Mine doesn’t.
I just don’t see a need to toss a working phone until it stops working, as a result, I seldom have up to date phone tech. Oddly enough, this hasn’t been a problem for me.
there are a LOT of legacy recordings of court hearings and such on cassette tapes. The court where I worked (Immigration Court) didn’t prepare hearing transcripts unless and until a case was appealed. So if a dispute arises many years later about what actually took place in a hearing, a cassette player is needed to figure it out (and some way to copy the recording - a couple years ago, I had to play back a court copy on a boom box and record it with my phone, because we had to send the tape to the appeals court).
Even phones that can record audio memos only have so much storage on them. Court hearings can go on for hours or day or weeks.
The senior partner in the immigration law practice where I work still does this. Of course, he’s in hiss 70s, and very few people younger than him still use those.
Even 10 years ago, I used to use a cassette recorder to tape my guitar classes so I could listen to the techniques when I wanted to practice between classes.
Eva Luna already described the main current usage scenarios for tape recorders:
(1) access to selected legacy recordings (in cases where a complete digitization of the inventory isn’t feasible or hasn’t been done for other reasons).
(2) tape based dictation machines
(In addition to that, there might be the occasional, middle-aged, nostalgically minded individual who found a box of cassettes tapes in the attic with music by A Flock of Seagulls and Howard Jones).
Tape recorders are extremely intuitive to operate and you cannot inadvertently erase two hours of work by fiddling around and touching the wrong buttons. This might be appealing for older users who are used to them and who are struggling with new technology. Other than that, there is no reason for anyone to choose a tape based, analog dictation system over a digital system. Dedicated digital voice recorders, BTW, are mainstream products and will always be in demand by the corporate world, law firms, doctor’s offices etc. These users usually won’t use smartphones to dictate their stuff just because there’s an app for that.
Smartphones vs. feature (dumb) phones are a somewhat different: There are enough compelling reasons (security being one) to choose a feature phone over a smartphone. There will be more that just a niche market for these devices (unlike tape recorders).
OT here, but there are horse drawn carriages in my town and I live neither on Mackinac IS or in NYC. In fact one a year they have a horseback tour of the town (bring your own horse) .
Most likely it does, you just don’t know how to use it.
I was going to say you were wrong but then I looked closely at my really dumb work provided phone named Brutus. I always say that its only good features are that it is waterproof and free. I didn’t think that Brutus had any enhanced features at all because its main purpose is to allow coworkers to harass me the old fashioned way 24/7 but it turns out you are right. Buried rather obscurely in deep menus, there is an option to record ‘voice memos’. which is an innocuous name for a feature that probably has clandestine origins. Someone paid someone else really good money to put that feature in a weatherproof phone for a very good reason. It claims that I still have 311 hours and 48 minutes of voice recording left to use for whatever I choose. Cool! Russia and North Korea better watch out because I am well equipped to compile damning evidence on tens of high ranking officials.
I have had the little gas station $9 tracphones. They have voice recording. Not much memory, so you aren’t going to record much, but they are equiped.
You can get FM transmitters to do that… solves the problems with reliability of the system … (except where the actual local broadcasts signal strength doesn’t let your little personal signal work… )
Of course tape could do anything, it could be used for digital signal, but the problem is that the audio cassette worked with large grains, in terms of magnetic domains, and that meant that there is limitted space on the space… it was all used up.
You could of course get digital quality onto the tape, but you’d have to run the tape as really high speeds… well that would damage the tape too … so …
a change was required. tape has all those problems, obviously lasers don’t have to touch the surface, so no wear…
How much does a convenient, portable, hand-held tape recorder cost? What’s the price difference between a smart phone and a dumb phone? I suspect that if you want a portable hand-held recorder, it’s more economical to replace your dumb phone with a smart phone than it is to buy a dedicated device, and that’s before all the other advantages like the other apps on the phone, or the need to carry only one device instead of two. There will still be some people who use the tape devices, because they already had one when cell phones came out and they’re used to them, but new entries to that market will pretty much all be using phones.
This $5.99 Tracfone dumb phone has a camera, video and audio recorder. Sure it is low quality. But to use those features, you don’t even need to activate the damn thing.
Cassettes are good for:
- folks who have one already and it’s working for them
- possible use of tamper-proof evidence recording (though I have serious doubts about that)
- folks who like retro, just for the fun of it
- fools
Sure, credible compared to cassettes or low-rate MP3. Not even as good as high rate MP3. S/N ratio tops out in the mid 70 dB’s. 1/4" tape might be OK if you’ve spent thousands on the machine, but a Soundblaster is still going to be better, unless you want the smoothing effect of tape compression/distortion (when recording levels are too high for max fidelity, and it is a nice sounding effect when used well.)
One proof of the pudding is to re-record the material over and over and see how much it degrades after some number of generations. Even a Soundblaster sounds pretty decent after 4 bounces. 1/4" reel deck? Um, no thanks. BTDT, got the t-shirt to prove it, wore it out and use it as a rag.
I still have my 1/4" TASCAM 40-4 4-track sound-on-sound deck. Anyone want to make me an offer? Sadly, the built-in dbx compander is broken. Not that an audiophile would want that anyway, but it was great for home studio use.
Interesting that detectives still use dictaphones to record interviews. I have heard that videotapes are still widely used for CCTV cameras as they are more reliable than digital alternatives. I’ve always hated how convoluted some PC/ CD burning devices are, where it is not clear if the disc hasn’t been finalised, is already finalised, or just doesn’t need finalised. 1980’s audio tape & VCRs with their big buttons and lights were usually more user friendly in this respect- with digital it was too easy for the file to get corrupted or just record silence. Admittedly a cassette can get chewed. Anyone who can splice a tape back together is a genius in my book, right up their with brain surgeons
Forensically detecting all bar the most sophisticated modification to a recording on tape isn’t all that hard. One critical thing is that you can recover the bias signal, and you can analyse that to look for glitches. A phase change in the signal can be evidence of a splice, and looking at periodic variations in the bias signal will show you periodic components related to the mechanics of the recorder that provide a whole slew of markers at different periods that make it even harder to avoid leaving traces of modification. Add to that periodic signals in the background noise of the recording itself, and you have something that essentially includes a time dependant fingerprint peculiar to the recorder. Re-recording a new tape will have its own set of new fingerprints, so it gets very difficult.
Not that that gets you a legally anointed “tamper proof” seal of approval. But you would be foolish to try to tamper with a tape recording and try to pass it off as pristine. Not if the information has significant importance.
I use cassettes as a musician and there is no digital substitute.
Try using an iphone or digital device to record audio diary type stuff on the fly. See how far you get, when your being spontaneous over a period of time, and want to load it an hour at a time on your computer.
Add to that that there are/were great sounding condenser mics in some recorders and boxes. Jumpin Jack Flash and Street Fighting man were both recorded through cassette players (with only acoustic guitars btw) You’d never want to do that with any device today.
Why, what would stop you? The only relevant difference I can think of would be capacity, and the iPhone would have the tape beat there by a huge margin.
What prevents this is that each time you power on a digital recorder it begins a new file which can only last until it is powered off. You have to name the file discretely and it is saved that way. To me that’s not spontaneous. I can’t have a different file for each idea I have.
That is odd.
That’s just a problem with one particular digital recording program. I can’t imagine that they all work that way. And even if they do, what’s the big deal? Why does it matter how many files there are?
There has been a lot of music released in the past few years that was recorded on iPhones. R.E.M.'s entire last album, for example.