Are gen xers always mad? Honestly, they seem to be the chilliest generation that’s reached adulthood.
Maybe we are chill because we live our motto; “whatever”.
Their tiktoks get wild though
As a Gen-X representative what is tiktoks?
FR, why were they all suddenly making Tiktoks using the wolf transformation filter and saying they were gonna rise up last month? Was it like a collective midlife crisis?
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?
I have a pretty massive mp3/flac collection but I still use Spotify for ease of listening to new music. I don’t mind the $12/no because fuck ads and it’s pretty much the only media subscription I have (except Hulu but that’s more for my wife).
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
My RioVolt SP250 manufactured in the year 2000 still works just fine. It came with Ni-MH AAs and runs fine on Alkalines.
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.
A record is not a solid master copy. Vinyl, as an analog medium, wears out in the same way a cassette does.
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.
TBH, if I had a car that old that I was keeping for some reason–as opposed to trading in for something more efficient–I’d replace the stereo.
If the car was old enough and vintage itself, I‘d try to keep it as original as possible. And that includes the stereo. Replacement stereos usually don’t fit in well with the rest of the car. I also love to work with limitations like that in general, be it analog audio, photography, etc.
I don’t hold much of anything as sacred; if I had a ‘classic’ car (and unlimited funds), I would absolutely turn it into a more modern beast. Analog photography is interesting to me because of the inherent limitations of the media, and the difficulty in replicating that with modern tools (esp. large format wet plate photography). But I see cars as being too utilitarian to fall into that category. Would it ruin the ‘value’? Sure. But that’s irrelevant to me for utilitarian items.
I understand where you’re coming from, but I wouldn’t be interested in a vintage car that sucks gas like it’s going out of style and spews out more emissions than a diesel truck rolling coal. (And, FWIW, my first car was an '84 Monte Carlo SS that I promptly put a 400ci short block in.)
I like things with history thus I‘d never modify something I consider vintage, as long as I can keep it working in its original condition. And for any modifications that go beyond swapping the radio or the wheels, I don’t have the know how anyways. And if I‘d have to pay someone for modifications I could just invest that money into a better car that doesn’t need modifications.
Also, I’m German, so a lot of the 20-40 year old cars you can still get probably have better efficiency than most US cars of the same age. A 30 year old VW Golf doesn’t need much more fuel than a modern one.
For analog music it’s similar to photography for me. It’s about the limits. The same way I love that I only have 36 pictures on a film, I love that I only have 90 minutes I can put on a mixtape and that, to get those, I have to split it as exactly in the middle as possible. It’s a challenge and the reward is a perfectly mastered little object that holds my playlist. I do play vinyl records on my sound deck but I don’t always want to listen to an album and just plugging in a bluetooth receiver is so hopelessly unromantic. A carefully crafted cassette though… Although I will probably listen to more CDs when I get the CD-Deck fixed, eventually.
But yes, that’s all very much not utilitarian, which is why, when I just want to listen to music, I listen on Apple Music and why I bought a bluetooth-fm-transmitter for the one car at my work that doesn’t have bluetooth or aux-in.
Hide them in the glove box.
But where do I put my gloves then?
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.
Cassettes are making a comeback actually, which is weird
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.
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.
I still haven’t re-ripped a box of CDs whose digital versions were lost in a HDD failure almost 20 years ago. 😒
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.
I need to figure out a new system for acquiring tunes. Tricky bit is while I want to buy stuff outright, I would never financially recover if I paid $1 per tune. I DJ, and mix with a very wide, relatively niche catalogue. What I’m spinning is still only a fraction of what I listen to and would want in the personal collection.
Anyone know of a decent service that grants access to tons of music, downloads and transfers enabled, without demolishing my bank?
Otherwise, I know there are potential means of sailing the seas again, which some may take under consideration…
I still use my Deezer subscription and the old Deemix-GUI, which is a mixture of the high seas and having a subscription.
disclaimer: deemix has has been discontinued 2 years ago, and the default login doesnt work (for me); the alternative ARL-Login still works fine tho.
alternatively there’s always soulseek (which still astounds me - this thing is still alive and kicking after such a long time)
Cheers for plugs! Soulseek being alive and well is wild. That’s an old dog.
should have just stuck with the vinyls.
You’d have to be mental to replace vinyl with tapes of all things. Going digital, no media, or subscription can kind of make sense for accessibility and other reasons.
Tape was all about portability IMO—you could take your music with you using a boombox, walkman or of course your car stereo.
I don’t think most people typically replaced whole vinyl record libraries, but they will have bought more things on tape during the period.
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I’m a millennial, so…
I never had a record collection. When I was growing up they were considered old fashioned and obsolete, audiophiles were still clinging onto them muttering about how they sound “warmer” or whatever. My parents had records that I wasn’t really interested in.
Cassettes were kind of my childhood. I owned a series of tape recorders and/or boom boxes with cassette decks, and went from children’s programming on cassette tape to recording music off the radio. Though I really did catch the tail end of the format.
By the time I was a teenager, digital audio was all the rage. CDs were the gold standard of audio quality, maybe you still had a cassette deck in your car, and mp3s were the hot new thing. Everybody was pirating music on file sharing services. Everybody was playing around with Windows Media Player’s visualizer settings. Soon people were buying music from iTunes or subscribing to Pandora or Spotify.
But given I remember hi-fi stereos in the late 90’s coming with turntables, cassette decks and CD players, you’d have to have been an idiot to repeatedly throw away your music collection as each format comes out especially given you could record mix tapes from vinyl and cassette, and it’s been fairly trivial to rip from all three formats to mp3 for pretty much the entire 21st century so far.
Sit Ubu, sit.
Ah man I’m an old millennial and that works for me too.
Nobody forces you to replace your vinyls XD
He’ll I’m buying them again
And now back to records again.
My old man had 8-tracks in his old retired cruiser lol. Anyway I was never into music as a kid; I’m mad for wholly different reasons.
Are we always mad? That’s just, like, your opinion, man.
Look, you can buy music on vinyl, CD or digital and own it forever. You can also subscribe to a service that has every song ever made by man on demand for like $10 a month. It can be both!
At the end of the day, it’s just a great time to be alive if you’ve got ears and can listen.
-The Ultimate Eighties Page-
