not in a casette sense but none of my portable cassette players could either. But on the digital world it’s all very different
The days of optical discs like DVDs are gone. I bought a couple blu-ray drives and put 25G of photos on each disc, and never used them. Mechanical hard drives are next in line for extinction. I still use them for data, ie not the system OS so their speed is not a big problem. Mechanical drives are still cheaper for larger drives 1TB+. My MP3 music libraries include about 40Gb of first line music and 200G+ of "2ndS". So the 40G music library fits:
1. On a folder on the D: drive
2. On thumb drives in the car
3. On a uSD card in my phone
1. and 3. also carry ~10 years of photos. Avoid putting music or other data on the C: drive, so that you can copy/move it easily to a new machine when your computer gets old. I keep a backup on external drives, and I use "Total commander" to sync backups. If I was starting new today, I probably would have used a higher bit rate MP3 or FLAC files, but 192kbps-256kbps is good enough, better than FM radio. I do listen to internet radio but many internet stations use low data rates so they don't sound very good. Other are 320kbps and sound just fine. I actually started with 160kbps wma files but wma was not well supported by the DVD player I had at the time, so I switched to MP3 at a higher bit rate. You should be aware of the importance of media tag data. I recommend the utility "mp3tag". There are others but none are as powerful and easy to use as MP3tag. I keep music in the structure D:\music\artist\album\mp3files but some media players want to reorganize your files because some people just dump music in one folder or wherever their software puts it. It's a nuisance when the player breaks up a various artist album.
So, all mechanical media is soon history. Computers use SSDs and portable players use memory cards and thumb drives. Thumb drives may not last either. uSD cards would be the ultimate solution but they are not as fast as an SSD, which is important for compute OS volumes. It is important to understand that you can now put your life in a uSD card. The days of individual albums is long past. No more shelves of books or records.
1. On a folder on the D: drive
2. On thumb drives in the car
3. On a uSD card in my phone
1. and 3. also carry ~10 years of photos. Avoid putting music or other data on the C: drive, so that you can copy/move it easily to a new machine when your computer gets old. I keep a backup on external drives, and I use "Total commander" to sync backups. If I was starting new today, I probably would have used a higher bit rate MP3 or FLAC files, but 192kbps-256kbps is good enough, better than FM radio. I do listen to internet radio but many internet stations use low data rates so they don't sound very good. Other are 320kbps and sound just fine. I actually started with 160kbps wma files but wma was not well supported by the DVD player I had at the time, so I switched to MP3 at a higher bit rate. You should be aware of the importance of media tag data. I recommend the utility "mp3tag". There are others but none are as powerful and easy to use as MP3tag. I keep music in the structure D:\music\artist\album\mp3files but some media players want to reorganize your files because some people just dump music in one folder or wherever their software puts it. It's a nuisance when the player breaks up a various artist album.
So, all mechanical media is soon history. Computers use SSDs and portable players use memory cards and thumb drives. Thumb drives may not last either. uSD cards would be the ultimate solution but they are not as fast as an SSD, which is important for compute OS volumes. It is important to understand that you can now put your life in a uSD card. The days of individual albums is long past. No more shelves of books or records.
I have a TASCAM and a ZOOM recorder that I feel are the modern equivient of the great old SONY pro portable cassette recorders. But the digital recorders sound better, record longer and are cheaper. For me they are like the cassettes of old with the quality of my Revox open reel or better.
There was someone talking on the radio, they were on active service during a war - pre internet ( 1980s ) Their children recorded cassette tapes for them, singing songs, telling about school etc. Many years later they found the tapes and played them together - I can't imagine someone listening to a digital file with their grandchildren 30+ years after it was recorded. I sometimes wonder how the police cope with evidence of historic cases on old formats - cassettes, floppy discs etc.
I can, but with hesitation. A hundred years in the future there may be a weird gap in personal histories around the time we went digital. Saving that early digital stuff has been tricky - formats and devices changed, we didn't have a good sense of how to save digital files, or even if we should.
But I did wonderful recordings of my grandparents on cassette that are now long lost, photos gone too. With digital, copies are easy to make and save in multiple places. If I make recordings of my father in MP3 format, I can keep them, and other members of my family can keep them. Will they survive 3 or 4 generations into the future? I hope so. How cool would it be to have HD video or HQ audio recordings of your great-great grandparents when they were children or young adults? Maybe we are at the dawn of that, if we can figure out have to save it all. Or maybe FaceTube will save it all for us. 😛
You're presuming that digital files will still be used in the future - how many people had 8mm ciny film transferred to video, then to DVD, then to usb stick? We think every format will last us out.
Would a mix tape on usb stik be the same?
Yes I am. We have just gone thru 20 years where formats were changing so fast that we couldn't keep up. Video that I shot on digital tape? Pain in the butt to archive, unless I get it into a recent digital format. I've tried pulling video off old 3/4" video tape and it didn't go well, the tape is now sticky and draggy. But once it's in a digital format, it has some chance of surviving.
Sure, we will be using different digital formats in the future, but I feel that software and digital files now have a much better chance at backward compatibility than tape. Simply because the medium doesn't matter much once the format is bits and bytes. There will probabaly be a gap in early digital content, but things are settling down now.
I have a feeling they are used more than most people think. Only a hand held like that could have recorded the audience sounds at the beginning of Clapton Unplugged!
Funny that you mention it about video formats Pano. I know quite a few people who went from replacing their vhs tapes extensive collection to hundreds of dvd's, which they later replaced with bluray. Now they are only streaming.
I done none of that, since i am old fashioned.
Still got cassette decks, reel to reels and turntables. I like to keep them around, even if new technologies come and go.
I done none of that, since i am old fashioned.
Still got cassette decks, reel to reels and turntables. I like to keep them around, even if new technologies come and go.
I use Minidisc quite a lot, a great format really and more 'hands on' than a ubiquitous app. It's also amazingly flexible in its editing capabilities.
SD and other solid state recorders tend to be aimed more at semi pro use than home use in both looks and features and I've also noticed lots of them have analogue only with no or limited digital inputs (such as TOSLINK), presumably because of copyright concerns.
Yes, because they are mostly aimed at musicians and video production who are recording straight from mics or a small mixer. Many digital mixers can record to HD card, it's built in.
When you get up to the real pro recorders, they will usually have digital I/O over Dante, SDI or sometimes good old AES.
There was a follow here on diyAudio who lives in LA and his job was to keep old video tape machines running. There is a lot of old content on tape that can be digitized and sold again. Streaming services have huge appetites. 🙂
Ah, is that what it is. Many years ago there were some that were more domestically acceptable and in some ways I wish I had got one back then.
That depends very much on the signal processing before storage, digital compression algotythm and rate and the cassette recorder/player. I think 40 years ago we just got used to the cassette background noise same as we are used to compression artefacts now.
Would be interesting to do a test:
Good 3-head cassette recorder with dolby c/s vs. 128 kbit mp3.
Cassette might have advantages in very complex orchestral music.
Long time ago now but a cassette deck was thrown into the mix here and it threw quite a few, mainly because the files wouldn't 'analyse' as expected due to mechanical variations. Cassette can be surprisingly good subjectively.
https://www.diyaudio.com/community/threads/based-on-sonics-which-do-you-prefer.246165/post-3710376