| ▲ | RiverCrochet 2 days ago |
| 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. |
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| ▲ | tombert 2 days ago | parent | next [-] |
| > CDs... are more fraglie. CDs can be scratched more easily, obviously, and ruin them, but if you kept the production CD in good shape they will last a long time. About three years ago, I decided to buy one of those "random 100 CDs" on eBay, just to see what kind of weird stuff I would get. A few of the CDs in there were pressed in 1984, and they ripped just fine onto my 2022 laptop into FLAC and I listen to the FLAC files regularly. As far as I can tell there were no checksum errors or skips or anything like that. Burned CDs and DVDs do not have that luxury, especially cheap ones. My dad found out that a lot of his home movies that he had archived on burnt DVDs were literally starting to rot away. Fortunately in his case he had the habit of burning like twenty copies of each of his collections, so I don't think he actually lost anything, and I was able to show him how to extract images from it, but I consider ourselves lucky. > I've always liked the faint airy sound of tape silence in a weird way. Me too! Honestly there's something kind of charming about being forced to hear the artifacts of the actual medium that carries the sound. The light hiss has a certain "purity" to it, for want of a better word. It's also why I like watching movies from the 1960s-1970s; they couldn't make everything completely silent, so there was always a small hiss. It makes movies like Straw Dogs much more unnerving. > The really cool thing about tapes are the same cool thing that playing an MP3 locally has: Yeah, and CDs as well. For reasons that I am equal parts surprised about and grateful for, CDs never had any DRM; I can take an exact copy of my CD to my computer, copy it to all my devices, stream it with Jellyfin, remix it with Acid or SoundForge, or pretty much anything else I can think of. Given that CDs still sound excellent, I think you could make an argument that it's objectively the best audio media that ever got widespread adoption. |
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| ▲ | tom_ 2 days ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| Are CDs more fragile? All of mine still seemed to work last I checked. I gave up on tapes years ago, because they'd always fuck up one way or the other. The sound quality was also annoyingly bad, and track search was a faff. (I think I prefer measles to tapes. Neither killed me, but at least nobody reminisces fondly about that time they had measles!) |
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| ▲ | jaredhallen 2 days ago | parent | next [-] | | I mostly agree. Tapes worked pretty well. The big advantage of CD's from my perspective was the ability to jump straight to a track. Rewinding and fastforwarding was quite annoying. But CD's skipped like crazy on any mobile application, especially on the early hardware. Of course mp3's solved this. And there was a nice time, albeit short, time where we downloaded music and felt as if it was ours to own. Granted, a lot of this was probably pirated, otherwise maybe you ripped a CD. But still it represented a great state of solid technology (they just played for you without any fuss) and reasonable ownership. Then along came streaming. It does, of course, have its advantages, but they come with many significant drawbacks. | | |
| ▲ | seszett 2 days ago | parent [-] | | > there was a nice time, albeit short, time where we downloaded music and felt as if it was ours to own. Granted, a lot of this was probably pirated Nothing prevents you from doing it today, and there is more music to download than ever before. | | |
| ▲ | ryandrake a day ago | parent [-] | | Some of us never stopped. I never got into the whole streaming thing. My music collection today is a hard drive full of files, just as it was in 1999. No internet connection needed. No wondering if service X has song Y. I can load the whole library onto a phone, my car, wherever I want to play it. Peak music media. |
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| ▲ | mrob a day ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | I have CDs from the 80s that still play perfectly. The only CDs I've had fail were a multi-disc set that were packaged with foam padding in the case, touching the label side of the disc. The plasticizer leached out and diffused into the protective lacquer, which softened and stuck to the foam, and tore away when I took them out, pulling chunks of the metal layer with it. They weren't anything rare so I wasn't too bothered, but it later occurred to me that they technically could have been saved. The data is pressed into the polycarbonate, so if I'd very carefully peeled off all the metal, ideally in a laminar flow cabinet to avoid any dust, and then had them re-coated in aluminum with vacuum deposition, they would probably have still played. I think this is true for CDs lost to "disc rot" too. I don't have any nostalgia for tapes. I used them as a child, but I never liked them. The first music I bought was on CD. I still buy a lot of used CDs on Ebay. Lots of great bargains are available and they sound identical to brand new CDs. It's worth finding sellers who'll combine postage and buying in bulk or you'll end up paying more for postage than the discs themselves. | |
| ▲ | RiverCrochet a day ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | Really thinking about it, maybe they're not more fraglie. CDs scratch easily but tapes are still exposed on the bottom, so you really want to keep both in their cases. I still think it's wild that portable (as in the Walkman sense) CD players were a thing - a spinning disc with a precision optical pickup with very little separating it from the outside world that b1umps around on your hip as you walk. I guess it's equally crazy to have a tape motor on your hip, but it just seemed less fragile to me. My musical habits for the past few years have been long mixes of songs on YouTube, that I don't really skip around in. I think YouTube's ads that annoyingly hit between every video nudged me in that direction; but that's why I made mixtapes back in the day when you bought an album but there was only 1 or 2 good songs on it. | |
| ▲ | leetnewb 2 days ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | I bought a new album on CD a couple of years ago. Badly scratched straight out of the case. Guess that wasn't really the right comparison though. | | |
| ▲ | beAbU a day ago | parent [-] | | Scratched enough that it was not working any more? IME CDs work surprisingly well even with scratches, way way better than LPs though. You need to properly gouge the surface before things become problematic. | | |
| ▲ | leetnewb 6 hours ago | parent [-] | | From what I remember, exact audio copy could not complete the rip on the final track or two. |
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| ▲ | MengerSponge 2 days ago | parent | prev [-] | | Depends on what you mean by fragile. CDs are really susceptible to bitrot https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Disc_rot Archival discs are made with gold backing, which is much more robust than the aluminum reflector used in mass-pressed discs. | | |
| ▲ | Supernaut 2 days ago | parent | next [-] | | > CDs are really susceptible to bitrot Define "really susceptible"? I've bought hundreds of albums on CD over the last four decades, and only one of them has ever gone bad on me. The first CD I ever purchased, manufactured in 1990, still sounds as good as the day I bought it. | | |
| ▲ | MengerSponge 6 hours ago | parent [-] | | From NIST: One method for determining end of life for a disc is based on
the number of errors on a disc before the error correction occurs. The
chance of disc failure increases with the number of errors, but it is
impossible to define the number of errors in a disc that will absolute-
ly cause a performance problem (minor or catastrophic) because it
depends on the number of errors left, after error correction, and their
distribution within the data. When the number of errors (before error
correction) on a disc increases to a certain level, the chance of disc
failure, even if small, can be deemed unacceptable and thus signal
the disc’s end of life. Manufacturers tend to use this premise to estimate media lon-
gevity. They test discs by using accelerated aging methodologies
with controlled extreme temperature and humidity influences over
a relatively short period of time. However, it is not always clear how
a manufacturer interprets its measurements for determining a disc’s
end of life. Among the manufacturers that have done testing, there
is consensus that, under recommended storage conditions, CD-R,
DVD-R, and DVD+R discs should have a life expectancy of 100 to
200 years or more; CD-RW, DVD-RW, DVD+RW, and DVD-RAM
discs should have a life expectancy of 25 years or more. Little infor-
mation is available for CD-ROM and DVD-ROM discs (including
audio and video), resulting in an increased level of uncertainty for
their life expectancy. Expectations vary from 20 to 100 years for these
discs. https://nvlpubs.nist.gov/nistpubs/legacy/sp/NISTspecialpubli... |
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| ▲ | account42 a day ago | parent | prev [-] | | IME that's mostly a problem with self-recorded disks while pressed discs are quite durable in practice. Maybe if you keep them in a very humid/hot environment you get different results. | | |
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| ▲ | bagels 2 days ago | parent | prev [-] |
| My experience with tapes does not match yours. I've seen both audio and VCR tapes unspool by playing or trying to remove them from the player. |
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| ▲ | Cpoll 2 days ago | parent | next [-] | | I estimate renting over 1200 VCR tapes in my lifetime, and I've never had one unspool. The cassette problem was common enough that fixing it with a pencil was part of the zeitgeist, but I can't remember anything like that for VHS. | | |
| ▲ | __del__ 2 days ago | parent [-] | | i had ONE cassette unwind. my less careful friend was always winding them with a pencil. the culprit? button mashing between fast-forward and play. |
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| ▲ | usefulcat 2 days ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | I grew up in the 80s, and was a prolific user of both video tapes (mostly VHS) and cassette tapes. I can't recall ever having a tape get eaten by any deck, either video or audio. Not saying it never happens, but if it was common I absolutely would have encountered it many times over. | | |
| ▲ | asdff a day ago | parent | next [-] | | I think it happened more as the players aged and wore out. In the 90s and 2000s I remember it happening pretty commonly although cd or dvd skipping was way worse. A couple years ago we took the old family vcr player out of the parents attic and tested it out. It was a great vcr at the time, sony with all the bells and whistles. But it immediately at the tape and I mean ate it. Had to take it apart and route the tape out myself and I'm pretty sure its ruined the tape. We spent 2 hours on youtube with it taken apart and gave up the project indefinitely. | |
| ▲ | parineum 2 days ago | parent | prev [-] | | > I can't recall ever having a tape get eaten by any deck ... if it was common I absolutely would have encountered it many times over. Common enough that you know the slang for it, despite it not happening to you. |
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| ▲ | whycome 2 days ago | parent | prev [-] | | That must be an issue with the player |
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