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from the what's-old-is-still-old-but-they-are-making-more dept.
Submitted via IRC for TheMightyBuzzard
National Audio Co. is the only company in the U.S. that produces cassette tape. Now, as cassette tapes enjoy a resurgence in popularity, National Audio has less than a year's supply left of the stuff, The Wall Street Journal reports.
For the last 15 years, National Audio's co-owner and president Steve Stepp has been clinging to his company's dwindling supply of music-quality magnetic tape. In 2014, National Audio's South Korean supplier stopped making the material, so Stepp bought out their remaining stock before they shuttered — and has been left with a shrinking stockpile ever since.
Although the demand for tape has increased in recent years, the quality and supply has not; National Audio has long relied on outdated gear that Stepp jokes is "the finest equipment the 1960s has to offer." That's why the company — which makes cassettes for everyone from indie bands to Metallica — is planning to build the U.S.'s first high-grade tape manufacturing line in decades.
Crap! Where am I going to store my TRS-80 programs now?
Source: https://theweek.com/speedreads/735269/america-running-cassette-tape
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Monday November 13 2017, @07:22PM (12 children)
Devil's advocate time.
Given the DRM that's invading every aspect of personal computing, such as Intel TPM, doesn't it make sense to fall back to a more free (as in freedom) format such as simple magnetic tape, especially for something that tends to attract free spirits like music?
(No, I don't expect that's why hipsters are doing it....)
(Score: 2, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Monday November 13 2017, @07:26PM (7 children)
Speaking as a (real-life, gig-playing, self-managing, indie) musician, in small runs tape is still cheaper to publish than even CD.
The reasons can come from the supply and the demand ends of the spectrum.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by frojack on Monday November 13 2017, @09:04PM (6 children)
Except people have no where to play it. Cassette players have vanished from cars, nobody is really building home component audio systems with tape players any more, and you can't even find a walkman anymore.
Furthermore, I doubt your claim. 5 minute of web searching turned up: Tape tends to be more like $20/tape.
With blank CD media (reasonable quality) being available for about 20 cents a disk.
A small volume CD printer/Recorder is around $500 bucks, artist communities often buy and share these.
You don't want to get all techie, you buy professionally packaged CDs with artwork for just under a buck apiece.
There are even companies that specialize in getting you published on Amazon/Google, etc.
No, you are mistaken. I've always had this sig.
(Score: 3, Touché) by EvilSS on Monday November 13 2017, @09:17PM
You should spend more than 5 minutes then because you are off by a factor of 10.
(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Monday November 13 2017, @09:36PM (4 children)
Just the other day, I handed a tape to a woman who has a tape player in her car - and no CD. And you're missing the (quite substantial) boombox community. Oh, and do a quick Amazon search for cassette players.
You may be surprised just precisely how incredibly wrong you are.
http://www.atozaudio.com/html/azezcass-J.html [atozaudio.com]
Search better next time. 100 60-minute tapes with full colour j-cards, wrapped, $180.95. From the same site, comparable packaging, $2.50 each for CDs at the same volume, and that's a damn good price.
You're right! ... if you're buying at least a thousand. Realistic prices for small run (a couple of hundred) is nowhere near tape levels of pricing.
You're right! ... but if you want to actually hand fans a physical thing that you can sign rather than signing body parts, online publishing ain't where you're going. Is it in the publication mix? Sure. Is it the only thing on the list? Not for me, and not for many, many others.
(Score: 2) by bzipitidoo on Tuesday November 14 2017, @12:23AM
Does anyone want to buy my modest vinyl record and cassette tape collection? Got some VHS too.
Every time I see one of these stories, the first thing I want to know is where can I unload that old crap.
(Score: 2) by urza9814 on Tuesday November 14 2017, @07:14PM (2 children)
https://duplication.cdbaby.com/quoter/default.aspx [cdbaby.com]
100 CDs, full color printed and packaged in jewel cases, for $139. Pretty close to a buck a piece, and significantly less than what you quoted for tapes. Higher capacity too.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday November 15 2017, @02:59AM
I just took like-for-like from a given vendor that does both. I didn't say it was best in market - and cdbaby isn't the best choice for a lot of people (look at their T&Cs).
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday November 20 2017, @06:40PM
Dude, just followed your link to CDBABY.
What I'm seeing isn't anywhere near what you're posting. I went to basic, CDs in Jewel Cases, 100 count ...
$418.00 before shipping.
I couldn't get anywhere near $200 (or $2/each, the tape ballpark) until I went for slim jewel cases.
Where's the secret button to get the $1/CD jewel case packed and wrapped 100 count small run quote?
(Score: 5, Insightful) by Grishnakh on Monday November 13 2017, @07:32PM (3 children)
No, where did you get that idea?
Digital audio is superior in every way to analog, given a high enough bitrate and sampling frequency. TPM is a canard: a standard audio CD does not have DRM on it, it's just simple PCM audio. There's many audio formats that support higher quality with lossy and lossless codecs, and they're all DRM-free too: I recomment Ogg Opus and Ogg Vorbis and FLAC.
DRM isn't a given in computing by any means. You can easily buy yourself a Raspberry Pi for $50 or less which has no support for DRM through TPM modules, run Linux on it, and listen to audio in one of the above Free formats.
Just because Windows 10 is spying on you doesn't mean you need to listen to audio on shitty old analog formats that never had decent sound quality; it just means you need to stop using Windows.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday November 14 2017, @08:02AM
I actually wanted to buy a tape recorder for my kids (3 and 1 right now).
I can trust a 4 year old with something more or less mechanical, he will understand exactly what's happening (therefore there will be no need to take it apart until he's 8 and starts wondering about the motor), and there's no risk of damaging anything important if he wants to play/record.
a computer is somewhat more expensive, and much more complicated to operate.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday November 14 2017, @08:23AM
One of the Ogg developers has an article about this (Google it if you care). The signal to noise ratio (S/N) can be converted directly to bits per sample.
If I remember the numbers:
Home recorded cassette tape is about 6 bits.
Professionally recorded cassette tape is about 8 bits.
Vinyl gets up to a whopping 10 bits.
CD's are 16 bits, since then the numbers have only been going up.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday November 14 2017, @02:30PM
dude who would do all that stuff you listed
just buy a $20 mp3 player and get a 2 gig CF card or something. better yet it supports headphones and probably AA batteries so you can replace them easily and even use rechargables if you wanted. great for workouts and probably won't break if you drop it
people do not need to carry their ENTIRE library with them, or have internet connection.
you make me laugh. you rag on windows 10 to play media as if its the only thing, then a raspebrry pi for $50? you think regular people are going to set one up? to use an actual computer to play music? christ you can get a used android tablet with a terrible horrible screen running 2.x something that plays mp3s just fine if you can figure out where to shove the memory chip.
i cant think of anybody ever that just wants to listen to music on the cheap that even know what you said, except for the CD and DRM acronyms. they arent worried about windows 10 i promise you so stop being an IT guy and just press play