One of my cassettes is a KRS-ONE one I bought on the street in NY. The song titles are printed on the wrong sides of it, but who cares.
Hell, I still refer to someone’s new “album” coming out. (Not “dropping”, either! :))
I don’t, but my friend does. She also still has VHS tapes, does not own a car or a cell phone, and believes a proper hair cut should cost $35. None of this is out of old age, or any particular financial circumstances. She’s 37 years old, college educated, good job, nice place, bla bla bla; it’s just that for some reason she’s trapped in 1981.
My tape-listening days may have ended just the other day. I got a tape stuck in my car stereo. I called around, it would cost me money to have the pull it out, and even then it’s a crapshoot as to whether they can get it out without breaking the deck. I’ll probably end up spending almost as much as it would cost to buy a new stereo and have it installed. God, it pisses me off how cars are put together, so you can’t do really basic things without special tools and skills. What’s wrong with having screws, and some snap-in covers for the screw heads, or something like that?
There’s one thing I prefer tapes for, which is audio books and lectures in the car. For one thing, they keep their place when you take them out. Also, they don’t scratch, so you can take one out, toss it in the passenger seat and then put the next one in while the car is moving.
I’m holding onto a home-stereo tape deck so I can digitize my tapes sometime. I only have a handful of music tapes, but there are also some family recordings. The same goes for VHS, although I don’t know how to digitize that. There are also a few old family reel-to-reel tapes, but I don’t have a player for that. I’ve thought about putting up an ad on Craigslist or maybe audio forums to see if someone might help me with those.
I would really like to record my cassettes onto CDs–I have almost 300 regular cassettes plus another 68 of stuff I recorded off the Dr, Demento show, and a few others. But they are mostly 90-minute and I understand CDs don’t have that knd of capacity.
Nothing wrong with that - the word “album” has nothing to do with the specific form of media. It’s merely another word for a bundled collection of items, as in “picture album”. You can have an album on LP, on CD, on tape or as a file on your computer. If it’s sold together, it’s an album.
Are you saying that hair cuts cost more than that? (I haven’t been to a barber of any kind since 1997, and I couldn’t tell you what I paid then. if haircuts cost more than $35, I’m glad I don’t bother cutting my hair anymore. After all, for $35 I can probably get a whole bunch of cassettes…)
And I still listen to them occassionally, mainly because I haven’t had the time to digitize them and despite what some people seem to believe, everything isn’t available for mp3 download. I bought a lot of cassettes at shows I would go to in high school that were sold by the band, who didn’t have a record deal. Most of the bands went nowhere and don’t exist anymore, so there’s really no way to get the music anywhere else. I have digitized a bunch of cassettes though, and those don’t get listened to any longer. Like someone else said, they are like old friends and I don’t know if I’ll ever be able to part with them.
I have many obscure cassettes that aren’t available on CD. (Hell, I have many CDs that apparently aren’t available on CD – I just got an iPod and have been busy putting music on it – so far easily 75% of the CDs I own don’t have cover art available.)
In 1997, I think I was paying somewhere around $45, and now I can’t seem to get out of a salon for less than $80. I think I’m doing this wrong.
$80?? I can’t imagine being able to shell that out for a haircut. I had no idea my laziness was saving me so much money. (Are men’s haircuts significantly cheaper than women’s though? Please tell me these guys with short hair aren’t forking over that kind of dough every few weeks)
Guys pay significantly less for haircuts. I’ve never paid more than $20 myself.
I have short hair and a good barber, and my roughly-monthly haircuts cost me $20.
Back to the OP: I still have several dozen tapes, and listen to one probably a few times a week, on average, usually on a small stereo deck (which includes a CD player) in our kitchen. Most of what I listen to on tape is Windham Hill/New Age or classical music that I don’t have on CDs or on my iPod.
My man’s haircut = Me taking clippers to his head in the bathroom.
I think men’s haircuts are generally cheaper. The last time I discussed haircut prices with a male, something like $30 was standard. I used to cut my own hair, but I got tired of my hair always being shaggy and uneven, and didn’t want to look like the girl who cut her hair in the mirror with a paper scissors anymore… even though that’s exactly what was happening. So I finally decided to let a professional sort this mess out, grimaced at the prices, but sucked it up anyway. It looked fabulous and now I can’t not pay ridiculous amounts of money at the salon. Am I vain? Maybe just a little. If it makes me seem less like one of those women, the shoes I’m wearing were on clearance for $15 at The Gap!
Hijack over, sorry.
Men’s haircuts are ridiculously cheaper than women’s. I always pay less than $15. My wife pays closer to $80, although with the coloring and this and that and the other the total bill is usually far more. She does it for professional reasons and goes to the best salon in town, which means that it will get much cheaper after she retires. But I’ll stay under $15.
Men can pay huge amounts if they live in a big city and go somewhere chic. But you’d also have to multiply the women’s costs by 3 to 5 times to keep it equivalent. That’s a whole nother world.
There’s no particular reason to think that. iTunes AAC and Amazon MP3 are both 256 kbps, which is fine sound quality. Aside from singles, I buy CDs and rip them at 320 kbps, which my ears can’t distinguish from whatever Apple’s lossless format is.
Back in the day I remember getting music at some absurdly small bitrate, but nowadays legitimately-obtained digital music is fine quality.
Yes there is. MP3s, are by and large, 256kbps or less (and the vast majority are 128kbps). It’s a form of lossy compression that sacrifices the high and low ends for smaller file size. And home ripped versions are even worse, as it’s already taking a compressed CD signal and compressing it even further. And that’s not even getting into the whole ‘most MP3 listeners use shitty headphones’ point (it’s not surprising to me how many iPod owners still use the default white buds).
Listen, I’m not a music snob–I listen to MP3s like you do. But if one truly wants great sounding music, using MP3s (particularly with shitty headphones) isn’t the way to do it.
I’m beginning to realize that a large percentage of the audiobooks on CD at my local library are scratched. The ones on cassette are still fine for the most part, and if they start to give trouble, you can fiddle with them and oftentimes make them work. There’s not much you can do about a scratched CD.
I’m female and I can’t conceive of paying $80 for a haircut – but then, I have long, straight hair, and all I really want is an annual shearing to get rid of the split ends and make it more or less even. The $18 place at the Super WalMart is just fine.
Well, I think there’s a difference between truly wanting “great sounding music” and “not caring about sound quality.” I’d say most people fall somewhere between those two extremes, and decent-quality MP3s (or AACs or whatever; I don’t really know the difference) hardly sound as bad as, say, taping a song off the radio.
I find that’s a problem also. It’s the same thing with DVDs vs. VHS. If a tape has a few rough patches, it’ll still play through. Granted it might be a little snowy, but you can still see or hear what’s going on. And once it gets past that rough patch, it’ll look or sound fine. On a DVD or a CD, if there’s a problem it’ll skip around or just freeze up entirely.
It pisses me off when I have this problem with Netflix, because it means I have to wait a few days to get a replacement copy and see the rest of the movie.
True but what you do is put them on a CD as an mp3 file or a wma file, NOT as a wav file. An mp3 file (depending on how much you compress it) is around 15% as big as a wav file
Most portable CDs now-a-days will play mp3s and wma files but you must check to make sure. You can put a lot of mp3 files on a CD, 90 minutes would be no problem