A thread for cassettes

this revive was prompted by a fb status that said "plus, this band will be selling singles on CASSETTES."

like, wow!

dbs stands for douchebags probably

yeah idk i like cassettes or the idea of cassettes but im also v tired & v sad, music has the right to its antecedents

maybe in 20 years ppl will be trading youtube links like "remember when we used to play the new cassie single off of youtube" "yeah man nothing like staring at those jpg embeds"

i have a pile of tapes that i bought back when i was making these tape experiment things in school that i've been meaning to do something w/. i got reminded when i found an mp3 of one i had made on my harddrive today. its not great.

maybe in 20 years ppl will be trading youtube links like "remember when we used to play the new cassie single off of youtube" "yeah man nothing like staring at those jpg embeds"

― dayo, Thursday, March 17, 2011 2:14 AM (3 seconds ago)

a part of me broke when they took geocities down btw

i hate all physical things, when can i leave this body and be air

why was this necessary

sorry for not having unlimited space to stuff a million chillwave tapes

uh i was not making a dig at u in any way shape or form?

ok

this reminds me of when I tried to get into vinyl, I bought a dual turntable off of craigslist and built a DIY line out thingy and hooked it up to my speakers and everything, and when I played my first LP on it (abandoned luncheonette from goodwill) it sounded like shit, so thin and scratchy, I have never set it up again, idk if my cartridge was bad or not calibrated or something, I tried looking for info online but it was a bunch of vinyl nerds talking about $500 cartridges and I gave up

anyone pretending than selling music on tapes in 2011 is about anything other than nostalgia is kidding themselves. nostalgia is a totally valid reason to do something. but that is all it is about.

and i agree with mr. steven tyler that tapes sound "great" but they ultimately only sound "great" to me because that's how i listened to music when i was 14.

you should have built a dream machine w/ it

one of the things i like abt chillwave/whinehaus/subwave is how much affection it has for the geocities aesthetic. i miss html 2.

i dont even care abt sound i mean i do but yknow i dont ~CARE~ enough to have preferences and opinions i like things tho, i like feeling connected to ppl via objects in time/space & feel good when ppl have little drawings or cards or w/e in the tapes they sell you - i always put some in mine - its v obvs or w/e of course

tapes can sound pretty nice imo

lamp you should like sell me a tape, i would have to like send you the money in cash form tho bc idk its an endless struggle

Isn't it more fun to spell out douchebags than abbreviating it?

dbs stands for douchebags

http://i.imgur.com/QPUGO.jpg

you guys i made that joke already

or are you just nostalgic

always

ill trade you a copy of the 80s fan cd single for the untidy towns 7"

i have the former and not the latter :(

man it's like I don't really care enough to argue but I do think object-relation is a real thing. I listened to a lot of music direct from iTunes to the stereo today, but the nature of the interface means it all kind of blurred together. then I listened to a couple of CDs I got in the mail and those I remembered & had a more interesting time with. Tapes are like that but more so, because they're weird and anachronous.

no I totally get you on that relationship, I shoot film and part of the reason is that I feel so much more involved w/ the process than digital

yah i guess, when iwas in america i had all my photos developed together at the end, 3 months worth, and im p clueless so only a fraction actually came out but yeah i mean digital is a totally diff experience there

one of my favorite artists ever released a tape-only album last year

still want to know who this is...

Scott Tuma

this one iirc

xpost

yah i guess, when iwas in america i had all my photos developed together at the end, 3 months worth, and im p clueless so only a fraction actually came out but yeah i mean digital is a totally diff experience there

― plax (ico), Thursday, March 17, 2011 10:53 AM (1 minute ago) Bookmark

I develop my own film so it's kinda involved, I wonder if there's an ILM thread yet about the process of listening to music, as opposed to the listening experience itself

omg esoj that tape's title is A+++

but I mean another thing (responding more to n/a's "it is nostalgia & only that" assertion) is that cassette releases can still be small. they are not in the cycle of promotion, generally speaking. if you put out an album on CD or even LP and people get excited about it, even at a small level, it starts getting blogged & posted & so on. cassettes do get ripped & shared & reviewed but at a much smaller level; tapes in 2011 sort of allow people & scenes to not participate as intensely in the Everything Gets A Press Release historical moment we're in. Tapes don't really have "release dates" and one-sheets as far as I know, they just sort of come into existence & Night People writes a little blurb about 'em and there are only a couple hundred and then they're gone, and if people go completely nuts about one then it gets pressed on an LP a year later, but tape releases get to retain a little don't-mind-us-we're-just-fucking-around vibe that other releases kind of can't claim. imo.

oh i was mixing up yr post with plax :(

haha its like youre not even reading my posts...

but tape releases get to retain a little don't-mind-us-we're-just-fucking-around vibe that other releases kind of can't claim

but yeah bon jovi otm - cassettes are just a really low risk way of releasing music atm. although i guess thats part of the nostalgic pull - appealing to the idea of music just being a thing for u & ur friends & sorta existing outside the constant flood of internet music

yeah Lamp is right - that is nostalgia I guess although I consider nostalgia a damning word: like, nostalgia to me is "it was better back then just by virtue of being back then." Whereas I think the connected world vs. the possibilities for isolation that're now extinct, that's an actual conflict worth talking about & fucking with

I take a lot of pleasure in thinking thru this stuff anyway thanks for this thread you guys good night

good night.

I miss the sound of a cassette, I especially one that has been well loved with grain noise in the blank track space. I had a copy of the Back to the Future soundtrack that had the wear noise, mostly from me playing it over and over in 6th grade on the bus ride to and from school. I also miss a lot of my old radio cassettes from when I'd spend the weekends taping songs from American Top 40 and a handful of the "retro" shows that would play rare 7" and 12" mixes of older singles. I've lost a lot of the tapes and have had to recreate them thanks to the intertubes.

I still own plenty of tapes (my car boasts a tape deck). My most played is a fab solo Wu tape my best friend compiled in '98, and it still sounds great -- the bass is especially fat.

but I mean another thing (responding more to n/a's "it is nostalgia & only that" assertion) is that cassette releases can still be small. they are not in the cycle of promotion, generally speaking. if you put out an album on CD or even LP and people get excited about it, even at a small level, it starts getting blogged & posted & so on. cassettes do get ripped & shared & reviewed but at a much smaller level; tapes in 2011 sort of allow people & scenes to not participate as intensely in the Everything Gets A Press Release historical moment we're in. Tapes don't really have "release dates" and one-sheets as far as I know, they just sort of come into existence & Night People writes a little blurb about 'em and there are only a couple hundred and then they're gone, and if people go completely nuts about one then it gets pressed on an LP a year later, but tape releases get to retain a little don't-mind-us-we're-just-fucking-around vibe that other releases kind of can't claim. imo.

― five gone cats from Boston (underrated aerosmith bootlegs I have owned), Thursday, 17 March 2011 03:00 (5 hours ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

I hear all this but it does beg the question, why not just put it out on CDR

except Lamp answered that right at the start of this revive

I buy a lot of tapes at the minute b/c lots of music I want to own is being released on the format but as far as I can tell its prevalence is entirely down to low-level marketing gimmicks, low-level trolling or some sort of combination thereof

get a tape deck they're cheap

not in my experience! mine died abt 3 years ago and I've been unable to find a replacement in what I consider a reasonable price range

(admittedly this may be my fault as the second-hand ones I've seen have had dents, stains, rusting and I don't trust those not to snap/warp my preciouses)

I bought a dual turntable off of craigslist and built a DIY line out thingy and hooked it up to my speakers and everything, and when I played my first LP on it (abandoned luncheonette from goodwill) it sounded like shit, so thin and scratchy

just checking - did yr "line out thingy" incorporate a phono preamp stage with RIAA curve equalisation? sry if teaching grandmother to suck eggs

why not just put it out on CDR

tapes can last a long time. cdrs dont.

not at all convinced that one of these formats is across-the-board more likely to deteriorate beyond playability than the other, based on my experience

just checking - did yr "line out thingy" incorporate a phono preamp stage with RIAA curve equalisation? sry if teaching grandmother to suck eggs

― dimension hatris (a passing spacecadet), 2011年03月17日 星期四 下午5:33 (28 minutes ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

I build the thing here, can't remember what I did with the signal after the pre-amp...maybe fed it into a receiver? Sony? maybe I should try a proper poweramp.

http://www.hagtech.com/bugle.html

oh, well I've never seen/heard that kit preamp but in theory it should have been fine, so no idea. just checking since plugging a phono-level output straight into line in will indeed sound thin and scratchy and generally ass-like in the extreme. it seemed pretty unlikely, but!

has anyone used one of those ION tape-to-mp3 devices? I was always pretty skeptical like "why would I buy this plasticky do-it-for-you thing when I can just plug a real cassette deck into my good soundcard and set the levels myself and actually know what it's doing", but since I'm finding it hard to buy a real, good cassette deck for even twice the price...

man, you guys are all so weird! i can't understand how scientific everything's become when it comes to how we receive whatever it is we're consuming. it's like there was a huge shark-jump ten years ago, probably after vhs frazzled away. there are so many factors that contribute to how you receive something, and there's still this weird attempt to try to compile hierarchies based on the mathematics involved; something has the highest pixel ratio and is thus the most enjoyable presentation of something. with movies, the way they're presented, and the fidelity to the original source material, sure it can be important, but other times your experience can be as affected by like, are you sitting comfortably? are you tired? you aren't always sat there wishing that the female romantic lead's face was rendered better, and situations in which it was don't necessarily boost your understanding of a thing. the idea that we can plot a line-graph of ENJOYMENT, correlating with SCREEN RESOLUTION, for sex and the city ii, is nuts. and with music, maybe everyone goes home and sits in living rooms carefully arranged so as to minimise impedence and listens to a SACD of kind of blue from their sweet stereo and it's ideal, but similarly maybe they don't; maybe the first time you heard it and the first time it pricked up your ears was when you were clunking a walkman around, or someone gave you a copy of it on a cassette and you could hear parts of the other side playing backwards during the silent parts, but still you're pretty sure there was some trumpet playing throughout and it was pretty moving. i don't say this in favour of nostalgia - remember when!, you were so young!, lol @ walkmans! - but in favour of the fact that we don't listen so mechanically, and the time we heard something in a car might have been better than at home, the time we danced to something blaring out of a shitty speaker had the edge on the time we bought the LP, and the time we spend listening to the radio in the kitchen sometimes beats our attentive quiet-time with headphones. tapes are nice objects, and do sound good; they have a different sound; kind of particularly, but not fetishistically, the kind that have given up some of their potential crisp fidelity in favour of a blocky, clunky, overloading fullness. to put out tapes now: why the fuck not? if you don't have a tape player then - you are kind of a musical judas tbh, but anyway - fine, don't buy one, you probably realistically have options in terms of getting this music; or go buy a boombox (because why wouldn't you? do they not receive the radio? is the FM radio news vaguer and more profane than digital radio news, or is it just that if you don't get your shit together and put your aerial in the right spot, it could crackle? (like a digital radio could gurgle (we blank out the flaws of new things))). they still play the songs out and that is kind of the point. it isn't that i have never had the experience of hearing a thing - autumn's child, on good headphones - and appreciating what good representation can do for a piece of art; of course i have, and of course that's worth pursuing, and preserving, i guess. but similarly i can't forget about the fact that it is all just music, and for all our qualms over how to receive it, a $3 shittily-mastered BILLIE HOLIDAY HITS compilation from a service station still has a whole lot of billie holiday songs on.

all of this is different from tape releases; maybe they're fetishistic or ironic or whatever. but they're still giving you music and you're still playing it in your house and that is the point. i'm not even getting into the virtues of tapes themselves, vs cds (you get two track ones, and two final songs!, vs one track one and one final song), terrible & lifeless objects that cds are. but it's fine to just sell a thing or buy a thing, free of the weird sense that we should be pursuing it to its platonic ideal of listenability.

Case in point:

In a Sherlock holmes story, the detective retires to his drawing room to play the violin a bit.

Meanwhile, the two 'villains' are left alone in his dining room, and discuss in whispers the entire details of their crime and guilt.

At which point the detective appears from behind the curtain, having heard the whole thing AHA!!

But.. you were playing the violin in there! How?

They all go into the other room, and lo there is a windy up gramophone playing the music off a new 78rpm record.

Now, you might think that it was unlikely that they'd mistake a real performance for something off a 78rpm record through a funnel.

But that's the only format they know: Live performance. So, this new-fangled invention at this point would seem to be "as good as live"...

I remember spending gobs of money on those TDK metal tapes, only to use them to record my vinyl blaring from shitty speakers. The irony.

"not at all convinced that one of these formats is across-the-board more likely to deteriorate beyond playability than the other, based on my experience"

i have tapes that are 20+ years old and they play fine. i have had plenty of cdrs that never lasted more than a year or two.

99% of the tapes i play all play fine no matter how old they are. if they are DIRTY then that is a different story. cuz most people treated their tapes like they treat their cds. like garbage. don't put them in the case, left on the floor of a car, etc.