I hope you get nothing but hip hop fans and metalheads.

"Excuse me sir do you have the new Big K.R.I.T album!?"

Elph: " :mad: "



lol :o:

Congrats though Elph!

Get ready to be asked if you liked the new *insert terrible band/singer here* album and if you have tested all the used records/tapes/cds to make sure they work.

I feel bad for all your future patrons.

I'm sure he'll be peddling "Yacht Rock" on unsuspected customers with his authoritative knowledge of the subject he obtained from your journal.

"I'm looking for something with some soothing Michael McDonald backing vocals. Possibly with Neil Stubenhaus on bass?" mumbled a timid looking 50-something with spectacles and frost-tipped spikes.

*elph screams a Commie battle cry and pulls his shiv from behind the counter*

"MORISSSEYYYYYYYYYYY IS ALL YOU NEEEEED" he snarls with all the fervor a white middle class boy can muster.

Hi there, Ants. Nice to see you around :D And grats on your new job, elphenor. You can peddle me yacht rock and Morrissey any time. I got my Steely Dan Aja shirt on as I write this.

Myself am currently having parental leave, which is why I have had the time to hang around a bit lately. Unfortunately, my responsibilities still require me to take time off parental leave to work and today I wasn't able to because the kid hasn't been sleeping like he should, so.. work stress still haunts me. But the weekend is almost here!

Also, I am starving for new musical influences and have been for the last 5 years or so.

Have you considered neo-Nazi oi punk?

No, but I'm sure you're eagerly brimming with recommendations

You have a very handsome (or just very photogenic) family! Congrats on the squishy new addition :)

Woop! Thank you so much, Steph :love:

How are you doing? :)

all vinyl records are redundant at this point. It's just a novelty item.

"But I'm an audiophile...."

Bitch please :rolleyes:

Pretty much my reaction to this too, especially after getting more into music production.

don't care lol

Whatever minute sound difference it has it outweighed by the inconvenience of the physical medium and the maintenance required

Unless you're a dork who enjoys that sorta thing cause it's vintage in which case see: novelty item

I hear cassettes have made a comeback which is even more of a mystery to me. They're small with small art and not as displayable, so not as good a collectible. Plus, who wants to blindly rewind or fast forward to change songs?

We wanna rid the world of plastic waste and reduce co2 footprints, yet we're gonna produce these outdated mediums that noone really needs.

Bro don't argue with trendy bourgious white people. They know what's real.

Thats not a valid analogy lol

I would say the inconvenience of having to take the record out and place it on the turntable etc. is part of what you pay for with LPs. People miss the more tangible experience connected to music listening and let's admit it.. sleeves, especially gatefolds, are pretty nice.

But sound quality is worse if anything, though I fully expect people may enjoy the thinner sound you get from having to master out low end to preserve groove space.

Cassettes don't make any sense for me because even the experience of using them sucks. I remember how inconvenient they were back in the day and how ****ty I thought they were compared to CDs and even LPs. I never missed them. They're the worst.

This scenario is so fake and contrived. Getting your music on services like Spotify and YouTube music is as cheap as getting a distrokid account, can even be done for free, and is likely much easier than making "cheap" cassettes.

For various reasons. The days when sharing bootlegs and underground music on cassettes was the most practical option is long gone, so I find the current fad kinda inauthentic. It's just cultural mimicry with no real basis to it other than it being fad-y.

But mostly, it bothers me due to the reason posted above. If people wanna listen to tapes, someone has to make tape decks and someone has to make tapes. These things have to be shipped by container ships and trailers. It creates plastic waste and other kinds of pollution. And all for novelty items which noone needs which are ultimately comparatively impractical.

The only thing cassettes were ever good for was when blank ones were the only way to record something. Even then they were inconvenient. Leave one too close to a magnetic field (eg speakers) and you'd lose elements of what was on it (what we used to call drop outs) - "I never meant to cause you - le rain! Purple ra- want to - bathing in the - honey I know..." etc. Jesus it was annoying.

Then as tore says, the mere "inconvenience" of running the tape forward or back (we didn't see it as such then because like I say, there was no other way and so we just accepted it) - if you'd not recorded up to the end of the tape you'd have to fast forward so you could flip it over and not end up in the middle of the first song on the other side of the tape - and as for tangles! Jesus. Every other tape, after a while, would get caught up and ruined. So not only had you this: I CAN'T GET NO-OH SAT-IS-FACTION! I CAN'T GET NOBRLURRBLKEWURBLEWEEIOOOOOOOO...." Tape AND recorder ruined, so you had to extract the cassette from the deck and TRY to untangle the actual magnetic tape from where it had twisted around the spindles before you could use the deck again.

No ****ing thanks. Cassettes were a necessary evil but I never want to go back to the tyranny of the tape again thank you very much.

This. I've never met a person who grew up with cassette tapes who ever thought highly of them.

If you could perfectly replicate the sound of a live performance would you just skip the concert then?

Nah cause it's not just the sound, it's the experience of being there with other people getting trashed / trying to get laid / etc plus being in the same giant room as the musicians you idolize

Just like vinyl isn't just about the sound. It's about novelty seeking. Looking for that special sound that "can't be gotten" digitally. Plus the whole vintage aesthetic involved in the medium. Like, I get why people like that as a hobby. Doesn't bother me if that's what you're into. I used to collect Chinese garbage and scraps of cardboard from trucks I unloaded at Lowes distribution center cause I loved the idea of having a weird connection to another part of the world that I interacted with only inadvertently. So I totally get novelty seeking behavior.

I just get annoyed/amused by how every single person with vinyl records claims it's all about the pursuit of this unique sound and don't acknowledge that at least 50% of it is that they like the idea of vinyl. Just say that instead of pretending to have special ears or something and I would respect vinyl hipsters more. But hipsters can never own their hipster behavior. They're like vampires hiding from the daylight.

Sorry if I've annoyed you. I have gone on bashing something you like and work with, after all. It's nothing personal.

You got a point about there being bigger fish to fry, but it also seems fallacious to say something good is not worth doing because there's an even bigger, better thing that could potentially be done.

Or that it's okay to throw candy wrappers on the street because waste problems are so much bigger elsewhere.

Something that is special about media like music, books and films is that their digital representations serve us very well, so western society could basically get on just fine without these things existing physically even today.

It's a step we're basically ready for.

lol @ the idea of giving someone a cassette of music you recorded. That's proper psychopathic behavior in 2021 bruh. I would certainly laugh at you for that one pal.

Reminds me of when I worked at Walmart in Florida

It was like 2009 or so.. CDs were still a thing sorta... And on break we're all outside smoking and it's me and pretty much half the Haitian dudes I knew in lake worth.. we all got hired on at Walmart at the same time in a hiring frenzy... And so this white guy sees this group of mostly black men standing outside smoking and decides to come up and give us the spiel about do you like to check out local artists.. hands my friend Nelson a CD and says that's his music and to check it out. Real heartfelt moment. You could tell he was nervous too but Nelson played it off like yeah man definitely we'll check it out.

So anyway he walks away and as we're heading back inside the store this fat black cashier girl is walking the opposite direction Nelson walks right up to her and is like "Yo, this that new transformers" (movie had just come out) and hands her the CD then we keep walking. **** was hilarious :D

yeah.

hilarious.

Actually, I can see where he’s coming from with that.
With a live band, you can’t have them move ahead to
a favorite song. On YouTube, you can. So saying that
you can’t easily move ahead on a cassette is missing
the point.

All of these formats do have their own sound to them whether they’re vinyl, cassette, mini-disc, DAT, and so on. Because of this, there are various desires coupled with rituals that people will go thru to hear them. I see no problem with that. Sometimes convenience is the driving force, sometimes not. I have all kinds of recordings not available digitally - even new stuff that’s available completely or partially away from digital. Actually, cassettes are being offered by all kinds of labels now. On meeting one of our forum members here a couple years ago, the first thing he did was give me a cassette of his music. Even tho I already had a digital copy, I accepted his gift and I still play the cassette, because it does have a different sound to it (and a convenience). Cassettes dropping out or being eaten up just means that you either stored them in a crappy way or haven’t cleaned your deck in ages. Yeah, LPs are now too expensive for the often lousy pressings, but there’s a historical reason for that having to do with the closing of several pressing plants, and other factors. ...and this idea that some people are too cool to accept CDs from someone just trying to ply their trade is just asinine. What the fuck do you think all of this product is anyway? They’re audio business cards. Like nearly all activity, people don’t always have some secret desire to annoy or feel superior or whatever nefarious quality you want to pin on them, it might be that they have a ritual or convenience that works for their current lifestyle.

Relevant quote -

- Brian Eno, A Year With Swollen Appendices

Nah, weird thrift store tapes are a legitimate thing. Most of them date back to the 80s and 90s before it was so easy to upload your music to the web.

Also let's see you run the tape from your distrokid account across the room to warble the sound while it plays. Until then, cassettes have a place.

Information is physical, and storing it indefinitely will likely contribute to a wider negative environmental impact than the one-time production of physical media.

Yes, there's stuff like server upkeep power consumption. This will get greener as we change to cleaner and more sustainable power sources.

But all in all, the digital versions are here to stay. At least until the digital apocalypse comes. You could possibly make the argument that we should turn the servers off, produce only the bare minimum of what we need in terms of physical mediums and live a cleaner existence that way in the very long run, but it would seem unlikely and non-sensical

Oh good, it'll just fix itself.

Then you agree that it was pretty silly of you to introduce that as a point against cassettes.

Applying just a bit of logic, you might realise that the servers where music and movies can be stored is also an important backbone piece of infrastructure that also enables pretty much the Internet and all the services that exist there.

Can the same be said for tape decks?

The transportation and polymer industries that you pinned on cassettes both have wide reaching uses, yes.

Yeah that's not what his point was about though.

In any case:
There are different sounds to every medium, but for most people (including me) it's definitely mostly about the aesthetic. There's nothing wrong with that. For me it lies in childhood memories because my grandpa and my mom used to play me lps when I was a kid. And also the reason I started buying records is that some things aren't available in digital form, or if they are, not for free. And if I'm gonna pay for music I want the fun physical object. But yeah, the snobbishness that some people feel about it is nonsense

Alright, I'll concede. Please then, if you can, what is the point you're trying to make?

Edit:

I'll clarify my own; we can pollute less by not producing physical mediums (besides servers/data storage) for distributing media like books, movies and music.

Cassettes are fine.

Started a 2nd Snapchat group!

Had a fight last week and someone in the first group(that is 7 years deep now), said "Create a new group then!"


So I did.... https://i.imgur.com/N0W9kVR.png

All new people!



Have a nice day musicbanters!

Pff, knew it.