I still like having the original CD of an album (CD singles OTOH were always a PITA and I'm glad they're dying). But it gets encoded to MP3 as soon as I have the thing.

And no, I don't use cassettes nowadays :)

Re:time for computer upgrade

[Anonymous Coward]

I think you'll find that the psychoacoustic model used in MP3 encoding is pretty detrimental to your ZX-81 program data.

Call it a hunch.

Re:time for computer upgrade

[mrjb]

Connect your TRS-80 to your soundblaster. Use your favorite audio program to record the noises, then burn those to CD. DO NOT use MP3 to compress them (lossy audio compression isn't a good idea if that audio represents data). Playing back the CD should do the trick for loading the data to your TRS-80 again. If you can find a good TRS-80 emulator, you may be able to put the actual TRS-80 saving while the emulated one is loading (and vice versa) for saving and loading binary data to and from hard disk.

In other news

[Admiral Ackbar 8]

Grass is mostly green.

Bill Gates hates you.

Linux is 1337!

Cassette product for the future

[Laz10]

I have seen that you can get adapters for connecting a MP3 player through the cassette via. a "adapter tape".

What I don't understand is why nobody makes a cassette that contains a tiny MP3 player and eats a memory stick.

Cool product for all us who a not blessed with the latest and greatest in car-radios and also don't want a portable MP3 player.

Re:Cassette product for the future

[milesObrien]

Err, umm, been theere, done that: http://www.tvi-web.com/products/digisette.html Google "cassette MP3" for other make/models.

Re:Cassette product for the future

[enosys]

MP3 players that can be used like a casette exist. They've been around for a while. Here's one example.

Re:Cassette product for the future

[lb746]

I had a crappy rio 128mb mp3 player for a while that I ran into my car stereo with one of those cassette tape converters. Soon as my rio died a few months later I started plugging my laptop into my car with that plug. This made for some awesome road trips! However, since I switched to a new car, which only has a CD player/radio, I can't do this trick anymore. I've used one of those radio signal devices but it's not the same quality and bringing along extra AAA batterys for them is a real pain.

Personally I wish my new car had a cassette deck just to be able to use my laptop in my car again.

Re:Cassette product for the future

[Laz10]

Fair enough. I should've googled it better.

Now, after googling it. I wonder why they are more expensive than a small MP3 player, plus a tape adapter and a 12v to USB Power adapter.
-- maybe I'll just get that then ...

Re:Cassette product for the future

[Anonymous Coward]

they do have them, i live in ontario canada and they sell them in electronics stores for about 60-70 CDN, only i think these ones take SD instead of MS; but it gets the job done

Re:Cassette product for the future

[jalefkowit]

Ask and ye shall receive!

Durable

[RickPartin]

The one thing I miss about cassette tapes is how durable they were. Now the newer music CDs that are coming out don't even let me back up my music. CDs only last for a few minutes in my grasp until they get scratched up and explode.

Re:Durable

[hackstraw]

Now the newer music CDs that are coming out don't even let me back up my music.

Take the plastic thing back to the store and ask for a CD. The DRMed stuff does not count as a real CD and _should_ not purport to be one by using the CD logo.

CDs only last for a few minutes in my grasp until they get scratched up and explode.

Please stay away from my CDs and anything else of value that I own and my workplace. Thanks.

Re:Durable

[dogmatixpsych]

Man, all I can say is you've got to be the clumsiest guy in the world then. :-)

While CDs are not perfect they certainly are more durable than cassette tapes. Sure the casing of the tapes is durable but the actual tape itself would deteriorate pretty quickly. Each time you played it, the tape got a little worse. I listen to 20 year old CDs and they sound just as good as when they were new (even after being played more than 50 times). I can't say the same for any old tapes. Some that old and even older are still okay, but then again they weren't played nearly as much.

As far as not being able to back up the music from some newer CDs, you just need the right software (or know the right keyboard buttons to push) to circumvent the copy-protection.

Tape?

[Quiet_Desperation]

You mean that silver stuff that holds all my stuff together? You can record on that? Weird!

Stupid CD player

[Cassanova]

5 year old Sony 3-cd changer stops abruptly - wont play cds anymore. Tried cleaning the "laser" with one of those "cleaning cds" but no luck. Meanwhile the built-in cassette player continues to play all my old cassettes like a gem....

Re:Stupid CD player

[mmkkbb]

CD changers are much more likely to fail since they so many moving bits.

Rewinding

[Donkey5555]

I'll be damned if you catch me rewinding ANY media ever again.

Re:Rewinding

[Anonymous Coward]

Be careful, the 8 track did not rewind and try to find one today!

Re:Rewinding

[Antonymous Flower]

In the future, there will be robots... ... in the form of middle school girls who refer to their favorite parts by HH:MM:SS.

Re:Rewinding

[Anonymous Coward]

WTF?

Audio Books

[NetSettler]

Audio books have all seemed to be switching over to CD-ROM, but it makes me sad. I don't really care about ultra-high fidelity when being read a book. What I do care about is not having it lose my place when I have to stop the car, etc. I rarely stop on a chapter boundary. And it's rare for audio players to remember the CD's their position well under all the circumstances they need to in order to make Audio Books on CD really work.

So I don't doubt there's been a decline in cassette audio books even--it's obvious at the stores. But I think it's premature, at least for that genre.

Re:Audio Books

[Lehk228]

every car sterio i have seen restores to the same spot on CD audio, my CD player does so in resume mode, it's a Panasonic SL-MP50

Re:Audio Books

[jpmkm]

And your cd player remembers the location you stopped for every cd you use in it? What happens when you want to listen to something else for a change, and then go back to the audiobook?

Re:Audio Books

[Anonymous Coward]

Audio books have all seemed to be switching over to CD-ROM, but it makes me sad. I don't really care about ultra-high fidelity when being read a book. What I do care about is not having it lose my place when I have to stop the car, etc.

Go get a real CD player, then. The one in my car starts playing exactly where it left off.

Re:Audio Books

[Lehk228]

that would actually be really cool, but no i have never seen a CD player capable of that, though it shouldn't be too hard

Re:Audio Books

[Longstaff]

My new Sony DVD player has a 40 disc memory for this; I'd like to think the same thing will make its way to car decks if it's not already there.

Re:Audio Books

[Scorchio]

Or even pop the audio book CD out of your car CD player and continue playing it on your home audio system. The CD would need a writable area to record the last play position.

Re:Audio Books

[BillyBlaze]

It's obviously way to late for this to be implemented, but it would be interesting if CDs (or perhaps DVDs and their replacements) had a thin ring of magnetic tape, like on credit cards. The idea would be just to store a few hundred bytes of transient data - the position on the cd, for example. Players could just have one fixed head that reads the ring when loading the disc and updates it continuously. Besides position, you could also store things like audio and video settings (bass, contrast), maybe play mode (random, in order), and anything else you can think of.

Re:Audio Books

[Webmoth]

The one in my car starts playing exactly where it left off.

Only if you leave the CD in there. If you take it out, oh, to listen to some other CD, then put it back in, it's going to start over at the beginning.

Re:Audio Books

[Xibby]

I use Audible myself, and play my audio books on my iPod mini. Syncs right up with the rest of my iTunes music.

Right now I've got about 3 days worth of audio books on my iPod.

I perfer it to CDs/Tapes, etc. The audio books take up so much less physical space. :)

Re:Audio Books

[Anonymous Coward]

Mod parent up. This is EXACTLY why CDs for audio books are bad. I'm listening to one now (or trying to; I may give up due to this frustration) and frequently want to shift from car to listening in bed at night. Believe it or not, I've started to copy some parts of it onto - you guessed it - cassette tape.

Re:Audio Books

[daviq]

This makes sense--> digital media can be stored for as long as you have your server!

Re:Audio Books

[prog-guru]

The idea would be just to store a few hundred bytes of transient data - the position on the cd, for example

Or 'they' could store how many times you've played it, no thanks.

Re:Audio Books

[Anonymous Coward]

The one in my car starts playing exactly where it left off.

Only if you leave the CD in there. If you take it out, oh, to listen to some other CD, then put it back in, it's going to start over at the beginning.

Well, I don't know about you but, if I take a CD out of the player, chances are it'll be long enough before I listen to it again that I'll need to hear at least some of the stuff I've already heard, just to make sure I'm at the right place. May as well start on a track boundary.

Re:Audio Books

[Carl Oppedahl]

The point he was trying to make is, what if I am listening to an audio book in the car, and then I want to continue in the house. A cassette tape does not lose its place. A CD does.

Re:Audio Books

[Carl Oppedahl]

Yes, I am sure it does, but that is no help if I carry a CD audio book from the house to the car to continue listening. It will lose its place. A cassette solves that problem.

Re:Audio Books

[Jeff DeMaagd]

I've used MP3 players for this. Wherever I go, it remembers where I last paused it, I hook it up to whatever sound system and go. Transferring CD to MP3 is easier than tape to MP3.

I suppose that remembering a simple time code is difficult. There are CD players that allow you to jump to any time code.

Re:Audio Books

[loki1978]

Exactly my word I put all my CD audio books on cassette for this reason. One my mobile player is a Sony Walkman, call my nostalgic and romantic. Two, i can listen to my book, stop and resume at the same position, even if the battery went flat even on another player, like my stereo at home The cassette easily stores the postion. Show me how CDs or MDs do the same. To my knowledge, they dont

Are the cassettes so old...

[gsasha]

... that the poster needed to include the link to a wikipedia article?

Collector's Items?

[alvinrod]

I know that cassettes are still popular in less developed portions of the world, but they've basically gone out of style in America. How long until cassettes in good condition become collectors items?

If you browse around on some music stores, old vinyl records are going for several hundred dollars, whereas a CD of the groups music is priced regularly. Just because they've gone out of style, doesn't mean you should throw away your cassettes. In 50 years who knows how much money they might be worth, especially if you've got a cassette by a popular group from the time that's still in good shape.

Re:Collector's Items?

[angle_slam]

Vinyl is still valuable for several reasons: 1) a small, but vocal group of people insist that they sound better than CD; 2) DJs, particularly hip-hop DJs, use vinyl; 3) there is still music that is only available in vinyl. None of those factors apply to cassette tapes. 1) nobody thinks cassettes have great sound; 2) nobody DJs using cassette; 3) might be true, but not to the extent of vinyl.

Re:Collector's Items?

[szyzyg]

I've heard stories of Eastern European DJ's from the late 80's DJ'ing using casettes, they would add a little platter on one of the tape spindels and use this to brake or push the tempo for beatmatching.
Not that I'd ever consider this, but respect is due for these DJ's who used what was available to them.

The early house DJ's also used to play stuff off reel to reel tapes - in particular the original mix of Phuture's Acid Trax was chewed up in a tape machine, the version you hear now lacks the original vocal - which is probably a good thing.

comparison

[bornyesterday]

They have no real aesthetic appeal as do vinyl records, and are less convenient than the more modern CDs, DVDs, and MP3 players. Over use of them also wore the tapes thin, or snagged them in the player and made them unlistenable to. It's completely understandable that they are dropping into obscurity.

whaaaa?

[revery]

Cassette Tapes On The Wane

Seriously, is anyone, besides the mentally handicapped, the recently comatose, and Poison fans, reading this headline and going, "Whaaaa, cassette sales are down in the US and UK?", and if so, what are the chances that they know what the word "wane" means?

Re:whaaaa?

[leland242]

Dude,

Poison kicks ass.

Thanks,

- 80's glam-metal fans everywhere

Re:whaaaa?

[revery]

Uhmm...

Unskinny Bop

'Nuff said.

I need cassettes

[Quiet_Desperation]

Bou how will I store my Apple II files!?! I refuse to upgrade to OS X!!!

the lost art of the mix tape

[CoffeeJedi]

A friend and i were just discussing the mix tapes of our youth the other day. When you'd strive to make sure the song was cut in EXACTLY. How you'd try to fill to the exact end of the tape. How you could fill in with sound effects from tv shows. Waiting for hours for your favorite song to come on the radio, then carefully editing around the dj chatter. Giving or recieving a mixtape as a gift really MEANT something.

CD's are just too easy, a few minutes on P2P or the iTunes store, and you're done. You kids don't know how good you got it! We had to walk uphill both ways in the snow to get to the tape recorder, and.....

Re:the lost art of the mix tape

[Zerbey]

...the asshole next door starts using a poorly shielded power tool that messes up the FM reception so your Fit the Third tape is full of intermittent "hissssssSSSSSSSS". (Well, more hiss than usual)

Ah... childhood memories... :)

Re:the lost art of the mix tape

[Rude Turnip]

The real art in putting together a mixtape has nothing to do with dealing with the technical limitations of casette tapes...it's all about getting together the right mix of songs and putting them in the right order to acheive just the right mood.

Using programs like iTunes gets rid of the technical limitations of tapes and lets you focus on putting together the best mix. In the end, you're really putting together a personal soundtrack. Turning back to iTunes for a moment, their music store features a bunch of "iMixes," which are playlists that customers have put together and submitted. Thus, the mixtape lives.

Re:the lost art of the mix tape

[Fear the Clam]

The real art in putting together a mixtape has nothing to do with dealing with the technical limitations of casette tapes...it's all about getting together the right mix of songs and putting them in the right order to acheive just the right mood.

Only problem was, by the time you got it all recorded you were fucking *sick* of the songs. That's why you gave 'em away.

The real art was the groovy home-made cover art with silver pens, tape, and Weekly World News stories. Nothing helps you recall those fleeting high school romances like a cassette tape with girlie bubble writing and magazine pix of Duran Duran.

Re:the lost art of the mix tape

[endoplasmicMessenger]

When I make a audio CD mix, I also make sure it fits on a C90 cassette. I have a tcl script which takes the songs which I have allocated for the CD, and determines that subset of songs which will most perfectly fit into a 45 miniute segment. That way my mix can fit perfectly on both CDs and cassettes.

Re:the lost art of the mix tape

[qzulla]

The idea of a mix tape is to create a flow and a mood. Does your script do this?

q

Re:the lost art of the mix tape

[Anonymous Coward]

p.s. females see mixtapes and run.

Re:the lost art of the mix tape

[endoplasmicMessenger]

No. But since you brought it up, I will outline the steps I go through to create a mix.

1. I select the songs that I would like to be on the CD. I have a script which checks to make sure the song will fit on the CD, and if it overflows the CD, it suggests some songs to remove from the CD which would give the songs the best fit.

2. After step 1, I have a list of songs that will fit nicely on the CD. Then I use another script to identify the subset of songs that will best fit on one side of a cassette. After step 2, I have two lists: one list of songs that fits nicely on one side of a cassette, and another list of songs that will fill out the rest of the CD. (The second list does not usually fill the second side of the cassette, but I'm willing to live with that.)

3. Next I go through each list of songs and reorder them as I see fit. I find that the randomizing effect of my scripts sometimes produces delightful juxtopositions that I may not have thought of myself. At any rate, within the limits of the allocations of songs, I make the final decision of ordering on each side. In fact, sometimes I make a "beta" copy of the cassette and listen to it for a few days to make sure I am satified with the selection and ordering of the songs.

4. Before making the final copies, I adjust the volumes on each song so that there are not harsh transitions from one song to the next.

4. Finally, I can burn a CD. I keep the master CD in storage and make another copy for daily use. I also make a cassette from the CD. The songs on the cassette will be in the same order as on the CD. Since side one has been filled to the max, there is no long gap between the end of side one and the beginning of side two: an important part of maintaining the mood and flow.

I have been making mix tapes (and now CD's) for years. I have received many compliments on my mixes mainly in terms of flow and mood. I was a dance DJ at college and people told me that hands down I was the best DJ there -- exactly because I knew how to (or took the time to) pace the music so that it would interact with the crowd itself in a way that would take them through different moods and energy levels.

And when I give out my mixes, some people (certainly not all, but some) notice how well my mixes fit onto cassette and realize how much care and attention I put into my mixes. This is not so noticible with CD's -- although many of my CD's only have seconds to spare. In fact, sometimes I have had to reduce the spacing between songs to get all of them to fit on a CD.

So, yes. I know all about "mood and flow". I just happen to find it more challenging to add "fit" to the mix. And I end up with even more plesant results.

8-track

[tempest69]

Yea, But recording on an 8-track takes way harder to find equipment... Even back in the 70's... It was the copy resistant version back then.

I havent listened to an 8-track in over 20 years now....

Can you imaging when your explaining to grandkids about what a DVD was.... and how you used to have a wild stereo, but it's lame in the 2050's..

neither can I.

Storm

Re:8-track

[hurfy]

Explain it to them?

You not gonna keep a working one around?

hehe, most of my friends are 20-somethings, half my age. Even they are impressed with my stereo, 8-tracks and all! I finally bought the dream system of my youth, only took about 25 years to get it. Top-end pioneer 4-channel 8-track and dual EQ plus everything but reel-to-reel deck.

Turkey - back to the 80's

[Anonymous Coward]

It's like a time tunnel trip walking into a music shop in Turkey. Half cassettes half CDs.

Then you play the game of "dodge the 80's like yuppie with the latest Nokia". That 80's throwback yuppie is likely to have a tapedeck at home he / she uses.

Incredible!

You cannot go tape-dropping without casettes...

[salimfadhley]

http://hellebore.aa.stodge.org/episode8.html This guy makes an art-form out of purposefully discarding casettes full of strange and alarming music; He calls what he does tape-dropping, and while technically the same thing can be done with CDs, he appreciates the rough-seedy aspect of casette-tapes.

Re:You cannot go tape-dropping without casettes...

[Rorschach1]

Speaking of dropping tapes, we once had a DLT 4 tape go bad, so out of boredom I pried the cover off and wedged the corner of the cartridge in one of the ceiling panels so that the tape could freely despool.

Now, I have no idea how long one of those tapes actually is, but it's LONG. The thing was fluttering away for quite a while, building up a huge pile of loose tape on the floor.

All of this got me thinking - what would happen if you tossed one of these out of a plane at 10,000 feet? Would the air resistance be enough that it'd break before unwinding? Would it unwind all the way before hitting the ground? Does mylar tape show up on radar?

I might be tempted to try it someday if it weren't for the potential to drape over power lines and start a fire or choke wildlife...

Re:You cannot go tape-dropping without casettes...

[pinchhazard]

Do it over the sea.

Re:You cannot go tape-dropping without casettes...

[Rorschach1]

Yeah, but if sea critters are dumb enough to choke on six-pack holders, introducing them to hundreds of feet of tough mylar tape is probably a bad idea.

Re:You cannot go tape-dropping without casettes...

[tomlouie]

If you anchored the loose end of the media and threw out the cartridge, I would imagine that the cartridge would tumble in midair, and cause the unwinding tape to jam and snag. And probably snap.

If you anchored the cartridge and tossed the loose end of the media, I'd imagine that it would be a more controlled despooling. Until the spool bearing overheated and seized up.

Tom

Re:You cannot go tape-dropping without casettes...

[Anonymous Coward]

557m is the length of a 40GB tape. My guess is that if you anchored or attached something with high drag the tape would likely despool completely snapping the tape when it was completely despooled if anchored. The additional drag from the tape should stabilize the cassette and stop any spinning.

Cassetes don't care about DRM

[WillAffleckUW]

and since you record them from audio input, they defeat most silly copy-protection schemes as well.

Video camera that used audio cassette tape.

[lupinstel]

Anyone remember the childs video camera that would record video in black and white onto audio cassette tape (circa 1985)? I don't remember who made it (may have been Fisher Price), or what it was called, but I had one as a kid, and I wish I could find it now. Anyone remember the name?

Re:Video camera that used audio cassette tape.

[CoffeeJedi]

http://www.vidipax.com/museum/msm49.html

apparently a lot of independant and underground filmmakers were huge fans of the things in the 90's

Re:Video camera that used audio cassette tape.

[spasm]

not just indy and underground - some big budget films used pixelvision for effect. The main one that comes to mind is 1994's 'Nadja' http://imdb.com/title/tt0110620/

Re:Video camera that used audio cassette tape.

[Anonymous Coward]

On the flipside, I know a few audiophiles that still use VHS tapes to record music. I have a JVC toploader that still works after 20 years, plus I can fix it myself if it does need repair.

Re:Video camera that used audio cassette tape.

[santos_douglas]

These cameras rocked! I had one and it worked very well, very easy to operate for kids as intended. Took decent video too as I recall. Sadly mine died a painful death after I somehow got the strange idea to try to film underwater, and wrapped the camera in plastic. It worked nicely at first, but eventually sprung a leak - you can guess what happened next. Thus ended my directing career.

Re:Video camera that used audio cassette tape.

[Anonymous Coward]

I remember seeing one of those in high school.

Note: this *actually* happened.

I saw someone with one of those cameras, and it looked really silly to me, so I said "What is that, a Fisher-Price camera?" (because it looked like a toy to me).

He turns to me, I look at the camera, and it *WAS* a Fisher-Price camera! I didn't know that existed at the time!

Always remember

[$RANDOMLUSER]

Your source isn't really backed up until it's in Kansas City Standard!

--
Actually, it's on-topic.

Salon: Lost in the mix

[slagheap]

Lost in the Mix [Registration required or day-pass].

In a new book, Sonic Youth frontman Thurston Moore and his hipster pals lament the demise of the mix tape in the age of the iPod.

..."Mix Tape: The Art of Cassette Culture." Edited by Sonic Youth frontman Thurston Moore, "Mix Tape" claims to be the first book wholly devoted to mix-tape culture. "Not only is [the era of the mix tape] over, but there are so many people who don't even know what it is," Moore said in a long phone interview. "Think of people born in the '80s."

What the hell....

[Hits_B]

is a cassette tape?

Wrong

[Anonymous Coward]

Didn't you read the news, Linux is for losers.

Who picks these topics?

[Radical Moderate]

Cassette use declining is NEWS? Give me a break! A couple weeks ago I submitted an interesting column by Cringely describing a way to fight back against phishers, instead they posted an article that had already been on /. twice. And now they post this drivel?

If I had a subscription, I'd cancel it.

Audio book thoughts

[FunWithHeadlines]

Yeah, I've noticed the audio book bit. In the last year I've gotten into audio books thank to Audible for my iPod. I also like to listen in the car, but for that (since I don't bother hooking my iPod up to my car) it requires a CD. Cassettes? I haven't owned a player for years. I certainly have no intention of buying a cassette tape.

But look in a bookstore at the audio book section and it's cassette tapes almost all the way. A few CDs are included, but ypu really have to hunt them down. But who uses cassette players any more, and I'm talking about not only hand-held units but in cars too? Are cassette players even sold in cars any more? They must be, given the state of the market. But I cannot imagine choosing cassette over CD for a car.

50 percent of sales?

[tkr2099]

Turkey still sells 88 million cassettes a year, India 80 million, and that cassettes account for 50% of sales in these countries. In Saudi Arabia, it is 70%.'

Wow, you'd think they'd spend more on housing, or maybe.. food.

Re:50 percent of sales?

[9gezegen]

Read and learn more. Nobody died in Turkey because of starvation or because of lack of shelter.

Re:50 percent of sales?

[Anonymous Coward]

Obviously, parent was making fun of "50% of sales" which means "half of all trade is trade of cassette tapes", not "half of music sold is on cassette format."

Suggestions Anyone: Analog to Digital?

[Rac3r5]

I have some cassettes that are lying around and I would like convert into MP3's

It would be nice if I could actually listen to this stuff again. I don't mind doing a bunch of editing to actually grab the proper data.

I don't wanna pirate any software, so are there any free tools out there that will enable me to do the editing?
If not, anyone know any good tutorial on how to grab the audio data using C++?

Re:Suggestions Anyone: Analog to Digital?

[ElBeano]

Exact Audio Copy has a record feature. You can even do some basic editing of the waves... removing noise, selecting a range and doing a "save selection as" to divide tracks. It also does a great job ripping CDs.

Re:Suggestions Anyone: Analog to Digital?

[Rac3r5]

k thanks I'll check it out..

Re:Suggestions Anyone: Analog to Digital?

[MasterOfMagic]

You can connect the line out of a tape deck to the line in of your computer and use any tool that allows you to record from line in (for example, sox on Unix or Sound Recorder on Windows). ThinkGeek also has a drive for this.

Once it is in your computer, editing, cleaning, and splitting tracks can be done with Audacity, which is covered under the GPL. I've used this to convert several tapes and LPs to CD and MP3, and it works quite well.

If you're looking to program software for it, the obvious places to start would be the audiofile library, and perhaps libao for playback, but I haven't found this necessary.

Re:Suggestions Anyone: Analog to Digital?

[Anonymous Coward]

I have my amplifier connected to my soundcard line-in with the amp set to treat the soundcard as a second tape deck. I use the sox utilities to grab the sound as a standard cdda sample with something like -
rec -c2 -w -r44100 filename.wav stat
rec is sox where the input file is /dev/dsp, -c2 for stereo (default is -c1, mono), -w is word size samples (i.e. 16 bit, the default is 8bit) and -r44100 is the sample rate (again, not the default). The stat parameter shows stats for the sample when you stop. Try the command a few times while the tape is playing to make sure that your not clipping before kicking off the full recording - if the applitude (last stat listed) is 1.0 then it clipped, generally I aim for a value of about 1.4 - this gives a bit of headroom). I then use GWC (http://gwc.sourceforge.net/) to dehiss the sample, mark the track boundaries, and encode the selections. GWC is really intended for vinyl (I transfer records this way too) because it has declick/pop algorithms which are very good. I also use audacity for stuff like speed corrections, fades etc. (sox can do this, but the syntax is rough and audacity has a nice GUI). The results have been really good - I can hardly tell that I am not listening to CDs.

Re:Suggestions Anyone: Analog to Digital?

[bburton]

Umm, just get a tape deck, plug the output into your soundcard via a Y cord, and dump the sound. Then you can encode/compress/whatever.

Vinyl? Aesthetic?

[uberdave]

Just because vinyl records occasionally get nailed to a wall or ceiling in 50s style diners, doesn't mean that they have aesthetic value... unless you're talking about the one thing we're going to lose out on, the one thing that will not convert to CD and MP3s: album art.

Re:Vinyl? Aesthetic?

[bornyesterday]

I'm talking about the whole package: cover art, vinyl color styles, the texture, and even the smell of vinyl. Nothing compares to it. Hell, even the sound of vinyl is great in it's occasional grittiness/unpolished feel.

analog is so passe

[smarthur]

this article should have been written some time ago. especially with the advent of mass storage mp3 players, even cds are on their way out - although it may be some time before they're as outdated as casettes. until we figure out how to make online digital media more accessible for those who don't pirate but still seek comercial media, cds and dvds will continue to be viable. the downside with these physical media, however, is the tremendous amount of space they can take up. i used to have a very difficult time letting go of physical media, but as physical space becomes more and more of a premium, i've become less reluctant to ditch all my cds, dvd, video and audio casettes in favor of hard drive space, which is significantly cheaper volume-wise than cubic feet in an apartment.

The reason why they sell a lot in India...

[Anonymous Coward]

... is price.

Cassettes (Hindi music): Rs. 30 (75 cents)
CDs (Hindi music): Rs. 100 (little over 2 dollars)

Cassettes (Non-hindi music, that's your rock, pop, electronica etc.): Rs. 75 ( $1.50)
CDs (Non-hindi music): Rs. 500 ( $10)

Yeah, it's obvious why cassettes still sell a lot more.

(Disclaimer: I haven't visited India for almost a year and a half, but those prices shouldn't have changed that much.)

Cassettes

[jd]

Type IV cassettes were comparable in quality to a CD and about the same sort of price, although most stereos didn't have the ability to take advantage of anything above a Type II.

They were a lot more durable, too. CDs scratch a lot more easily, and you can't repair them with scotch tape.

Because they were analogue devices, you could play them at variable speed or even in reverse, which meant you could get some really strange effects if you tried. You can't really do that with a physical digital system, you'd have to read the information into RAM and then vary the sample speed.

CDs and DVDs decay rapidly in UV light, which means they are worse than useless for long-term storage. Tape, on the other hand, can remain in extremely good shape for decades.

Finally, tape systems are simpler and mechanical, which means that they can be maintained in countries that have little or no technology. I would really not want to try to replace a 16-bit DAC chip in a CD player in the middle of the Sahara desert, but unclogging a jammed lever would be relatively easy.

(For that matter, given the choice of making a DAC chip from scratch, or winding copper to make a motor, it's fairly obvious as to what the minimum level of technology you'd need would be.)

That's not to say that digital formats suck. Well, most do - they're low-cost and low-grade - but that's because manufacturers are cheapskates and not because the concept is flawed. Digital formats should be "better than live", because stage microphones are generally poorer than studio microphones, studio power should be a great deal "cleaner", and RFI interference should be much more controllable.

In reality, CDs are 16-bit 44.1 KHz lossy recordings on aluminium disks (the cheapest type you can go for, which means there may well be errors in the recordings, as well as having no meaningful life-expectancy). Live digital instruments (such as professional keyboards) are often 20- to 24-bit, 192 KHz, and lossless digital amplifiers have been around since the 60s. (Though damn-near lossless high-end analogue amplifiers have been around about as long.)

What we're getting is third-rate crap that only rich corporations can even maintain, which means most consumers treat such devices as disposable. And then people wonder why those who can't afford, or don't even have access to, those rich corporations opt for something that - for all intents and purposes - is just as good but much more useful to them.

For further notes on this, you might want to check out the clockwork radio (1 hour+ of listening time) that is popular in Africa. When you can't go round the corner for batteries, low-tech solutions that produce high-tech results are going to be popular.

Re:Cassettes

[wfberg]

Live digital instruments (such as professional keyboards) are often 20- to 24-bit, 192 KHz, and lossless digital amplifiers have been around since the 60s.

Damn my incompatible 10bit 30Khz ears!

Re:Cassettes

[Anonymous Coward]

Live digital instruments (such as professional keyboards) are often 20- to 24-bit, 192 KHz, and lossless digital amplifiers have been around since the 60s.

Damn my incompatible 10bit 30Khz ears!

I'm glad someone said it, though to be honest, the 44Khz sampling rate on CDs only gets you to 22Khz.

However, if your ears are good up to 30Khz, you've got hearing better than any other human. In spite of what people might say, CDs are still better than we can hear.

Re:Cassettes

[Anonymous Coward]

CDs scratch a lot more easily, and you can't repair them with scotch tape.

This is compensated for by the fact that perfect copies of CDs can be made, as long as the CDs are too badly damaged.

CDs are 16-bit 44.1 KHz lossy recordings

Redbook CDs are stored in a lossless 16/44.1/stereo PCM format. The redbook also describes having multichannel (surround sound) recordings on CD, but no player ever supported that.

lossless digital amplifiers have been around since the 60s

Depends on what one calls digital. Digital audio in the spring of 1967 was 12-bit/32k, cost a fortune, and couldn't be edited. Japan had the lead here, as it turns out.

Re:Cassettes

[Anonymous Coward]

> Type IV cassettes were comparable in quality to a CD and about the same sort
> of price, although most stereos didn't have the ability to take advantage of
> anything above a Type II.

That's not true; all tapes have far inferior S/N ratios than CDs, they do
not have flat frequency responses, and they have higher distortion.

However, it is true that on typical music material (i.e., not 'classical'),
a high quality tape dub off a CD comes close.

> CDs and DVDs decay rapidly in UV light, which means they are worse than
> useless for long-term storage. Tape, on the other hand, can remain in
> extremely good shape for decades.

Recordables, yes. I wasn't aware that pre-recorded 'degrade in UV'.

I'm not sure quite how well tape stands up, but considering they are subject
to wear and tear on every playback, and the problems of drop-out and
print-through, I doubt that you can really claim tape has brilliant
longevity. Moreover, there is no way to backup a tape without losing a
generation.

> Finally, tape systems are simpler and mechanical, which means that they can be
> maintained in countries that have little or no technology. I would really not
> want to try to replace a 16-bit DAC chip in a CD player in the middle of the
> Sahara desert, but unclogging a jammed lever would be relatively easy.

Hardly an argument against a technology, and even if you are going to argue
about 'spreading the benefits', IC's are a highly efficient and low cost way
of doing so. Besides, you'd have to compare fixing the CD transport
mechanism, not the DAC. I'm sure replacing the surface-mount IC's in a
cassette deck in the 'middle of the Sahara desert' (!) would be an easy
task, too.

> That's not to say that digital formats suck. Well, most do - they're low-cost
> and low-grade

(!) CD was state-of-the-art at the time.

I don't suppose you've heard of DVD-A and SACD...

> In reality, CDs are 16-bit 44.1 KHz lossy recordings on aluminium disks (the
> cheapest type you can go for, which means there may well be errors in the
> recordings, as well as having no meaningful life-expectancy)

You're have to look into what BLER (block level error rate) results in
interpolation to the point of audibility.

> Live digital instruments (such as professional keyboards) are often 20- to
> 24-bit, 192 KHz, and lossless digital amplifiers have been around since the
> 60s. (Though damn-near lossless high-end analogue amplifiers have been around
> about as long.)

Compared to the linearity of the typical, or even high-end, loudspeaker...

> That we're getting is third-rate crap that only rich corporations can even
> maintain, which means most consumers treat such devices as disposable.

There are plenty of high-end audio devices out there; apparently, most
consumers are not willing to pay for them. Audio technology, in particular
in the realm of mechanical devices (i.e., loudspeakers), does not benefit
from the same cost reduction curve as IC's, but also, quality amplifiers
need expensive power supplies, etc.

(High-end studio microphones are also terribly expensive, but professional
recording studios are willing to pay for them.)

If you really want to criticise the record industry, then I'd look at the
medicore quality of today's music, and the excessive amounts of compression
used in the 'mastering' stage, apparently to make the music 'hotter' and
'louder'. (When it makes it 'flatter', and only makes the average level
'louder'.)

> For further notes on this, you might want to check out the clockwork radio (1
> hour+ of listening time) that is popular in Africa. When you can't go round
> the corner for batteries, low-tech solutions that produce high-tech results
> are going to be popular.

What on earth has some crap clockwork radio, aimed at those at sustenance
levels of living, have to do with the highest quality audio reproduction?

I think I'll stick with my iPod and Shure 'phones if I ever have the
misfortune to be in Africa, thank you very much.

Re:Cassettes

[thinkzinc]

I would really not want to try to replace a 16-bit DAC chip in a CD player in the middle of the Sahara desert, but unclogging a jammed lever would be relatively easy.

I can't imagine anyone needing or wanting to replace a DAC chip anywhere! Did you ever know someone who's DAC chip went out?
Live digital instruments (such as professional keyboards) are often 20- to 24-bit, 192 KHz, and lossless digital amplifiers have been around since the 60s. (Though damn-near lossless high-end analogue amplifiers have been around about as long.)

I thought the topic was cassette use? What would that have to do with someone listening to a tape?

What we're getting is third-rate crap that only rich corporations can even maintain, which means most consumers treat such devices as disposable.

I don't know about you but I wouldn't trade my iPod or my Denon CD Player for a cassette player (walkman or CD deck). IMO good digital players blow away the poor quality of a tape. When you bring up 'lossless' in an analog tape, consider the signal-to-noise ratio, wow and flutter and most important - freqency response. With noise and distortion, it's hard to enjoy the 'lossless' expereince!

Re:Cassettes

[Anonymous Coward]

They (Type IV tapes) were a lot more durable, too.

Type IV (metallic Fe, not oxides) tapes were not durable, at all - rust was killing those pretty hard, as well as they were killing tape heads, themselves.

In reality, CDs are 16-bit 44.1 KHz lossy recordings on aluminium disks

In reality, CDs are 16-bit 22.050 kHz lossless PCM-encoded (pulse-code modulation) audio records. What you see on a computer audio equipment claimed to be "Hz" in fact is cycles (or samples) per second, not Hz. 2 cycles/sec make 1 Hz, so in normal audio world your "44.1kHz" soundcard outputs 22.050kHz of audio. So does the audio CD.

Re:Cassettes

[HFXPro]

Technically digital is lossy. It only approximates the a up to half the frequency it is.

Re:Cassettes

[godzer0]

Soory, but this is not a 1 size fits all world.
I can EASILY hear up to 50 Khz, and damn does it hi=urt if it's loud.

Most women can also hear abouve the usually quoted 20Khz.

Is your temp exactly 98.6 degrees F? I thought not.

Re:Cassettes

[johansalk]

For all the scandalous durability of CDs, I'm really amazed that there hasn't been a class-action lawsuit against the responsible corporations thus far. I'm sure there was no technical, or even economic reason why they couldn't have come up with a more durable solution, at least some sort of packaging like MiniDisc. I suspect that it serves their interests that CDs and DVDs are of such low durability; if it's scratched, you'd have to buy another one!

*Sigh* - I miss the days when tapes where thrown about the place and at people without worrying about damage.

Re:Cassettes

[kmortelite]

Are you serious? I thought I was abnormal when I could hear up to 25-26 KHz. 50KHz? Serious? How did you measure? (genuinely curious)

Re:Cassettes

[Jeff DeMaagd]

They were a lot more durable, too. CDs scratch a lot more easily, and you can't repair them with scotch tape.

I suppose if all you have is a hammer, all problems start looking like nails. Scotch tape is the wrong fix for optical media. For the extremely rare instances that I've had to repair a scratched CD, a minute or two with plastic polish works wonders.

I've never had a problem with CDs running off the spool and winding themselves around every little rotating object, one of the reasons tape splices are needed. CDs also don't stretch over time.

CDs and DVDs decay rapidly in UV light, which means they are worse than useless for long-term storage.

I would think that if you exposed tape to a similar level of light, it too would be damaged. The lesson here: long term storage is generally a cool, dry and dark place, regardless of media. There is no need to derive superiority of one media over another based on media mishandling. The magnetic properties of rust on cellophane decays over time, so neither format is necessarily ideal for long term storage.

The restoration of M*A*S*H movie illustrates that restoration can be problematic. That movie had magnetic audio and it was flaking off the film. The optical part of the film fared better and somehow required a lot less work.

Fun with audio tape.......

[Anonymous Coward]

Back when I was real little, I would put little
stretches in the tape of an old cassette, and
pull the tape out on the floor, and watch my
tape recorder pull all of the tape back into the
casette as it was playing.

There's ALWAYS a connotation.

[game kid]

At least, if this guy can be believed. (See the Etymology of the word Penis section.)

"Penetrating" a market involves getting into it and selling something to the people, fulfilling their desire for music. The male genital has to (for lack of a better word) get into the female's and *ahem*sell sperm to the egg(s) there, filling in their DNA blanks. Sex and economics seem more similar than I thought--both involve enticing people, penetration, and fulfillment...

ObStewie

[sharkey]

Just wait 'til they have to suffer through Jesus Jones.

mod parent up

[Anonymous Coward]

awesome post

Cassette MP3 Players???

[poena.dare]

Besides the Digisette, does anyone have a suggestion for a good cassette MP3 player?

Nissan, Chrysler and others

[esobofh]

I just went and test drove a Nissan 350Z - beautiful car. But it has a damn tape deck in it! What the hell is that all about? You can't get it without the deck. I'm actually considering it a major strike against my decision to purchase the car because I think it may limit resale in 5 years when it's REALLY seen as a technology that's behind the times. I'm driving a 2001 neon now, and it's also got a tape deck in it i've never used - hell, I don't even know if it works. What gives with these manufacturers slupping this crap on us?

Re:Nissan, Chrysler and others

[grgyle]

Regardless of what audio the manufacturer puts in the car, it will be marked up to twice of what a comparable retail deck would be. Don't take any audio, save yourself $500-$1000 off of the sticker price, then put your own kickass system in for half the price.

Even better if they aren't charging you for a standard cassette deck, negotiate them down on the car anyway with the excuse that they are shoveling obsolete tech on you. It really does work! Heck, I'd take a crank-wound gramophone in the car just for the negotiating power it would give me :-)

Tapes and stuff

[Orion Blastar's Psyc]

Casette Tapes have no security lockout feature that prevents them from being copied. Of course the media companies are trying to phase them out. I got a lot of friends who still have just the cassette player in their car radios. Some of them still have 8-Track players in their car radios.

It should be noted that any boom box that can have a casette recorder and CD player in it, can easily copy from CD to cassette tape.

On average cassette tapes are cheaper to buy, because while the CD media costs less, the media companies mark the CDs up higher than cassette tapes to boost their profits. It costs media companies about 50 cents for a blank cassette tape and 25 cents for a blank CD. Since they are paying a lot of money to protect that CD, the markup ends up higher. Cassette tapes do not have a protection, and thus there is no need to add in the cost of a protection system. This begs the question, why protect CDs at all, when it just adds to the cost of them, and forces more people into piracy to listen to their favorite music? If CDs cost less, perhaps there would be fewer people who find the need to pirate music?

The same goes with software and eBooks, the better protection they put on them, the higher the retail price ends up being. Thus, it makes it unaffordable to more people, who end up pirating it instead of buying it. There is always going to be someone to find a way to break copy protection, so why bother with it in the first place? Customers don't need or want it, so why do it?

CDs will disappear before tape does

[sjonke]

You can take a tape out of one tape deck (say at home), put it in another (like your car) and pick up exactly where you left off and without having to think about it. You can't do that with read-only media such as CD. As such, CD is only useful as a means of delivering content, which is then copied to computer and iPod. In contrast, tape still has playback utility at least for audio books, where picking up where you left off is essential, and means of doing this with read-only CDs is problematic/hackish, and tape has huge ease-of-use advantages in this regard, even over MP3 players (where it's easy to accidentally skip to the next chapter, and then getting back to where you were is a royal pain.)

Of course with the advent of the iTMS, etc, the days of CDs even as content delivery mechanism are numbered (though for me they won't be until iTMS goes AAC+ and includes full liner notes/lyrics with every album along with some really slick interface to it all, which is currently just wishful thinking....) Because tape still has use for audio book playback while CD has basically no use for playback, I think CDs will go the way of dinosaurs before tape does.

Re:CDs will disappear before tape does

[mikael]

Maybe we could have smart CD's where a small magnetic strip is stored on the transparent plastic bit at the centre of the disc. Then you could save some basic information such as the last track position on the disc.

Re:CDs will disappear before tape does

[timmyf2371]

And the number of times a specific CD was copied, how many times the copies were copied, and if used in a device connected to the internet voila.

Re:CDs will disappear before tape does

[KillerBob]

I think CDs will go the way of dinosaurs before tape does

I doubt it. One of the main reasons I used when I pitched Laserdisc (failed) and later DVD (successful) to my parents was that I was sick and tired of those stupid "To rewind is divine" stickers on videos....

Tape's the same thing. Very rarely do I want to pick up a recording 1:32 into a 3:36 song. I really don't like missing that first minute in a song, and it's incredibly convenient being able to queue up the start of a song with the push of a button. Plus being able to fast-forward past a song you don't feel like hearing is a major advantage.

I'm only 24, but I have *never* bought a cassette that wasn't blank, and I switched to CDRs 10 years ago for my recording. I still have a couple of blank 90-minute cassettes in their original wrapper; I'm thinking of hanging on to them for another 20 years and selling them on whatever's become of e-bay by that time. They're certainly of no use to me.

Oh, and I've seen audiobooks on CD and on DVD-A. They're divided up into at the very least one track per chapter, and often somewhat more frequent (like one track every couple of pages). If I was in the market for books on tape, I would think that hearing the last little bit before I left off would be a good thing, as a little reminder of where the story was when I left off.

Close

[geekoid]

the news is that some countries cassettes stilla count for more then half of sales.

recent consumer grade cd-players=junk?

[Anonymous Coward]

At my local Goodwill, they get a high volume of donated stereos where everything *except* the CD player works (they mark the units as such when they go to the floor). Most of these units were manufactured in the past 5 years or so. I got a 15 year old Sharp boom box (not marked with the "cd player dosen't work" tag from the same store that works like a gem, including the CD player.

Are manufacturers using very crappy components
for their CD players these days, or are people just throwing these things out when the lens gets
too dirty, not knowing any better?

Robust...

[bender647]

Realizing my college band jam tapes were now 20 years old, I started sampling them and encoding with FLAC. My biggest problem was the degradation of the tape players, not the tapes themselves. One tape did jam, and I opened it up and fixed it (try that with a CD). Problem is, I'm not sure what to do with the digital data to preserve it now. Back to tape?

Re:Robust...

[RichardX]

One tape did jam, and I opened it up and fixed it (try that with a CD).

I'm game.
Any suggestions on how to get a CD to jam?
Hmm... maybe if I shove it in a tape player...

Re:Robust...

[Anonymous Coward]

Problem is, I'm not sure what to do with the digital data to preserve it now. Back to tape?

Now that you have it FLAC'd...

Whistle over and pickup QuickPar. Put together enough data to fill the optical media to about 80-90%, and populate the rest of the disc with PAR2 files.

Then burn 2 or 3 copies, and store them in seperate locations. Verify them every 2-3 years to see if they've started to lose data integrity.

Re:Robust...

[bender647]

Good tip on the Quickpar -- a search of Sourceforge shows several partity protection tools.

8-Tracks tapes? Feh -Real Geeks Listen to...

[Anonymous Coward]

9-track tapes!

Like, the 3-blade razor, one more track is much, much better. The in-dash player is a little large, though. And the ears hurt a lot. Also a plus: they're harder to misplace.

Wooden Sneakers

[Doc Ruby]

Those Phillips engineers are crafty. Cassettes, CDs... did they invent the "phillips screwdriver", too? Anything else that Sony gets credit for instead?

Re:Wooden Sneakers

[Ilgaz]

Philips and Sony are long time buddies.

DVD, their work. CD is their work too.

Cars and Music Formats

[soft_guy]

When I wanted a Car with a CD player, the brand new car I bought didn't even have it available as a factory option.

This time around I wanted iPod connectivity, but my new car came standard with a 6 disk changer in the glove box.

Re:Cars and Music Formats

[timeOday]

I wish the automakers would sell cars with quality amps and speakers (since those don't change much and installation is a real issue), but with no head unit. They are always overpriced and a generation behind.

Re:Cars and Music Formats

[TWX]

Well, many makers (Chrysler and Ford both come to mind) put awesome secondary amp systems into their cars, but since everything is all subject to how the entire system is designed it's hard getting these amps to work properly with aftermarket decks. Honestly, if you want to go this route, get a dealer-installed aftermarket system when you buy the car. It'll be included in the purchase price and payments rather than as an extra expense, and everything will work together.

Re:Cars and Music Formats

[toddestan]

I just want a nice factory sound system that I don't have to replace. The big advantage to leaving the factory system intact is that no matter how nice, the theives will just ignore it.

Those handy-dandy cassettes

[jangobongo]

I had one of those AM/FM/cassette/phonograph stereos that I made numerous mix tapes with. Ah, I miss being able to do that.

I also remember pranks that we used to do to people, like record their snoring at night - just to prove to them that they did - then play it back in front of everyone. Try doing that with a CD.

Or how about recording something, say - a sound. I have a whole side of a ninety minute tape with the sound of the dishwasher running on it. Why, you ask? Because my son, as a baby, would fall asleep quicker to sound of it.

And lets not forget that Watergate was all about tape recordings. Couldn't have busted Nixon without the lowly cassette tape.

Re:Those handy-dandy cassettes

[Anonymous Coward]

Ah, but were Nixon's tapes really cassette tapes or were they reel-to-reel? Watergate occurred in 1972, only nine years after Philips' introduction of the cassette tape (according to the article blurb). Nixon had his system installed in '70 or '71, I believe.

You always hear about the Watergate tapes, but I guess I've never actually seen them. Are any on display at the Smithsonian?

Re:Those handy-dandy cassettes

[Moofie]

Yeah, because it's totally impossible to record sound without using an audio cassette.

Re:Those handy-dandy cassettes

[B1ackDragon]

If you really like being able to record stuff much the same way tape recorders work, you may want to consider getting a minidisc recorder.

Disclaimer: I know many people complain about ATRAC3, but it's not like it's any better than a portable casette recorder. I find it interesting how many will decry ATRAC3, and how many will make offhand offensive comments about "audiofiles" on the same forum... I can only hope these aren't the same people.

What I found a bit interesting

[dsci]

Is that we have a

Director of Research

at the

International Federation of Phonographic Industries

Nice Research (not) Beeb

[Anonymous Coward]

Dutch electronics giant Philips perfected the design of the cassette in the 1960s.

It was designed to be a new form of portable entertainment, launched into a market dominated by vinyl LPs and reel-to-reel tape recorders.

Wrong. The cassette was designed by Philips for low-qulity "talking letter" recording. It was the Japanese who pushed the envelope and convinced Philips to allow improvements to allow for decent (for the time) audio reproduction.

ZX81 CD-ROM? Noooooooo!!!!

[Anonymous Coward]

I have all my ZX-81 programs stored on CD and it works just dandy.

Oh man, that is ****** up. That is the ultimate subversion of the masses of data storage available on a CD.

CD-R written as CD-ROM; approx. 700,000MB of storage.

Same CD-R written as audio CD from ZX81 cassette-out (300 baud); 175KB. On a good day.

By the way, have you seen any of those short 15-minute CDs for storing computer programs on?- I heard they're faster to rewind, or something. :)

In all seriousness, if you're using an original ZX81, I can see why you might want to do this (though the CD setup sounds a bit fiddly); if you want to be really clever, you should write a program for the PC that reads the ZX81 data, 'converts' it to digital form on the PC, and which can play back the 'digitised' files through the audio output and into the ZX81's cassette-in.

In fact, I haven't checked, but I'd give better than even odds that it's already been done...

Ok, who else read...

[OwnedByTheMan]

the line International Federation of Phonographic Industries

and thought they saw pornographic industry intead of phongraphic.

Of course, I didn't, but I thought some other sick bastards might have that problem.

Re:Ok, who else read...

[coopseruantalon]

"some other sick bastards might have that problem."

Duh...

Colored Vinyl - Picture Disks...

[soft_guy]

What about colored vinyl? How about picture disks?

I have some of both which are pretty awesome to look at.

Re:Colored Vinyl - Picture Disks...

[HFXPro]

Vinyl which had art in it was awesome. I have a copy of the the Jungle Book in very good condition which features artwork inside the Vinyl. I wonder how much its worth.

Re:Colored Vinyl - Picture Disks...

[badfrog]

Hm, I have a Michael Jackson "Bad" picture disc.

Guess I should give it to Goodwill.

Re:Colored Vinyl - Picture Disks...

[soft_guy]

I have a picture disk of "The Cramps" All Women are Bad.

WWRMSS?

[Anonymous Coward]

'The cassette format itself was free, but that was the only good thing about it...'

MOD PARENT UP

[SewersOfRivendell]

Grandparent is spreading misinformation.

So, are 8 track sales waning too?

[Anonymous Coward]

Maybe its time to get rid of the cassette player and get myself an 8 track.

"digital" compact Cassette- another winner

[dreadlocks]

Does anyone remember DCC? Philips' digital cassette never went anywhere at all. At least it died quickly. The analog cassette looks to be going slowly.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digital_Compact_Casse tte

Why old CDs are great

[Anonymous Coward]

There's been quite some comments on how people use cassettes and VHS tapes still because of the fact that CDs and DVDs are easily scratched. There is a solution. Buy an old CD Drive. It uses Cd Cartredges.

I like the sound of tapes

[sandmaninator]

I think the imperfections or the speed wobbles or whatever adds to the ... I dunno, I just like the sound! They are not very portable though. And they are more easily destroyed than a CD by far.

Minidisc Quality

[gavint]

Minidisc doesn't have the same quality as a CD at all, the minidisc format uses serious lossy ATRAC-3 compression to achieve the same running time as a CD. I believe the actual data capacity of a minidisc is well under 100MB.

Re:Minidisc Quality

[Anonymous Coward]

Hum a minidisc recording audio using atrac will record at 296 kbps.

A minidisc recording using atrac3 lp2 132 kbps
A minidisc recording using atrac3 lp4 74 kbps

The carrying capacity of a md is 160 meg

Now atrac is a wierd codec. Sony is always working on it. That mean that no 2 md player is going to sound exacly the same. That also mean that the higher the codec version the better the sound qual is. Hi-md for example can contain 1 gig of data and
using Atrac3plus lp4 can record at 69 kbps... and the file should be the audio equivalent of a 128kbps mp3.

FF, rewind, record and pause...

[swschrad]

the BBC hasn't done their research, they go way back to our hero, open-reel tape, 25 years before the cassette. or possibly to magnetic film in the 30s in Hollywood, where position jogging was also possible.

Ripping old tapes...

[otis wildflower]

... there's always the PlusDeck..

http://www.thinkgeek.com/computing/drives/6908/
(hey, it was the first relevant google hit)

Not sure if there's a linux driver tho :p

Proper Title

[d34thm0nk3y]

Cassette Tapes on the Wane, except in some of the largest, most densly populated nations on the planet.

Ob: Life Is Hell quote

[dexter riley]

Q: Is Home Taping Killing Music?
A: Yes. Instead of making billions and billions and billions of dollars, the music industry is now making only billions and billions of dollars.
-Matt Groening

Digital amplifiers vs. digital audio

[jd]

The Sinclair digital amplifier would work fine on analogue recordings and produced analogue output. The digital phase was purely in the amplification. It was actually quite ingenious and very cheap.

Audible

[kcirrem]

It's interesting that this story came out a day after Audible announced their launch in the UK: http://biz.yahoo.com/bw/050615/155149.html?.v=1
It will cut into the last popular market of cassettes there, which is the audiobook format.

Dunno about your phgysics teacher

[jd]

But "cycles per second" is the definition of Hertz.

CDs have effectively half their sample rate, because you can't plot a wave with one point. Most playback systems do simple linear interpolation, so two points are required.

Re:Dunno about your phgysics teacher

[Anonymous Coward]

Most playback systems do simple linear interpolation

Actually, most reconstruction filters do some pretty complicated mathematics which is anything but simple linear interpolation. [1] The drawback is that these filters have a delay of approximately 1ms. Yes, this delay matters when mixing analog and digital components in a signal chain.

[1] The reason being that frequencies near the Nyquist limit (sampling rate / 2) have their phase in relation to the sampling frequency change, causing there to be a tremelo effect with the higher frequencies. A complicated reconstruction filter is utilized to remove this effect.

Re:Dunno about your phgysics teacher

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes, I probably misuse the word "cycle". What I mean is this (rough ASCII, sorry):

/\ - One PC sample

\/ - One PC sample

/\
\/ - One Hertz (two PC samples)

Just do a spectrum analysis on any "44.1kHz" WAV file, and you will see how many kHz it really has.

Re:Dunno about your phgysics teacher

[pete-classic]

So, by Nyquist, CD audio starts aliasing at 11.025kHz?

That can't be right.

-Peter

Re:Dunno about your phgysics teacher

[putaro]

No, he's just pulling the Nyquist limit out and saying that's really the sample rate, or some such. I think what he means is that the maximum frequency recorded by a CD is 22 KHz which is true since the sampling rate is 44.1 KHz.

bah?!

[BungoMan85]

I just bought 3 cassettes today. Granted they were made in 1996... Hooray for Earth Crisis demo tapes.

I thought the same thing..

[backslashdot]

That CD's weren't any fun as compared to tape...

But then i threw one in the microwave .. Whoa .. plasma.. cool!

Fast forward 17 years to when I'm working for a big corporation.

Boss: "We need to destroy these all these CD's that contain confidential data. Can't shred them .. guess we can scratch them up or something?"

Me: "Umm no .. let me have them ... this will only take two seconds.."

ZZzzzbt.

Whoa, plasma! And a raise.

Re:I thought the same thing..

[Blkdeath]

Boss: "We need to destroy these all these CD's that contain confidential data. Can't shred them .. guess we can scratch them up or something?"

While you found a nukable (workable) solution to the problem; there are special CD and media shredding devices out there.

Get them while they're, uh, hot (?)

[dmccarty]

Just what you needed to turn your tape collection into MP3s: http://plusdeck.com/englishsite/product_01.html

Screw the 1541, Cassettes Forever

[Anonymous Coward]

Just installed Mosaic on my C64 off of 5 cassettes.

Use the head cleaner cassette about every 6 months, its been running perfectly for 10+ years!

Maybe I'll upgrade to a 1541 off of Ebay when it fails.

Re:Audio Books - CDs are excellent

[Nitar]

With my MP3 player, I'm extremely pleased when audiobooks come out on CD. If the book isn't on iTunes, then I can get the CD version and rip it in short order.

I know you can rip tapes too, but it is a much slower and inconvenient endeavour.

Generally iTunes has a great selection, but there are still a bunch of books that have yet to make it there. The entire Harry Potter series is not there, which is quite surprising.

The cassette tape... The future of music sharing!

[xander2032]

I think we should try to save the cassette!! We'll need them when all of our computers have Intel and M$ DRM technology inside.

We can teach these kids how to copy their friend's tapes using a strange and ancient piracy device usually referred to as a "dual cassette deck".

And they'll also need to learn the fine art of recording music off the radio. (Yes kids, that really is possible!)

Best of all... The RIAA is going to find it rather difficult to track our piracy activities and sue us!

Cassette tapes. The future of music sharing!

Saudi

[abborren]

I visited Riyadh (in Saudi Arabia) a couple of yeras ago and the amount of cassettes sold really surprised me. Most music stores seemed to sell most of the music in cassette format. I found what i wanted (Foxtrot by Genesis) though not in CD format :(

I shall not complain though, I still listen to the cassette in my car, which has not yet got a CD player.

Tapes are nice

[GoldMace]

You can have beer and cigarette ashess all over them and they still play. CD's one little scatch and it is a coaster...what a hump of junk...where is the next generation cassete anyway, maybet then I'll buy something...until then...mp3 it is...

good job, but you forgot one

[potat0man]

I have mod points but I wanted to comment.

Good riddance

[Anonymous Coward]

I hate cassette tape. It's noisy, subject to much wow and flutter, and the tape easily crinkles and becomes ruined.

That said, I have a drawer full of them. I put all my cassette tapes into the one drawer. It's a pretty full drawer.

Recently I have been working my way through that drawer. If I find a tape in there which contains only commercial music then I will go to www.allofmp3.com and download the album, then throw the cassette in the bin. It's quite satisfying to "convert" those oldies to mp3 in that manner.

To those who complain that CDs are less robust, will last fewer years, and so on... whether that's true or not, CDs don't suffer generational loss. I can keep copying and recopying to preserve this "data". But in reality, I just keep the "data" online all the time and I make sure that my disks are RAIDed and my partitions are backed up.

I have about 8000 mp3s. I challenge anybody to manage that number of tracks on cassette tape.

As long as there are used cars, there are cassetes

[FusionDragon2099]

Most used cars don't come with CD players, and people aren't willing to spend money to install some. The solution? Put music on a cassette tape.
As long as there are old vehicles with only cassette decks, there will be cassette tapes to put in those decks.