As someone who grew up with cassette tapes, I don’t anticipate this fad lasting too long. They were very inconvenient. With most technology I see resistance from people not wanting to move on. I don’t remember seeing that with cassettes. The only downside of CDs was that you couldn’t record from the radio and Napster eventually solved that better than radio ever did.
Minidisc is the format I have some nostalgia for. It never blew up, but it felt like the best of both worlds. You could record from the radio like a digital cassette tapes, and even trim out the DJ and reorder tracks… and give them names. You could also buy them like a CD. From a digital file you could use a TOSlink cable to get a great quality recording at home. And the later ones even played MP3s directly. It could really do it all.
> The only downside of CDs was that you couldn’t record from the radio and Napster eventually solved that better than radio ever did.
This was far from the only drawback with CDs especially early on, at least in mobile applications: the media (and thus player) is bulky, cases are fragile (in part through increased leverage), it has low resilience to physical damage, and before memory prices hit low enough for significant buffering the slightest g forces would lead to skips.
MDs were real progress on that front. Shame it was quite expensive and the digital models were hobbled by horrendous software. And obviously flash-based pmps then smartphones are their lunch entirely.
MDs are just another example of Sony screwing it up by making things proprietary and keeping it to themselves instead of creating an ecosystem (memory sticks were another example, although they didn't offer quite the same advantages). It's really a shame, I think if Sony would have gone about this differently they likely would have put off the emergence of MP3 players for a long time.
It’s a funny comment because those formats only existed to be proprietary. Sony learnt the wrong lessons from CD, which they co developed with Phillips. They saw the success of that format and wished they were getting royalties on the underlying tech.
They then wasted billions and decades in formats other companies wouldn’t touch because they had fees attached. Minidisc being a prime example. Sounded worse than CDs, cost the same. Had a recording feature people already had with cassette.
There were already plenty of “successors to the floppy” in the dustbin of history (floptical, Iomega zip, LS120, …). None of them was competitive as a distribution format, or at all once CD-R became widely available.
Yeah, and the MiniDisc was the only one that could have come close. Sony already had computer MiniDisc readers/writers, mass production with pre-recorded content, (fairly) large volumes.
They just never connected these things to each other. It could have been a great standard and we would have been plagued to this day with them. :)
In some ways it's even better than USB flash. There are no read-only flash drives, for instance. It's also a problem that you mosh "data" in the same port you mosh "keyboard" or "spy device". We gained a lot with the USB paradigm but we lost some things, too.
MiniDisk! I loved that format. Great physical size. I suspect my love is all about nostalgia for the future, because when they came out they were foreign (at least in the US) and fly.
After using minidisk I was sure that LS120 would succeed. The formats of cartridged optical disks mostly removed the annoyance of scratched disks. Now the only place I see optical disks in a cartridge is at the library where they put some CDs in a cartridge to use in a special drive.
I was in college during the time, but I remember all of these digital art students had iMacs and these clear+blue FireWire zip drives they used to carry around between classes and home.
In principle, maybe, but Zip disks were errorprone, didn't store music for portable players, and were rather large and cumbersome. Minidiscs were even smaller than floppies and more robust.
> As a child, one time I tried to make a CD unplayable and literally couldn't do it. (Sandpaper didn't do the trick.)
Either child you was incompetent or your player was very good at error recovery, because I personally saw a number of car CDs thrown out as the car’s stereo was unable to read them anymore.
you were probably scraping the thick transparent side, not the side with the label? the data is immediately under the label. the clear side can be surprisingly scraped up and still read properly, though I'm not sure how!! I have some CDs that I thought were ruined because of how scratched up the underside is, and they play just fine. Pretty sweet! Then I have one or two where the label side got a scratch taken out of it, and indeed, you can see right through the disc at those points - unrecoverable damage. Conversely a scratched up underside can simply be buffed/polished smooth and the disc will read good as new. I actually have one disc that cracked in half (a singular crack from the center to the outside edge, not spanning the total diameter of the disc)... and it actually plays without any skips (though surely depending on quality of the player and its resilience to read errors). I couldn't believe it at the time. A single piece of masking tape to hold the edge together was a sufficient "repair".
I worked in a CD foundry in the early 1990s. Scratches that were not tangential (perpendicular to the radius) were irrelevant, as the basic CD encoding scheme provide something like (IIRC) 30+ bytes of data parity protection. If the scratch width along the track wasn't longer than that, it didn't exist.
If it did exist, some toothpaste rubbed tangentially around the CD on your fingertips was often enough to buff it out, at least as far as the 30-byte limit cared.
It was a phenomenal jump in data integrity, built in at the recording level. Sure, you could encode even floppies with that scheme... but your computer didn't, natively.
CD pickup detects changes in the reflected light due to the reflective pits. As long as the scratches are significantly bigger than pits they will create lower frequency attenuation to the reflected light which won't affect the high frequency signal coming off pits. You will get occasional errors when crossing into and out of a scratch but that's just a few samples, likely those won't even make it through through the speakers. I have not tried but I imagine a very fine sandpaper could create the scratches at high enough frequency to interfere with the pickup.
But the label side is indeed very fragile as you can easily damage the reflective pits, only covered by a layer of paint. It's as same as a simple mirror, where the thin layer of reflective metal is very well protected from the front but is only covered with paint in the back.
They must’ve had a really robust kind of CDs wherever you lived, then. Like everyone else, I wore out a lot of discs simply by storing them outside their case.
Did that work? I heard everything already, from it being a wonder solution to it destroying the discs even further (if i had to guess they used the kind of toothpaste with little stones in them?)
Vinyl is populair, inconvenient and doesn't have crisp audio quality. Cassettes are also inconvenient and have poor audio quality, plus they are cheap and portable. So I definitely also see them stick around. I also see plenty cassettes being issued on e.g. bandcamp for years already.
The poor audio quality can be seen as desired feature btw. It brings a certain lofi or warmth with it.
I do value the inconvenience. When I put an album on, I put an album on. I don't hit next, random, go wandering off down rabbitholes. I put the album on.
And I do see the cost as a feature, somewhat. It feels like I got something for my money, in a way that paying for a zip doesn't.
Vinyl is big, which makes for a nice display of album art. 50% of vinyl buyers don’t own a record player. People play their convenience and high quality digital music, while displaying the vinyl albums as decorations.
I just released an album on cassette and definitely has _not_ poor audio quality. Anyway I remember a lot of releases with poor audio quality too, but this is more the problem of the production and not the cassette itself. All studio recordings back in the days were made with the same tape material, ferro oxid, sames as a Type I cassette.
Vinyl is nowhere near as inconvenient as tapes and sounds way better. And I say this as someone who used to lug around big bags of 12" records as a DJ! It's pretty annoying, but it's still better than having to rewind, and deal with the appalling durability of cassettes!
Nothing has managed to capture the mixtape model. A tangible object made with care you could give as a gift and was unique and valuable. CDs got close but people didn’t have the gear to make them until mp3s had arrived and overshadowed them. Plus CDs with handwritten tracklists didn’t feel as nice as tapes and blank CDs were invariably ugly.
Music as an object is a thing and playlists are in no way the same. You can’t even control the music on a playlist as it’s in the gift of the streamer.
I think the qualities of a cassette mentioned have clearly helped with the mixtape model. But I can't help but wonder if it wasn't also a product of that particular era.
It certainly depends on geographical zones, too, but I remember people burning audio cds for quite a while, and taking them on the go with portable players. This was quite widespread before portable mp3 players became common.
Hell, where I grew up, cassettes were still in regular use until the end of the 90s, and mixtapes had grown increasingly rare.
Quality is indistinguishable from the first playback. Tapes have a bad reputation because most people used them in the cars, which is the equivalent of storing them in an oven on a daily basis. A lot of car stereos were very cheap, and that lead to a lot of cassettes being damaged when they would have been fine otherwise.
Regarding the quality argument. Again, it's going to depend on the media and the equipment. I have a very nice Marantz tape deck, and I use chrome tapes with it. When recorded and played back with dolby noise reduction, it sounds pretty damn good!
I say this as someone that also owns a very nice turntable and has a digital FLAC media collection, so I'm not married to tapes in any way. They're just something fun to goof around with (and mostly to give my kid a more tangible experience with playing music at home).
Regarding convenience, I can't argue that they're the least convenient media. That said, I'm an album guy, so I like to listen to recordings in their entirety most of the time.
Cassettes and their cases had a really nice size and shape, fit right in the hand. And it was cool that you could see it moving, unlike (most) cd players. Also the recording paradigm was pretty easy to grasp, just 1:1. And they kinda degraded gracefully, with sound getting weird but still playing, at least until the tape actually came out in a big catastrophic mess and we’d try to rewind it with a pencil.
My last album release made 10x more money with selling the physical cassette then with digital sales! I think people want something in their hands. And by the way, the tape sounds really good. Definitely not lo fi, the opposite actually. Overall better then the compressed Spotify release with in comparison muddy bass and less saturation.
I can understand that, and I like it, too. But, personally, I dont want to fill my home with random artefacts if it's not strictly required, and I don't know of anything "in my hands" that doesn't come with this issue.
To your compressed Spotify point, I do recognize this as a general issue for modern music distribution, which had already started with CDs (and to which cassettes aren't technically immune either).
So, as a musician, do you know of places selling digital media mastered as the artists intended? I've had good luck with Bandcamp, but they don't have most of the music I'm into.
Really the only place where you can sell HQ audio on your own and that has an audience is Bandcamp. But to your question, you could try Qobuz, that's were my distributor uploaded the original master flacs to.
Cassette tapes were more practical for portable devices. The last high-end Walkmans were beautifully crafted and barely bigger than the cassette inside whereas portable CD player were always bulkier if only because of the size of CDs themselves.
Minidisc tried to play in that space since minidisc players are very small.
I largely share your sentiment, I had a tape player as a kid, and the second I could get a CD player and burn my own CDs I never looked back. One thing that I don't see mentioned often is how battery-hungry these players were as well.
I think the ‘warmth’ people attribute to older media has been shown to have to do with processing.
Modern audio has been mastered for loudness, with the corresponding loss of details and instrument separation. Tape media suffers less from this issue, and old vinyl even less so (but not modern releases).
It's an understandable response to the feeling of having lost ‘something’ in the era of digital audio (which is arguably just a matter of processing, not the media itself).
There's also the factor that the last 20 years of music have been marketed towards BT MP3 players. Intrinsically low-fi, mono playback devices, so why care about things like deep bass and channel?
It's not like metal, dungeon synth and PE/noise artists have just now started publishing on cassette. They've done it for years and years, and you'll find a lot of them on Bandcamp, e.g. https://duckpropaganda.bandcamp.com/album/auditory-chokehold .
minidisc has a lot going for it. you can easily carry a few around with you. you dont really need to carry the outer cases. you can put some album art directly onto them. if your player has netMD support then you can just use a web browser to manage the tracks on a disc.
the only downside i can think of is the loud screeching every once in a while when the disc is seeking. but that could just be the player that i have maybe
I wish somebody would make minidiscs and minidisc players. Can (optionally) replace atrac with opus. Fast transfers but 'slow playback' and more durability than cassette or CD.
I was recently surprised to sell an old portable MiniDisc player on fb for close to $100. (FWIW, it was mint). I’m still nostalgic for them, and have another portable player and recording deck, but I’m left scratching my head at how much folks are willing to pay to pick up their first player. Shrug
eventually I bet someone'll put a sd cassette in one and we'll be back to square one. I enjoy my atrac discman with writable disks, fits a lot of music but I'm not going to pretend I use it more than my phone
Minidiscs proved that people were comfortable with lossy compression. It was to be many years before lossless audio became a thing again.
It always amused me how we were told the difference between lossless and lossy compression was undetectable to the human ear up until the big streaming services started providing lossless and even high res, at which point it was suddenly the best thing since sliced bread. However you feel about the audio, one way or another it's gaslighting.
Personally, on most music I can't tell decent quality lossy from lossless, but I listen to a lot of choral polyphony and also perform it so I have a good ear for it. When you're listening to 16 or in some cases up to 40 voices and can follow individual lines (single voices recognisable as particular people) you can hear it, and I disliked
minidisc and mp3 players for that reason. High res, though, makes no difference at all as far as I can tell.
They did no such thing. Sales numbers were tiny outside Japan. People only tolerate lossy compression when that’s all they are offered. Hence the streamers introducing lossless options years after launch due to demand.
Minidiscs were briefly widely available here in the UK and were only short-lived because they were almost immediately replaced by iPods and other mp3 players, also with lossy audio only. Nearly two decades went by during which the only portable music options not widely considered obsolete were lossily compressed, despite the fact you could still buy CDs and listen to them on the move. It's disappointing (and I certainly don't agree with it) but the vast majority of people do tolerate lossy compression even when there are lossless alternatives that are only marginally less convenient. Minidiscs and iPods proved it comprehensively and Bluetooth earbuds have done so again.
Edit: I'm very glad lossless is finally mainstream again but I'd be more inclined to believe it's due to "demand" if I weren't routinely the only person on the train wearing wired earphones.
Minidisc is the format I have some nostalgia for. It never blew up, but it felt like the best of both worlds. You could record from the radio like a digital cassette tapes, and even trim out the DJ and reorder tracks… and give them names. You could also buy them like a CD. From a digital file you could use a TOSlink cable to get a great quality recording at home. And the later ones even played MP3s directly. It could really do it all.