Are gen xers always mad? Honestly, they seem to be the chilliest generation that’s reached adulthood.
That might be why I’m unaware. I don’t have TikTok. Do YouTube shorts, but I guess I’ve just sort of missed em
Here’s a short with a dude laughing at a few:
Mostly just centres around a few Gen Xers ranting about how they “grew up feral” and “had battles for respect and turf”. Not that bad really. But when I see it, I can’t help but think of this meme:
I’m still on mp3s. I have gigs of music on my Plex server and just use that. Fuck subscriptions.
Nobody’s forcing anybody to use subscriptions… still got my MP3 collection from 20 years ago
Your collection is older than I am and I’ve been building up my MP3 playlist. Why pay or watch ads when you can simply have the files themselves?
And the portable MP3 players are most likely still gonna work nowadays. Most of the them had AAA batteries so no need to worry about flat batteries, iPods have a lot of replacement parts as well as upgrades, ex. SD card conversion kits
I thought we were just adaptable and “whatever”.
I still have CDs and records. It’s all burned to digital format, but still. I can’t imagine that anyone misses cassettes.
I don’t think anyone actually misses them. The only people I’ve seen that are actually into them now are way to young to be nostalgic for them.
Cassettes seem to interest people pushing back against the trend of instant gratification singles. They like being forced to listen to an entire album. Sometimes it’s just the object itself as merch. and has no relation to listening to the music. Many people buying records and tapes have no means to play either. It’s also all ancient retro tech to them and a tape is just a portable record that won’t skip. Similar to the resurgence in popularity of film formats in photography. There is even an artist out there that released their new single on a wax cylinder format that is damn near impossible for anyone but the curator of an audio format museum to play properly. If you’re nostalgic for the trappings of a time that you never experienced, is that nostalgia or some other thing?
Cassettes wear out. I did that with a couple back in the day. Whereas a record or CD is a solid master copy.
Unless it’s that trendy decor thing people Hoover up albums for, not to listen to, but to hang on their walls. Maybe they’re trying cassettes now to try to be unusual en masse.
There’s some nostalgia. Also, cassettes can sound very good. If you have a good cassette, a good recorder and a good audio source, that is.
Eh. The more you listen though, the worse it gets. Tapes are an inherently temporary medium. If that’s your jam, it’s cool. But I don’t want my music degrading over time.
I mean, I wouldn’t use them as primary mean of keeping a music collection. But they’re great if you happen to have an old sound deck or car that doesn’t take CD. You make yourself a handful of mixtapes and you’re ready to go. Much nicer than some bluetooth-cassette adapter.
I don’t wish we’d go back to using cassettes as a primary music medium, but I think it would be fun to revisit that era of tech and play with them for a little while. Like I think if my 10 year old niece discovered a box of cassette tapes and asked “what are these” I think we could have an hour or two of fun playing with my old boom box.
I still buy CDs, and I still rip them myself (usually 320kbps CBR; I’ve noted that 320kbps VBR sounds really bad in comparison), and manually put them on an SD card that goes into my phone. Sometimes I even use a set of Shure headphones with a <<gasp>> CORD!
If you rip the CD yourself, no digital platform can reach into your home and take that from you. When you ‘buy’ digital licenses to listen to music on streaming platforms, changes in licensing can mean that Spotify, or whoever, can remove your ability to listen to it.
I also love album art. Bands like Clutch make interesting artwork that conveys the vibe of the music is interesting ways. It’s part of a concept, not just the songs. But I’m lazy and now I let the small number of CDs that I still buy stack up until I have a bunch to rip all at once rather than on the day I get them.
Since I usually buy my CDs at concerts, I usually have 4+ to rip in one go.
I still need to re-rip Fallujah, Dawn of Ouroboros, Persefone, and Vulvodynia CDs; I ripped them as 320KBPS VBR, and the sound is muddy, with all of the bright edges and crispness gone. Everything that I’ve ripped to 320KBPS CBR is fine, so I assume it’s something about a variable bit rate that’s trashing the sound. It’s unlistenable to me; it’s so apparent compared to anything else I listen to that it’s completely distracting me from the music itself.
Favorite band of mine was running a kickstarter for their next album. They had lots of add-ons you could also purchase, from T-shirts and such to copies of their previous albums on various formats. I bought a total of five albums on CD, ripped them all to FLAC and now the discs sit safely in my CD rack and I can listen to the music on any device I own. To deprive me of my music you would have to commit a burglary.
Streaming? Hell no! Ripped to Flac, on a 500GB card in my phone. I live in a never ending dance party.
