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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the demand for tape has increased in recent years, the quality and supply has not; National Audio has long relied on outdated gear that Stepp jokes is "the finest equipment the 1960s has to offer."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: 2) by Grishnakh on Monday November 13 2017, @09:32PM (5 children)
Why would you need to order 500 USB sticks with data? Just copy it yourself. One album's worth of MP3s is maybe 50MB, guessing; it shouldn't take more than 10 seconds to copy that much. Find some kid to do it for you if you're that busy, but the whole thing shouldn't take more than 4 hours. You can do it while watching a movie.
Now if you really want those USB sticks to be professionally printed, that's another matter.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday November 13 2017, @09:51PM (2 children)
Try more like 400MB for FLACs. But it'll still fit on a dirt cheap USB stick.
The thing is, making it nice and memorable and a touchstone for fans means it costs more. Then you're talking engraving or printing or embossing or something like that, and that costs money.
It's not like you're handing out copies of Ubuntu in Outer Buttfuckistan.
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday November 14 2017, @08:31AM (1 child)
Why the **** would you use FLAC - the highest quality format available - for people who are willing to listen to cassette tape - the lowest quality format available outside of museums?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday November 14 2017, @04:54PM
TL;DR: because not being a dick to your fans for no reason.
If you provide someone a medium, the general understanding is that you're providing them as much as the medium allows, rather than the minimum you think that they might accept (unless you're Sony, I guess).
There's no point cramming things into lossy formats unless you're in a strictly space-constrained environment, and modern small format digital storage is so fast at retrieval, and so capacious, that the savings you might get from using MP3 and a smaller storage unit are negligible.
Modern (especially electronic) producers do their best to tune their quality, including compression levels and so on, to satisfy demanding ears. So Sonny Celphone listens to 128Kbps stuff through his crappy DAC on his phone, through his Beats by Appledre? Good for him. His experience is not diminished by anything other than his personal choices.
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Monday November 13 2017, @10:25PM
Geez, what a colossal waste of time. There are much better things to do with 4 hours than mindlessly duplicating USB sticks -- like reading and posting on soylentnews. And you still have to find a supplier for all the USB sticks anyway.
The neighbourhood kid probably messes up a couple drives because he's too busy playing cow clicker to do things well, and those drives won't be suitable for sale. It might still better than doing it yourself but if you have to personally spend 2 hours checking every single drive that doesn't sound like much fun either.
We can expect pros to do a consistent job and instead of 4 hours of my time it takes 5 minutes: send money and specs, receive finished product.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday November 14 2017, @02:36PM
that's about right; 3.5MB or so per song with 128kpbs flat rate or VBR peaking to 384kbps.
it takes longer than 10 seconds to rip the albumns, though.. maybe 10 to 15 minutes each depending on how the audio transfer is accomplished. if its analog its the full play time... if its a slow reader [stuff is cheaper now than it used to be... because most pcs that have cd roms now don't advertise based on their performance, just that they have one] it will take longer even if not done via that analog method.