I started getting cassette players working again when I had kids - I had lots of old cassettes with stories still, and after looking into a lot of stuff determined that it is one of the best physical storage formats for that kind of content for kids we currently have. Its major advantage is that it automatically saves state, and the state saving is player-independent. Add to that that players typically have large clunky buttons ideal for kids hands, and you have something even all the dedicated digital kids media players can't compete with.

My cousin had many old tapes from 1994-1995 of radio recordings. They've been put up for years and he's been recently listening to all of them. Most still work. He says that 30-ish years is the longest time he's seen a storage medium last. So he's been recording YouTube audio he wants to keep over them.

The article is also wrong on several points regarding the attributes of the medium:

> Meanwhile, cassettes break and jam quite easily.

No they don't. It happens sometimes but really tapes and decks were pretty reliable as long as you didn't have foreign material in the deck. CDs and vinyls are more fraglie. A Sony tape deck my cousin has had a belt wear out, but it was fixable. Unlike your Airpod batteries.

> Choosing a particular song might involve several minutes of fast forwarding, or rewinding, which clogs the playback head

Lol, clogging the head? No, tapes don't do that.

> and weakens the tape over time.

I recall that anything more than a 45-minute tape ("C90") is too thin and could experience this issue. So I never bought C100s or C120s (if those existed). Wearing tapes out wasn't a thing I ever experienced back in the day.

> The audio quality is low

I don't know the specs of all the Dolby NR stuff (which was a technology on later decks) but decent quality tapes had full frequency range. Given things like the loudness war and the artifacts of compressed audio, tape is perfectly fine for most typical music listening.

> and comes with a background hiss.

I've always liked the faint airy sound of tape silence in a weird way. But in most cases were you listen to music in real life, you don't notice it when the songs start playing.

The really cool thing about tapes are the same cool thing that playing an MP3 locally has: you can listen, give, trade, or share the audio without things on the Internet tracking or preventing you from doing it. In a time where digital freedom and creative artistic recognition is becoming less and less, this is one gateway into the offline world, which is going to be where the real interesting stuff starts to happen if current trends continue.

Should be possible to store digital music on cassettes as well just like you would with a tape backup. Would probably increase both the quality and storage capacity of cassettes.

I lived through vinyl, 8-track, cassettes, and CDs. I digitized all of my music over 20 years ago and no longer even own a physical media playback device. I can't fathom going back. Digital or bust.

It's been thirty years since I last used a cassette tape (the adaptor things you'd stick in the car radio don't count) and I've never once missed them.

Did a remix awhile back and printed to a cassette using a Tascam 414 Portastudio. Brought it back into the computer at about three quarters of normal speed twisting the dial occasionally. The other side of tape was Fleetwood Mac “The Dance” my dad dubbed for me in the 90s. The imperfections of that old hissy tape with backwards Stevie Nicks bleeding through collapsed the stereo field in a nice way. I welcome this trend!

Of course cassettes were all around me when I was younger; even my first car had a cassette deck. They seemed like an old relic in that time already - with the drawbacks mentioned in the article, so it was easy to put them away seemingly forever.

However, I got "back" into cassettes recently with some new releases. Grabbed a FiiO CP-13, and while the quality still isn't great, with low wow and flutter it's perfectly serviceable. There's one thing that made it stand out and felt like we missed something that's now become a lost art - absolutely no delay between pressing play and music playing. No buffering from a streaming service, no megabytes pushed into RAM, no decoding, no FIFOs being filled before the signal exiting through a DAC.

Can confirm. I've bought around 20 cassette tapes over the last 2 years - mostly new releases or re-releases of old stuff from the CD-era. I get way more enjoyment out of tapes than CDs. I think its because they're more hand's on, and I find the sound of my cassette deck soothing.

Cassettes lack the one thing LP records do better than digital formats: a large surface to display album art and roll a doobie.

I remember being SO HAPPY when I got rid of all my cassette tapes and vinyl discs for CDs. I was an early adopter of digital and, to this day I don't regret it. There's no way I'm going back.

What's next? VHS?

Vinyl resurging, I can understand. But cassette tapes were always so fragile. I can't count how many got twisted up in the player and lost forever.

Their only redeeming quality was the mix tape.

I have never experience reel-to-reel. That is the format I would like to get into.

My sense though is that anything made of rubber on these old machines need replacing. I'm a little intimidated about spending so much on a device only to be unable to restore it.

I might use audio cassettes if I want to record my own audio temporarily (and later copy it to a CD if I decide to keep it; I have done this before), especially if the higher quality of CDs is not needed. For most uses I would probably not use audio cassette tapes; I prefer to use CDs.

(One feature of audio cassettes is that it will stay where it was left off (even if it is removed and used in a different player), although this can be both an advantage and a disadvantage (for one thing, each cassette has only one position). At least, you can easily rewind it back to the beginning. There are other advantages and disadvantages as well)

Did people just forget the era of CD burning? Cassettes sucked.

Normal non-tech people were ripping CDs with iTunes. "Rip. Mix. Burn." was a nationwide if not worldwide advertisement.

All of this still works, if you have a CD drive.

If you're going to bother buying a cassette player... what's the allure for that over a CD-R and a basic CD player. CD players in cars are going away, but they're still around in houses and inexpensive small boomboxes.

But then... what's the allure of that over say any old audio player that takes SD cards or just a USB stick. A lot of modern cars and also stereo receivers and TVs will take a USB stick and play files from it. These players are incredibly prevalent and very easy to use. And loading the music from a computer or even a tablet is easy.

Of these three, cassette is the absolute least likely to be available anywhere.

You can still have the experience of making a playlist and even putting the files on a USB stick for someone. Importantly, they can actually play it on their own listening device.

So are 80s phones! Lol (I hated both)

https://tincan.kids/?srsltid=AfmBOopPdHpavGKB5WUVhZZDk34dKul...

weren't we done with this millennial nostalgia hipster bcrap in the 2010s?

Taylor Swift (and Ed Sheeran) releasing her albums on vinyl is what caused vinyl prices to sky rocket, so not happy to hear she's moving onto cassettes too. I moved to collecting tapes due to vinyls being too expensive to get for anything but my most loved albums.

Some genres just feel better to listen to on tape too: lofi black metal, dungeon synth, hardcore, anything that likes to play with lo-fi sounds for aesthetic sounds nice on tapes and it really adds to the experience.

If you were free to invent a completely new form of physical media for music roughly in the same space as casettes/vinyls/cds, what would you invent?

Casettes save state but you to rewind. Vinyl have a great album art, but are fragile. CDs and Casettes are small and allow saving and making mix tapes at home. Can we mix and match? How?

Well-timed article. Today I discovered the FM-84 Atlas album.

Been following people who have been making electronic music mixes between two cassette decks and a mixer which are worth a listen. The thing that's interesting is that you can pitch up and down in ways that sound nice:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Kzsa1M7s1sk

Anyways, here's the mixes:

Trippy Ambient Cassette-Only Mix by Bop | Rewind Ritual 01

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=feHvyc69xe4

Cassette-Only Drum & Bass Set by BOP | Live at SK1 Records

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CHmBcBPV-3U

DnB mix with cassette tapes (DJ Ponkachonka)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r8jp5TcherI

Cassette mix drum & bass (2005 - 2010) (DJ Ponkachonka)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Cpqui0lo-v4

What's crazy is that at least the portable cassette decks aren't cheap anymore. Look on eBay at prices and be amazed

Wish i had kept my old Sony walkman! Quite a sturdy guy as i recall ..

Pretty clear-cut example of the Submarine[0] genre.

[0] https://paulgraham.com/submarine.html For those who aren't up-to-date with their HackerNews lore.

Even when I was a kid an cassettes were the height of tech I hated them. They sound like crap and you can't even try to skip meaningfully and rewind is a nightmare.

I find it depressing that there seem to be only two ways to distribute media and manage one's audio collection: Either ultra-convenient but fully locked down streaming services - or analog "vintage" media like vinyl or cassettes, which do give you a physical medium under your full control, but also require you to forego all the progress we made with digital media.

The one thing that's absent: Plain old audio files that you can store on your hard drive and copy to your phone or other devices.

Edit: Ok, there are still more options left than I thought. I take that back then :)

Personally, I’m holding out for the CD comeback.

Quick! Fins a Nakamichi 550 Portable. Amazing sonic and build quality.

Anyone have recommendations for a cassette player?

Never really understood buying pre-recorded cassettes. It was better to buy the vinyl and make your own tapes.

whatever is old is new again. it's a story as old as time.

"In many ways, Bob's Big Boy never left, sir. He's always offered the same high-quality meals at competitive prices..."

Ah yes, the record player of the 80s. Hipsters gonna hipster...