alt Hacker NewsMy 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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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!)
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.
> 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.