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.

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ceuk 7 days ago | parent | next [-]

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

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

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

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

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georgefrowny 2 days ago | parent | next [-]

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

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

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

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

	▲	ceuk a day ago \| parent [-]
		I absolutely loved those just william cassettes as a kid! Completely forgot they existed, must have been lost or broken. Will definitely be repurchasing

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whackernews 2 days ago | parent | prev | next [-]

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

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

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

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fsckboy 2 days ago | parent | prev | next [-]

>compact

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

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

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

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wizzwizz4 2 days ago | parent [-]

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

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reel2reel 2 days ago | parent | next [-]

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

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jjgreen a day ago | parent [-]

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

	▲	amypetrik8 17 hours ago \| parent [-]
		>My dad had an Akamai M8 My own dad had a Akamai T19 cloud computing system and he would give me all the oggs and flacs and mp3s off the cloud from his Akamai system

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nine_k 2 days ago | parent | prev [-]

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

	▲	nephihaha a day ago \| parent [-]
		That is one advantage. Also great in cars if they're not chewed up. Very hard to change CDs in a car.

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arethuza 2 days ago | parent | prev | next [-]

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

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huxley a day ago | parent | prev | next [-]

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

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a day ago | parent | prev [-]

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georgefrowny a day ago | parent | prev | next [-]

> Its major advantage is that it automatically saves state, and the state saving is player-independent.

Yes, it's pretty mad if you think if what you would need to do to replace it.

Either you have a system with QR codes or simple ID chip to refer to some URL. Now you need a server, media licensing agreements and somewhere to store progress information, subscriptions, on and on. And the eternal temptation to abuse the data if it's in the cloud.

Or you store all the audio in the card, and now you need a memory chip and PCB in every card, plus some proprietary USB/WiFi/Bluetooth device to write the cards.

And the barely-makes-contact head system is genius too rather than sliding gold contacts. And it just has paper label inserts.

The only real down sides of cassettes other then the obvious physicality if you don't like that, is they integrate badly into modern cars, have a fairly short run length (and occasionally get chewed up). And if lots of need to be authored quickly, that's too bad!

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perilunar 6 days ago | parent | prev | next [-]

I noticed that when my kids were little they could use cassette players well before they could read. They would choose music based on the pictures on the cassettes and the covers. We had a (clickwheel) iPod for our own music, but they couldn't work it because they couldn't read the text-only interface.

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prmoustache a day ago | parent | prev [-]

Physical medias are great for kids. Also teach them to respect stuff.