Cassette tapes are making a comeback?

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.

I stopped using my smartphone for about 1 year now and bought a walkman fiio cp13, it is really cool, but it is really hard to make a good sounding cassette, particularly if you dont know what you are doing (like me).

I record stuff from youtube and make mix tapes.

I am experimenting with "not getting what I want the second I want it", e.g. "I want to listen to XYZ", 1 second later I click on spotify and its done. Now I have to wait, first XYZ might not be on the cassette I have with me, or it might be 5 songs later, and I dont want to waste battery rewinding, sometimes I rewind with the pencil if I am really desperate.

But the feeling of excitement when the song you wanted comes up is really nice :)

Some people recommend the `rewind` player instead of cp13, as it also has bluetooth.

We have forgotten how `not to get things NOW`. It took me a while to get used to it. There has to be some minimal amount of effort for a `thing`, when you go below it, it just becomes nothing. Maybe thats just me.

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.

The answer is so obviously "no" for the general case (making even a tiny dent to streaming/digital) that the article's title amounts to clickbait.

That's regardless of the fact that there has always been a vibrant extremely niche cassete scene, the same way there still are 8-bit home computer fans and clubs.

At best, on top of the above, a tiny additional niche of more mainstream "hipster" artists and fans might release/get cassetes as a statement.

Both numbers summed would still be so small compared to the overall music consumption market/methods that implying any sort of "comeback" is ludicrous.

Shameless plug. I've produced an entire album and released it on cassette (as primarily medium in mind). You can listen to it here and watching my tape deck spinning. It is recorded from my tape deck, so you get the real tape sound! :-) https://tonleiter.net/reihenhaus/

BTW this is the final audio chain then. Crazy. :-) Synths, instruments, etc. -> Analogue mixing console -> ADC -> DAC -> Professional tape production apparatus -> My tape deck -> ADC -> ACC Codec -> Your DAC

I lived through vinyl, 8-track, cassettes, and CDs. I digitized all of my music over 20 years ago and no longer even own a physical media playback device. I can't fathom going back. Digital or bust.

I don’t think so. I spent a huge amount of time in my youth recording, trading, buying, and selling audio tapes (all from the metal/hardcore/punk underground). It was a lot of fun, but everyone I know was glad when other ways of sharing and spreading music became available. As a niche, yes otherwise no.

As soon as recordable CDs were affordable, I switched completely, and never looked back.

Cassette tapes were nice when we didn't have anything better, but they were always a big pain in the back. Noisy, wearing out, skipping took a long time, making compilations took hours. I don't miss those times.

Nowadays, I can play mp3's on a $3 microcontroller, at excellent quality, and I love it.

Do you still use a kerosene lamp when you go into your barn at night?

It's been thirty years since I last used a cassette tape (the adaptor things you'd stick in the car radio don't count) and I've never once missed them.

Did a remix awhile back and printed to a cassette using a Tascam 414 Portastudio. Brought it back into the computer at about three quarters of normal speed twisting the dial occasionally. The other side of tape was Fleetwood Mac “The Dance” my dad dubbed for me in the 90s. The imperfections of that old hissy tape with backwards Stevie Nicks bleeding through collapsed the stereo field in a nice way. I welcome this trend!

Of course cassettes were all around me when I was younger; even my first car had a cassette deck. They seemed like an old relic in that time already - with the drawbacks mentioned in the article, so it was easy to put them away seemingly forever.

However, I got "back" into cassettes recently with some new releases. Grabbed a FiiO CP-13, and while the quality still isn't great, with low wow and flutter it's perfectly serviceable. There's one thing that made it stand out and felt like we missed something that's now become a lost art - absolutely no delay between pressing play and music playing. No buffering from a streaming service, no megabytes pushed into RAM, no decoding, no FIFOs being filled before the signal exiting through a DAC.

Cassettes lack the one thing LP records do better than digital formats: a large surface to display album art and roll a doobie.

Cassettes were never the best for audio fidelity but I always really liked the physicality of pushing the play button to move the heads into position. In some ways the inability to easily skip around a recording made listening a different experience than a CD or streaming.

Which is why I wrote a web component[0] that wraps an html audio element in an interface that mimics a (cheap) tape player.

[0] https://sheep.horse/2025/3/a_cassette_audio_control_for_the_...

I remember being SO HAPPY when I got rid of all my cassette tapes and vinyl discs for CDs. I was an early adopter of digital and, to this day I don't regret it. There's no way I'm going back.

What's next? VHS?

Based on the assumption that the appeal here is the experience, not the actual legacy media, it seems like it would be trivial to implement a digital stream standard so that audio cassette players could record and play a digital stream for higher fidelity with an identical experience? Or would that not be possible on legacy media because of bitrate limitations?

I can easily imagine the DAC/ADC and amplifier tuning/stream processing being an optional step so that legacy compatibility would be perfect, and even dual head setups that could do on the fly conversion. But perhaps the data density of the tape just isn’t there? Though it seems like with the type of data stuffing tech we use it flash memory and hdd these days to quadruple up on bits per domain, that it should be possible.

A friend’s daughter (young adult) told me about five years ago that cassette tapes are “cool” again. I was surprised because I always considered them to be the worst physical medium for music. I still have the cassette deck that I bought in the 90s for my hi-fi separate system but I haven’t listened to it in years. In the mid-2000s, I gave away most of my cassettes to a friend who had bought an old car that only had a tape deck. I only held on to recordings that were only released on cassette: demo tapes, bootlegs of live concerts that I had attended and some DIY releases from 90s’ punk bands that didn’t have (nor want) a record label.

Music sounded different when there were physically moving things that produced it. Live music, turn-table, cassette spindle that have a visible action. It's not fidelity. It's about connecting the sound to real world. We know tape is not producing the sound, but we know that it moves and movement causes sound.

Sound without any visible action or movement is a bit weird for our animal instincts.

Vinyl resurging, I can understand. But cassette tapes were always so fragile. I can't count how many got twisted up in the player and lost forever.

Their only redeeming quality was the mix tape.

Even when I was a kid an cassettes were the height of tech I hated them. They sound like crap and you can't even try to skip meaningfully and rewind is a nightmare.

Been following people who have been making electronic music mixes between two cassette decks and a mixer which are worth a listen. The thing that's interesting is that you can pitch up and down in ways that sound nice:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Kzsa1M7s1sk

Anyways, here's the mixes:

Trippy Ambient Cassette-Only Mix by Bop | Rewind Ritual 01

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=feHvyc69xe4

Cassette-Only Drum & Bass Set by BOP | Live at SK1 Records

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CHmBcBPV-3U

DnB mix with cassette tapes (DJ Ponkachonka)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r8jp5TcherI

Cassette mix drum & bass (2005 - 2010) (DJ Ponkachonka)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Cpqui0lo-v4

What's crazy is that at least the portable cassette decks aren't cheap anymore. Look on eBay at prices and be amazed

I still have a Nakamichi in storage

Another consumer deck I loved was made by Philips, who I once read "invented the tape deck"

I still have a Sony portable line level deck and powered stealth mics, too, for live taping. Concerts are way too expensive these days, though

Heck I still have a HHB CDR850 for converting from analog to digital

I gave away my Digi001

I still have 100 or so tapes, I gave away the rest

I remember buying 100s of Maxell XLIIs, Tower Records became the goto source

I'm not sure I have the ears anymore to notice the improvements, if any, of modern equipment over "vintage"

But most music produced today sounds like crap to me anyway. Too loud

I recently had to look at a particular kind of marketing, as a techie.

And suddenly I realized why Pinterest was so highly ranked on Google image searches.

It's not so much about a useful tool for individual users; rather, it's a marketing venue for manufacturing a lifestyle image that lets you extract money from people.

Like a fashion magazine with a greater illusion of participation.

Of course someone was going to decide that vinyl -- started as fringe genuine/hipster, and turned into marketable lifestyle -- had been milked or moated. The timing is right for you to extract more money for yourself with a new lifestyle twist to sell.

The exact gimmick doesn't much matter. Fire up the memetic lifestyle machine: we've got consumers (producers of money) to milk.

Not for me, analog audio is bulky and expensive compared to whats available today. The choices I see are, pirate a decent collection to manage and store on my computer that I can load onto a phone or "dedicated mp3 player", pay money for a subpar streaming service, listen to free radio streams, or just pick one of the billion playlists off youtube. I keep 2 MP3 CDs in my car for the rare times im in deep BFE and don't have reliable service, but I doubt 99% of people experience even that these days.

Personally, I’m holding out for the CD comeback.

Did people just forget the era of CD burning? Cassettes sucked.

Normal non-tech people were ripping CDs with iTunes. "Rip. Mix. Burn." was a nationwide if not worldwide advertisement.

All of this still works, if you have a CD drive.

If you're going to bother buying a cassette player... what's the allure for that over a CD-R and a basic CD player. CD players in cars are going away, but they're still around in houses and inexpensive small boomboxes.

But then... what's the allure of that over say any old audio player that takes SD cards or just a USB stick. A lot of modern cars and also stereo receivers and TVs will take a USB stick and play files from it. These players are incredibly prevalent and very easy to use. And loading the music from a computer or even a tablet is easy.

Of these three, cassette is the absolute least likely to be available anywhere.

You can still have the experience of making a playlist and even putting the files on a USB stick for someone. Importantly, they can actually play it on their own listening device.

I might use audio cassettes if I want to record my own audio temporarily (and later copy it to a CD if I decide to keep it; I have done this before), especially if the higher quality of CDs is not needed. For most uses I would probably not use audio cassette tapes; I prefer to use CDs.

(One feature of audio cassettes is that it will stay where it was left off (even if it is removed and used in a different player), although this can be both an advantage and a disadvantage (for one thing, each cassette has only one position). At least, you can easily rewind it back to the beginning. There are other advantages and disadvantages as well)

Pretty clear-cut example of the Submarine[0] genre.

[0] https://paulgraham.com/submarine.html For those who aren't up-to-date with their HackerNews lore.

So are 80s phones! Lol (I hated both)

https://tincan.kids/?srsltid=AfmBOopPdHpavGKB5WUVhZZDk34dKul...

The most interesting thing about this article was the Bow Wow Wow song linked. It's a song about music piracy (including a usage of the word "pirate") from 1980, including this stanza:

It used to break my heart when I went in your shop

And you said my records were out of stock

So I don't buy records in your shop

Now I tape them all 'cause I'm 'Top Of The Pops'

I'm waiting for the revival of computer games on cassettes.

Tapes stretch. Tone and tempo changes. You can't easily play along the track anymore. Tapes also break. Some players mess up the tape too, destroying precious cassettes. These were actual practical problems way back.

Taylor Swift (and Ed Sheeran) releasing her albums on vinyl is what caused vinyl prices to sky rocket, so not happy to hear she's moving onto cassettes too. I moved to collecting tapes due to vinyls being too expensive to get for anything but my most loved albums.

Some genres just feel better to listen to on tape too: lofi black metal, dungeon synth, hardcore, anything that likes to play with lo-fi sounds for aesthetic sounds nice on tapes and it really adds to the experience.

Cassettes were fairly good for car radios and little else. They aren't large enough to lead in cover art like LPs or even CDs. They are terrible for snapping and getting chewed up.

I still have some cassettes from years ago but definitely not the best format by a long shot.

My car radio has stopped playing cassettes for a while, I inherited this car with a full library on the glove compartment that I enjoyed playing from time to time. Guess it can be fixed?

I want consumer digital tape drives to make a comeback, for my backup needs.

The enterprise models are way too expensive.

I have never experience reel-to-reel. That is the format I would like to get into.

My sense though is that anything made of rubber on these old machines need replacing. I'm a little intimidated about spending so much on a device only to be unable to restore it.

Question marks are becoming more difficult for native speakers to use?

If you were free to invent a completely new form of physical media for music roughly in the same space as casettes/vinyls/cds, what would you invent?

Casettes save state but you to rewind. Vinyl have a great album art, but are fragile. CDs and Casettes are small and allow saving and making mix tapes at home. Can we mix and match? How?

If cassettes are still around, then the standard icons for 'play', 'rewind', etc will still make sense for a younger generation :-)

They aren't. They remain a fringe hipster staple. Like the vinyls.

From today : https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46201381

Should be possible to store digital music on cassettes as well just like you would with a tape backup. Would probably increase both the quality and storage capacity of cassettes.

Cassettes suck hard. Sorry, but apart from being smaller and failing in a different way to CDs, they suck hard.

Yes they were portable, and if you want a "pure" sound experience (you're not going to get that from cassette, you're going to get tape hiss and pitch wobbling) I can sorta understand. But DAT is where its at if you want that.

Cassettes have terrible dynamic range, and hiss like a mother fucker. Sure it evokes a sound of your parent's youth, in the same way that those tedious fuckers talk about vinyls "warmth" but objectively they both suck bollocks.

The casing though, thats great. I do like the album art. thats nice.

I understand the allure, but ultimately they just represent more plastic pollution (along with vinyl).

Digital media is a great chance to not collect more plastic stuff.

Wish i had kept my old Sony walkman! Quite a sturdy guy as i recall ..

Well-timed article. Today I discovered the FM-84 Atlas album.

I find it depressing that there seem to be only two ways to distribute media and manage one's audio collection: Either ultra-convenient but fully locked down streaming services - or analog "vintage" media like vinyl or cassettes, which do give you a physical medium under your full control, but also require you to forego all the progress we made with digital media.

The one thing that's absent: Plain old audio files that you can store on your hard drive and copy to your phone or other devices.

Edit: Ok, there are still more options left than I thought. I take that back then :)

weren't we done with this millennial nostalgia hipster bcrap in the 2010s?

Quick! Fins a Nakamichi 550 Portable. Amazing sonic and build quality.

whatever is old is new again. it's a story as old as time.