Comment by scrumper | Hacker News Reader

Comment by scrumper | Hacker News Reader

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My daughter, 10, was really pushing for some way to access her own music back in the summer. At her age I got a walkman and was already making my own mixtapes off the radio using the big system in the living room. We swapped tapes at school, did all the things in the article. I just couldn't see that being a thing now in 2022. So we got her a HomePod Mini for her birthday and, sure, she plays her tunes and is happy-ish but there's no headphones (it's not private) and no way to take it with her, no sharing, no discovery, no peer-swapping at school - it's pretty crappy compared to the experience I had at that age. I'd have bought her an iPod but of course they were discontinued the year before so impossible to justify.

At the same time her friend bought her a little Jensen walkman with a copy of the Guardians of the Galaxy Awesome Mix on it. She loves it! So I bought her some blank cassettes and now she makes mixtapes by playing off the HomePod into the Jensen's microphone. Quality is shit but she's young and nobody will be more pleased than me (among other things, a semi-pro audio engineer) when she complains and asks for something better. At that point I'll figure out some unholy solution involving a computer and a headphone cable and a tape deck. So much more complicated! So much for progress.

It really is an ideal format. Cassette is perfect. Siri most assuredly is not.

> peer-swapping

Right.

A guy at the pizza place I worked at handed me a cassette called "Reckoning" for a band called R.E.M. Literally changed my life.

I'm sure a lot of others have stories like that.

Same guy asked to borrow a cassette of mine one day — said he wanted to dupe it. It was well known then that the only thing worse than a cassette was a cassette copy of a cassette so I made some sort of comment to that effect. "It will sound better than your original," he said smuggly. "My tape recorder has dbx."

Okay.

My copy will sound better than the original because I am recording onto "metal" tapes and I have Dolby surround sound

It'd be interesting to hear them side by side and evaluate for yourself.

A tangent on the peer-swapping thing.

I grew up at a strange intersection between physical media and internet piracy. In Russia. I don't remember anyone swapping music on physical media often (we did swap computer games on CDs tho, that's how I first experienced GTA Vice City), but in high school we had a better thing for music: VKontakte. It's the Russian Facebook, except it had, and to some extent still has, an enormous catalog of streamable MP3s. You have your personal playlist on your profile where you add music you find in the search or upload your own files. You can also post music to people's walls. As VKontakte was such an enormous part of everyone's life back then, everyone you knew IRL was on your friends list, and then some. And you could flip through their music (subject to privacy settings, but most had it open for everyone or for friends) and discover something amazing. People would often point to their VK playlist when asked "what kinds of music do you listen"; I still do sometimes. Ah, and of course the human-ness of all that — some people would edit the title and artist fields of their uploaded tracks to say something personal. This one is mostly gone though because VK started doing talking to recording companies a while ago and replaced all mp3s for which there is a licensed version with one.

IIRC Spotify has a somewhat similar feature where anyone can create a public playlist. You can even follow people. It does have some of the same properties, but it's not quite the same thing because it's a separate app. The social features in Spotify feel like an afterthought. The separate social graph doesn't help either.

If you don't mind reflashing a player's firmware and sometimes a bit of hacking, Rockbox supports many (mostly old, unfortunately) players, but by being Open Source and not tied to any proprietary cloud or similar service, it doesn't prevent the user from moving and/or sharing their music files, since the players essentially become USB drives without any restrictions.

https://www.rockbox.org/

I installed it on both my Sansa Clip Zip players, and kept it until the day the last one of them died. Unfortunately I couldn't find a new device for installing it and had to settle for a cheap player with surprisingly good hardware, but also the crappiest firmware I have ever seen.

> If you don't mind reflashing a player's firmware and sometimes a bit of hacking, Rockbox supports many (mostly old, unfortunately) players, but by being Open Source and not tied to any proprietary cloud or similar service, it doesn't prevent the user from moving and/or sharing their music files, since the players essentially become USB drives without any restrictions.

> https://www.rockbox.org/

> I installed it on both my Sansa Clip Zip players, and kept it until the day the last one of them died. Unfortunately I couldn't find a new device for installing it and had to settle for a cheap player with surprisingly good hardware, but also the crappiest firmware I have ever seen.

I still have some Sansa player with rockbox, used it for podcast and helped developing such functionality (podcasts/player support) in one media player app. But then I switched to Spotify, and lost interest in helping.

I loved my Sansa back in the days when I still had a flip phone. Now that my phone has everything including unlimited* data and I'm going to carry my phone on a run anyway it doesn't really serve a purpose for me anymore. I will always carry fond memories of it getting me through some long, dark early morning runs.

I think many artist interviews or respective wiki pages mention how their early taste in music was influenced by wondering through their parents music collection - be it tapes, vinyl or CDs. With everyone on their own Spotify account that sounds way more complicated.

Is it though? You can flip through a catalog that would put even great record stores to shame effortlessly. You could just choose to listen to your favorites over and over instead, but discs hardly prevented that.

But having all the music is essentially the same as having none of the music. Having access to parents’ music is about the curation more than the expanse. This is why I still buy my music rather than rent it with something like Spotify.

I don't find that's true at all. I've discovered quite a few genres this way that I might not have ever bothered to check out if I had to go buy an album first (after all you want to be pretty sure you are going to like it before you part with your money).

It's an allure of single-purpose devices. All of that can be done on phone but you need to know what app to use, how to send someone a file etc. vs just press record and get the sound on the artifact you can share.

I want to see a poll of how many gen-Z'ers know what an MP3 is and how to use one. I have a feeling that it's around 5%.

I've started burning people mixes on compact disk again recently. My car even has a CD player, which I think should be a requirement. Tape is great, but slightly less durable.

My one rule. Do not burn full albums!

This way it's more about sharing and promotion and less about stealing.

Archival is another story... which I'm honestly also working on, albeit slowly. Far too many of my songs have been disappeared.

My mother's new truck (new as in 2016) somehow doesn't have a CD player in it and I was totally baffled by that.

I got mine a speaker with a microSD card slot. It works well but getting stuff onto the cards is a bit convoluted: if she likes a particular youtube video she needs to run youtube-dl, then pull out the audio track, and copy that to the SD card. Maybe if there was a walkman-format device with a SD card slot that would be better because it would be more private with headphones, and it would be possible to swap mp3s with friends.

Yeah I thought briefly that SD cards could become the new cassettes but they just won't. None of them have computers. Phones, iPads, Chromebooks yes. Everything streams. There's no physical download and share option.

Actually... as I write this, I realize you're hinting at something I think exists, in a form: a digital voice recorder. (Aka Dictaphone, since we're in the nostalgia thread.)

Edit: And right in front of me is a Tascam DR-40, which is a handheld recorder which takes stereo in (or internal mic) onto SD card. Very un kid friendly but simpler devices must surely exist.

So far as I have found, there really isn't "a simpler DR-40" on the market, at least one that's widely available as consumer electronics...and I thought surely there would be.

And probably because of DRM/intellectual property/anti-piracy lockdown of consumer computing devices. The success of the iTunes ecosystem was because Napster was the statistically likely alternative future for the intellectual property industries.

Not quite sure what you're after, but a used Zoom H1 may work for you: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Category:Zoom_H1_Handy_Re...

Stereo recording and playback, SD card, only one giant "rec" button on the front panel, about three adjusting buttons (mp3 vs wav selection for recording, etc) on the back panel, and some on the sides. Naturally, it also has line/mic-in. Notably, it also works as a USB microphone; and I used mine as the audio interface for an old Thinkpad T42 with great success.

The sound quality is considered very good for its price.

Only thing that annoyed me was the slowness of forward and rewind. Also, as with all SD-card devices, there's still a lag when you switch from one file to another. Compared to the instant-on playback from a cassette, it does feel cumbersome.

I miss cassettes, too, even if I don't remember being really thrilled about all that ff-ing or rew-ing in the 90s.

I still use my Sandisk Sansa Clip bought in 2008 for podcasts and music. Use it almost every day. 2GB internal storage, no SD card. Sturdy, simple unit, great sound quality. Works flawlessly after all these years.

Sorry for not being clear.

The Zoom H1’s run about $125 new.

A cassette recorder is $25 new despite all the additional material and logistics costs.

I was surprised that there is nothing in that price range.

I wound up buying a Tascam DR 05. It was about $125 at the time. eBay’d a year later. I just couldn’t commit to its interface abstractions and workflow.

It lived in the space where the software was motivated toward making design and manufacture easier rather than the use pleasurable.

If I have to menu dive every time I use it, why not just use my phone? Or tape since I can use a pen to name things…not scroll through 128 options one letter at a time.

And to be clear, not using my phone (or laptop) is why I buy hardware.

I see a need for a simple divice which has two SD card slots and which can play music / video and copy from one SD to another :).. lets just call it a SD Man

The RIAA has enough soft power to prevent general availability of such devices to consumers.

Remember sitting around the radiocasette deck, waiting for the desired song to play? And swearing at the DJ when they interrupted in the middle? Would be nice to recreate that from a streaming service. Could probably literally voice record an Alexa Echo Dot playing some song.

In my country, a frequent call-in request to the radio DJ was something like "please play the entire song, because I would like to record it".

I've used Audacity to capture system audio and record it to disk. Using a Youtube downloader is probably easier though for most music.

> run youtube-dl, then pull out the audio track

Run with --extract-audio to make that a single step? Could script it, too, maybe even including copying to the SD card.

An iP(hone/ad) with Garage Band free from the app store, or a laptop with a DAW are tools your daughter can grow into.

But playing music in public versus over headphones is more musical...it's not just what live musicians do, DJ'ing is also a thing.

As is audio engineering, which requires the willingness to do more work than seems reasonable to others to get the sound you want. And her workflow certainly looks a lot like that.

Btw, there are a bunch of free websites if you search youtube to mp3

I often find myself making "screenshots" by literally pointing my phone at the screen and taking a picture. Much more convenient. The pictures aren't great but so what for my purpose.

We bought our daughters portable CD players. The media is cheaper than tapes, and the effect is similar. I do prefer cassettes as a medium, but CDs are just so easy

I got my 18-year-old one of those Jensen cassette players for Xmas this year. She listens to it in bed with a pair of chunky audio technics headphones on. She likes listen to things that she handles and organizes and starts and stops in the real world.

There’s no shortage of $20-ish MP3 players with an SD card slot, which seem like a suitable solution to your problem.

I searched a lot and the only one I could find was a Sony with Bluetooth (good) + very short battery life (bad). If the battery life had been better and the reviews not so low, I would have gotten it.

The other I could find was a dirt cheap USB 1.1 mini (not even micro) USB connector with bad battery life and almost no controls, no shuffle, no memory of where it last stopped playing etc.

I just went to Amazon.com and typed "mp3 player" in the search box and I still see many.

I bought one of these for like $12 about 6 months ago: https://smile.amazon.com/gp/product/B09ZB8GW5S/ref=ppx_yo_dt...

I was blown away at how great it was for my kids. Just a simple player that mounts over USB as an SD card, you drag in music and bob's your uncle. I wanted to buy like 5 more but they were sold out.

It seems like that one is for sale under several different brand names still.

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