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For small indie artists, cassette tapes make perfect sense. Releasing digitally is of course the easiest way these days but artists usually want a physical arti
by naas 8y ago
For small indie artists, cassette tapes make perfect sense. Releasing digitally is of course the easiest way these days but artists usually want a physical artifact as well. It's easier to sell a tape than a download and it's nice to be able to touch your achievement. Vinyl pressing is insanely expensive in comparison and usually requires much larger batches to be produced
- icebraining 8y agoBut.. why not CDs?
- hannasanarion 8y agoMaybe because of the misconception that CD is a compressed digital format like mp3? Cuz it's not. CDs use the same sound encoding method as vinyl, just stored in variable reflectiveness instead of variable height. The "files" you see when you pop one in your computer is an abstraction generated by the operating system, they're not really there, there's not any digital data after the table of contents.
- icebraining 8y agoWell, no, CDs are definitively digital, hence the format being called CDDA (Compact Disc Digital Audio). Everything is encoded as binary, not variable: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Compact_disc#Physical_details https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Compact_disc#Physical_details But still, that hardly makes cassettes better sounding.
- naas 8y agoThat's not true. CDs store discrete data and vinyls continous data. However, it is true that CDs can store formats of higher quality than mp3s that cause no sound degradation. I think the point I was trying to make was that tape is something different than digital. You can download high fidelity files as well and if you buy a CD you'll probably end up importing the files anyway. With that said, cassettes are definitely not a hifi option and I'm quite sure it's genre dependent as well.
- mc32 8y agoThere was this thing called Digital Audio Tapes, for what it’s worth. Never got much consumer traction though, eventually repurposed for digital data storage, DDS.
- einr 8y agoAnd there was also DCC, the Digital Compact Cassette. DAT, of course, saw reasonable success in the recording industry for transferring 2-track digital lossless audio to and fro studios and such before CD burners were commonly available. DCC saw very little, if any, success anywhere :)
- einr 8y agoOf course, you are completely wrong as other posters have pointed out -- CD is indeed a fully digital format (but it does not have a filesystem, just a continous stream of binary data with a TOC section near the beginning of the disc to tell the CD player about the timecode location of the tracks) I thought it would be worth mentioning that you may be confusing CD with Laserdisc, the video format. Those look a lot like huge CD's but are in fact analog and work more like what you describe.
- MivLives 8y agoBecause everyone sells CDs. On tape you have a distinct feeling. The weirdest album I've seen for sale at a show was a Sega Saturn (or maybe it was a Megadrive) cartridge.
- einr 8y agoIt would have been a Megadrive cart then, because the Saturn used... you guessed it, CD's ;)
- barbecue_sauce 8y agoBecause CDs are boring?
- imgabe 8y agoIsn't burning CDs just as easy as making tapes, if not easier? It's also better sound quality and you'd have a larger audience of people who have a CD player lying around than people who have cassette players. At least, I imagine anyone who has a cassette player also has a CD player while many people who have CD players don't have a cassette player.