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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%.'"
In Saudi Arabia, it is 70%
:)
And every last one of them begins with "La illaha il Allah".
Did he just go crazy and fall asleep?
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.
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
bad_outlook
--
Is this vague enough for you?
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...
"A door is what a dog is perpetually on the wrong side of" - Ogden Nash
[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
....the countries that still use 8 Track Tapes?
Good riddance! Cassette tapes allowed easy duplication of music between friends that destroyed the music industry! Oh wait no it didn't.
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.
Waiting for ad.doubleclick.net...
I wonder if this could happen to floppy diskettes too?
In Soviet Russia, cassette tapes you!
Dark Reflection
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.
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!
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.
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.
You mean that silver stuff that holds all my stuff together? You can record on that? Weird!
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.
Kent M Pitman
Philosopher, Technologist, Writer
Macrovision is an analog copy protection system.
Trolling is a art,
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.....
May you be touched by His Noodly Appendage. RAmen.
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.
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?
Don't blame me, I voted for Cthulhu.
Uhmm...
Unskinny Bop
'Nuff said.
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.
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
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.
Vintage computer adverts: http://www.vintageadbrowser.com/computers-and-software-ads
That CD's weren't any fun as compared to tape...
.. Whoa .. plasma.. cool!
.. guess we can scratch them up or something?"
.. let me have them ... this will only take two seconds.."
But then i threw one in the microwave
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
Me: "Umm no
ZZzzzbt.
Whoa, plasma! And a raise.
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.