kerchunk-whirrrrrrrr
May 11, 2020 9:26 AM Subscribe
A preemptive eulogy for the cassette adapter: As we move into an era of increasingly convoluted and exclusionary music-playing options, a moment of recognition is in order for the last great car stereo equalizer. (The Outline) The Car Cassette Adapter: A Legend of Technology: The car cassette adapter is one of the most underrated pieces of technology ever devised. (Interesting Engineering) Aux to Cassette Adapter Teardown and Explanation (Youtube), How to make a Bluetooth Cassette Adapter (Youtube)
Interesting timing. Youtube recently recommended a a video about prison tech to me that discussed in part why modern music sometimes has 'classic cassette' releases: prisoners aren't allowed CDs. And why there are so many clear plastic music players on urbanoutfitters' website.
posted by pwnguin at 9:37 AM on May 11, 2020 [8 favorites]
posted by pwnguin at 9:37 AM on May 11, 2020 [8 favorites]
I had an older car with a cassette player and I wanted Bluetooth for my phone to play through the radio. Lots of online solutions involved tearing apart the dash and wiring in expensive boxes. I wasn't up to that, so I did some research and saw a bunch of these.
The Bluetooth Cassette adapter only made sense to me if you could have some little generator to convert the cassette spindle turning into a voltage to power it. Otherwise you have to worry about the battery for the adapter running out. I wasn't motivated enough to make my own adapter with a little generator.
The easy way to do this:
1. Cassette adapter
2. 12V 'lighter' socket with USB plug
3. USB powered Bluetooth device which the cassette adapter cable plugs into.
These cost about $5 each, for a total cost of $15 and basically zero effort, and my phone now connected to my car radio. Even phone calls worked (using the phone's mic).
posted by eye of newt at 9:37 AM on May 11, 2020 [3 favorites]
The Bluetooth Cassette adapter only made sense to me if you could have some little generator to convert the cassette spindle turning into a voltage to power it. Otherwise you have to worry about the battery for the adapter running out. I wasn't motivated enough to make my own adapter with a little generator.
The easy way to do this:
1. Cassette adapter
2. 12V 'lighter' socket with USB plug
3. USB powered Bluetooth device which the cassette adapter cable plugs into.
These cost about $5 each, for a total cost of $15 and basically zero effort, and my phone now connected to my car radio. Even phone calls worked (using the phone's mic).
posted by eye of newt at 9:37 AM on May 11, 2020 [3 favorites]
I just wish it didn't make that rattly noise. Its astonishing it took the industry 30 years to have aux inputs on car stereos.
posted by Ansible at 9:37 AM on May 11, 2020 [6 favorites]
posted by Ansible at 9:37 AM on May 11, 2020 [6 favorites]
I must admit, cassette adapters were pretty good in their time because they usually were able to get maximum dynamic range out of any cassette deck. This was usually 70dB or so which meant it sounded a hell of a lot better than FM radio. Untrained ears probably wouldn't be able to tell it apart from a CD.
posted by Your Childhood Pet Rock at 9:49 AM on May 11, 2020 [5 favorites]
posted by Your Childhood Pet Rock at 9:49 AM on May 11, 2020 [5 favorites]
I don't really get why the writer has to bait with "increasingly convoluted and exclusionary music-playing options".
I get in my car, wireless CarPlay is automatic even if I don't cradle my phone, I press my voice recognition button, ask for any artist, album, or song and Siri dutifully makes it come out of my car speakers. Isn't this like the ultimate in music-playing options? I have a good chunk of humanity's recorded music at my immediate fingertips.
Like I get that change can be overwhelming but once the tech is there it just feels like this is what the future should feel like.
posted by Your Childhood Pet Rock at 9:55 AM on May 11, 2020 [1 favorite]
I get in my car, wireless CarPlay is automatic even if I don't cradle my phone, I press my voice recognition button, ask for any artist, album, or song and Siri dutifully makes it come out of my car speakers. Isn't this like the ultimate in music-playing options? I have a good chunk of humanity's recorded music at my immediate fingertips.
Like I get that change can be overwhelming but once the tech is there it just feels like this is what the future should feel like.
posted by Your Childhood Pet Rock at 9:55 AM on May 11, 2020 [1 favorite]
Ahh, well, that assumes you have a phone, and a subscription to a music service, and a subscription to an internet carrier. All of which cost money, sometimes multiple times per month. Used to be you'd spend $6 for a cassette and schlep it around in a little briefcase full of other cassettes and you didn't have to pay again and again to hear it. And you could make mixtapes and trade them with your friends, for the cost of a blank. Or just record shit off the radio for nothin.
I mean, I have an Apple Music subscription and yes, the world's music is about three seconds away and yes the future of music is kind of great, but right now it's kind of only great if you can pay for it, over and over and over again.
posted by seanmpuckett at 10:01 AM on May 11, 2020 [43 favorites]
I mean, I have an Apple Music subscription and yes, the world's music is about three seconds away and yes the future of music is kind of great, but right now it's kind of only great if you can pay for it, over and over and over again.
posted by seanmpuckett at 10:01 AM on May 11, 2020 [43 favorites]
I once had a cassette based player piano from the 1970s, but it only came with one tape. Luckily, there was a large quantity of music available on the internet, and getting it to work on the piano required a Winamp plugin and a cassette adapter. (There was a hardware modification that might also have worked, but it was far more expensive and difficult.)
posted by surlyben at 10:02 AM on May 11, 2020 [3 favorites]
posted by surlyben at 10:02 AM on May 11, 2020 [3 favorites]
"home taping is killing the recording industry -- we left this side blank so you can help"
posted by seanmpuckett at 10:02 AM on May 11, 2020 [12 favorites]
posted by seanmpuckett at 10:02 AM on May 11, 2020 [12 favorites]
I still use one in my 2004 VW Golf. I hate the damn thing.
posted by fimbulvetr at 10:03 AM on May 11, 2020 [2 favorites]
posted by fimbulvetr at 10:03 AM on May 11, 2020 [2 favorites]
Ahh, well, that assumes you have a phone, and a subscription to a music service, and a subscription to an internet carrier. All of which cost money, sometimes multiple times per month. Used to be you'd spend $6 for a cassette and schlep it around in a little briefcase full of other cassettes and you didn't have to pay again and again to hear it.
My car has a USB player that you just put Mp3s on and it plays. That thing rules. The one I currently has is like 30 gb for $10, and holds 2000 songs.
Cassettes melted in the sun and often the car player was of low quality and ate the tapes, so you had to rebuy the same tape occasionally. CDs were a step up, but they skipped and were serious theft-bait.
I get that MP3s are on the way out, but you can also plug a phone that you have music loaded onto, so I still think now is the best of times, music in a car wise.
posted by The_Vegetables at 10:06 AM on May 11, 2020 [5 favorites]
My car has a USB player that you just put Mp3s on and it plays. That thing rules. The one I currently has is like 30 gb for $10, and holds 2000 songs.
Cassettes melted in the sun and often the car player was of low quality and ate the tapes, so you had to rebuy the same tape occasionally. CDs were a step up, but they skipped and were serious theft-bait.
I get that MP3s are on the way out, but you can also plug a phone that you have music loaded onto, so I still think now is the best of times, music in a car wise.
posted by The_Vegetables at 10:06 AM on May 11, 2020 [5 favorites]
It was definitely not a great solution, but for a few years there it felt like the only solution. I remember even before mp3 players, I had a portable CD player with a bouncy spring base (also not great) with a cassette adapter plugged in.
posted by HumanComplex at 10:10 AM on May 11, 2020 [2 favorites]
posted by HumanComplex at 10:10 AM on May 11, 2020 [2 favorites]
→ "increasingly convoluted and exclusionary music-playing options".
You have a car less than 5 years old, with above base-spec options, and you have an iPhone? Change any one of those and car audio becomes a "maybe". The tech is there, but only if you can afford it. Also Android in a car is blecch for playback. I've convinced myself that shuffle is all I really want to do, because it's all that really works. Google killed off Android USB Mass storage a few years ago, so no console controls for you! Yes, I could run Android Auto but that's Google yelling "GET IN MAH BELLY" to my data. Which there are still holes in coverage here. And my phone starts roaming about 20 km from home. Because Canada.
Props to the Ontario government for keeping cassette adapters going for longer than necessary. Until quite recently, Ontario considered a CD player in a government vehicle a forbidden luxury, so required vendors to offer a special government-class vehicle with only a tape player. Which of course they charged more for, because they had to rip out the basic console and replace it with a custom cassette one. But peace, order and good government were maintained!
posted by scruss at 10:10 AM on May 11, 2020 [16 favorites]
You have a car less than 5 years old, with above base-spec options, and you have an iPhone? Change any one of those and car audio becomes a "maybe". The tech is there, but only if you can afford it. Also Android in a car is blecch for playback. I've convinced myself that shuffle is all I really want to do, because it's all that really works. Google killed off Android USB Mass storage a few years ago, so no console controls for you! Yes, I could run Android Auto but that's Google yelling "GET IN MAH BELLY" to my data. Which there are still holes in coverage here. And my phone starts roaming about 20 km from home. Because Canada.
Props to the Ontario government for keeping cassette adapters going for longer than necessary. Until quite recently, Ontario considered a CD player in a government vehicle a forbidden luxury, so required vendors to offer a special government-class vehicle with only a tape player. Which of course they charged more for, because they had to rip out the basic console and replace it with a custom cassette one. But peace, order and good government were maintained!
posted by scruss at 10:10 AM on May 11, 2020 [16 favorites]
Best Buy still carries them for about $10 but back in the 00s the bastards charged something like $30.
If I were to go retro, I'd rather have this rotary cell phone kit.
posted by bonobothegreat at 10:10 AM on May 11, 2020
If I were to go retro, I'd rather have this rotary cell phone kit.
posted by bonobothegreat at 10:10 AM on May 11, 2020
but right now it's kind of only great if you can pay for it, over and over and over again.
I can't reconcile the ephemeral-ness of subscription-only music. I make playlists in Spotify and then they're ruined by songs disappearing out of Spotify's catalog for random reasons.
You can't pass it on to your kids or their kids. Stuff just disappears when labels fold or there's a copyright dispute or whatever happens to disappear music from the cloud.
Love the cassette adapters. I have a 98 Ford F-150 with a cassette deck. On the odd occasion when I drive more than 20-30 minutes I can hook up a media player and enjoy my tunes.
posted by jzb at 10:12 AM on May 11, 2020 [16 favorites]
I can't reconcile the ephemeral-ness of subscription-only music. I make playlists in Spotify and then they're ruined by songs disappearing out of Spotify's catalog for random reasons.
You can't pass it on to your kids or their kids. Stuff just disappears when labels fold or there's a copyright dispute or whatever happens to disappear music from the cloud.
Love the cassette adapters. I have a 98 Ford F-150 with a cassette deck. On the odd occasion when I drive more than 20-30 minutes I can hook up a media player and enjoy my tunes.
posted by jzb at 10:12 AM on May 11, 2020 [16 favorites]
Everything on my high school boombox slowly stopped working except the tape player, which had manual controls (rather than the dead electronic buttons on top or the missing remote that ran everything else). We were using a cassette adapter to play music off of iPods through it until 2011 or so, when we finally got iPhones that didn't need speakers plugged in.
posted by hydropsyche at 10:14 AM on May 11, 2020 [3 favorites]
posted by hydropsyche at 10:14 AM on May 11, 2020 [3 favorites]
There's a whole category of things that I don't know a simple word for, but are adaptors designed to make consumer appliances do things they weren't meant to do. I love them all. Cassette adapters, TV coax-to-ladder-line baluns in large silly boxes, baseband-to-RF video modulators, UFW down-converters, PC tape-drive adaptors, ultra low power FM radio transmitters designed to take headphone signals as inputs, telephone modems that couple to handsets, etc. I guess there are contemporary versions - my bluetooth to TOSLINK converter, for example - but, I can't help but feel some nostalgia for the simple physicality of the old ones.
When I was a teenager, I used a cassette adapter to get audio from my ham radio into the car stereo. Then a friend bought me a fancy new CD player stereo as a gift. I didn't have the money or knowledge to get the right wire harness or hardware, so I hard-wired it in place and then held the thing in the dashboard with four sheet-metal screws. But, the fancy new radio had no cassette, so I had to buy an FM commercial band radio transmitter to pipe in audio. The adaptor took batteries, which was stupid and expensive, so I had to make a cigarette-lighter plug 3 volt converter box. And then it got all sorts of nasty pickup from the ham radio transmitter, so I had to cover everything with half-assed metal mesh shielding and ferrite beads. It was a goofy looking mess that took up half the dashboard. But, it worked, and nobody ever tried to steal it. It's certainly worth the trade-off for today's tech, I can't help but feel a little bit sad that the equivalent for kids today is probably rooting the firmware on bluetooth receivers. That's more useful, but so much less hands-on.
posted by eotvos at 10:14 AM on May 11, 2020 [10 favorites]
When I was a teenager, I used a cassette adapter to get audio from my ham radio into the car stereo. Then a friend bought me a fancy new CD player stereo as a gift. I didn't have the money or knowledge to get the right wire harness or hardware, so I hard-wired it in place and then held the thing in the dashboard with four sheet-metal screws. But, the fancy new radio had no cassette, so I had to buy an FM commercial band radio transmitter to pipe in audio. The adaptor took batteries, which was stupid and expensive, so I had to make a cigarette-lighter plug 3 volt converter box. And then it got all sorts of nasty pickup from the ham radio transmitter, so I had to cover everything with half-assed metal mesh shielding and ferrite beads. It was a goofy looking mess that took up half the dashboard. But, it worked, and nobody ever tried to steal it. It's certainly worth the trade-off for today's tech, I can't help but feel a little bit sad that the equivalent for kids today is probably rooting the firmware on bluetooth receivers. That's more useful, but so much less hands-on.
posted by eotvos at 10:14 AM on May 11, 2020 [10 favorites]
> Ahh, well, that assumes you have a phone, and a subscription to a music service, and a subscription to an internet carrier.
...and that Siri understands a damn thing you say and will correctly retrieve your music without requiring you to reject wrong tries and repeat yourself. Guh. I hate talking to computers, honestly.
(I use an iPod Classic in the car.)
posted by desuetude at 10:15 AM on May 11, 2020 [4 favorites]
...and that Siri understands a damn thing you say and will correctly retrieve your music without requiring you to reject wrong tries and repeat yourself. Guh. I hate talking to computers, honestly.
(I use an iPod Classic in the car.)
posted by desuetude at 10:15 AM on May 11, 2020 [4 favorites]
I'm in Canada, I can't afford to pay the data required to stream everything, and I don't have enough storage space on my phone (because they no longer offer phones with room for an SD card) to hold a large enough selection of downloaded music. So I have an old ipod that I use in public transit and in my car and it has an aux out and it works great. I have no idea what I will do when it inevitably dies.
posted by jeather at 10:15 AM on May 11, 2020 [4 favorites]
posted by jeather at 10:15 AM on May 11, 2020 [4 favorites]
Most of my life I've bought older used cars that (if I was lucky) had cassette decks. I used the hell out of those adapters for years to plug minidisc or MP3 players into the car stereo.
A few years ago I bought a 2008 car that has a built-in 6-CD changer that is also MP3 compatible! (◕ฺo ◕✿ฺ)*✲ﾟ* I know that's old-hat nowadays, but it was a huge step up for me. It has an aux adapter too, but for me the most convenient thing was to cram 6 CDs full of a ton of MP3 files ripped from my CD and digital collection, pop 'em in the chamber, and away I went with hours and hours of music and no extraneous cables to manage. Eventually I got tired of those and burned another 6 CDs to swap in, but that took a few years. I've had the car for 7 years now and it's about time for a 3rd set...
posted by Greg_Ace at 10:36 AM on May 11, 2020 [3 favorites]
A few years ago I bought a 2008 car that has a built-in 6-CD changer that is also MP3 compatible! (◕ฺo ◕✿ฺ)*✲ﾟ* I know that's old-hat nowadays, but it was a huge step up for me. It has an aux adapter too, but for me the most convenient thing was to cram 6 CDs full of a ton of MP3 files ripped from my CD and digital collection, pop 'em in the chamber, and away I went with hours and hours of music and no extraneous cables to manage. Eventually I got tired of those and burned another 6 CDs to swap in, but that took a few years. I've had the car for 7 years now and it's about time for a 3rd set...
posted by Greg_Ace at 10:36 AM on May 11, 2020 [3 favorites]
I had one for a while and like others have said, you didn't use it because it was good, you used it because you were stuck. A dog walking upright on its hind legs, etc.
posted by GuyZero at 10:55 AM on May 11, 2020 [3 favorites]
posted by GuyZero at 10:55 AM on May 11, 2020 [3 favorites]
Its astonishing it took the industry 30 years to have aux inputs on car stereos.
After-market car stereos had aux inputs 20 years ago. It's just been the car manufacturers who were resistant to putting the aux input on their official hardware.
posted by explosion at 10:56 AM on May 11, 2020 [6 favorites]
After-market car stereos had aux inputs 20 years ago. It's just been the car manufacturers who were resistant to putting the aux input on their official hardware.
posted by explosion at 10:56 AM on May 11, 2020 [6 favorites]
I press my voice recognition button, ask for any artist, album, or song and Siri dutifully makes it come out of my car speakers
voice recognition systems are, like most things on earth, baselined for white men
posted by poffin boffin at 10:59 AM on May 11, 2020 [5 favorites]
voice recognition systems are, like most things on earth, baselined for white men
posted by poffin boffin at 10:59 AM on May 11, 2020 [5 favorites]
seanmpuckett: "home taping is killing the recording industry -- we left this side blank so you can help"
Source, for those wondering.
I had a few of these adapters, initially to tote around a portable CD player for my car in high school, and later to play music off my phone (I think). With one, we had to press the adapter into the cassette player to ensure complete contact. Aux ports were such a great addition, but my mind was blown by the USB reader built into our 2014 Honda Accord, which handles a ton of music pretty well. We had a rental, I forgot what now, but it choked on the volume of songs on the USB, only reading a portion of our collection.
posted by filthy light thief at 11:05 AM on May 11, 2020 [2 favorites]
Source, for those wondering.
I had a few of these adapters, initially to tote around a portable CD player for my car in high school, and later to play music off my phone (I think). With one, we had to press the adapter into the cassette player to ensure complete contact. Aux ports were such a great addition, but my mind was blown by the USB reader built into our 2014 Honda Accord, which handles a ton of music pretty well. We had a rental, I forgot what now, but it choked on the volume of songs on the USB, only reading a portion of our collection.
posted by filthy light thief at 11:05 AM on May 11, 2020 [2 favorites]
(because they no longer offer phones with room for an SD card)
I have a relatively new Samsung (maybe 2 years old, still a great phone), that accepts a SD card, but the headphone jack hole on the protective case is so small it wouldn't accept an AV cord without me having to drill it bigger first. Until like 6 months ago, all of Android's music players were terrible, having to go through a really convoluted process to re-load the SD and always forgetting the last song I paused on, but that's better now too. Also my car with the AV jack is 2005, so no integration with the stock stereo, so changing tunes in traffic on the phone is kind of difficult.
posted by The_Vegetables at 11:27 AM on May 11, 2020
I have a relatively new Samsung (maybe 2 years old, still a great phone), that accepts a SD card, but the headphone jack hole on the protective case is so small it wouldn't accept an AV cord without me having to drill it bigger first. Until like 6 months ago, all of Android's music players were terrible, having to go through a really convoluted process to re-load the SD and always forgetting the last song I paused on, but that's better now too. Also my car with the AV jack is 2005, so no integration with the stock stereo, so changing tunes in traffic on the phone is kind of difficult.
posted by The_Vegetables at 11:27 AM on May 11, 2020
Ahh, well, that assumes you have a phone, and a subscription to a music service, and a subscription to an internet carrier. All of which cost money, sometimes multiple times per month. Used to be you'd spend $6 for a cassette and schlep it around in a little briefcase full of other cassettes and you didn't have to pay again and again to hear it. And you could make mixtapes and trade them with your friends, for the cost of a blank. Or just record shit off the radio for nothin.
OK. First of all, yeah, $6 for a tape but how often are you buying that tape? The minimum wage in the US prior to October '96 was USD$4.25 an hour. People were paying an hour and twenty minutes of their lives minimum for a tape that wasn't even that durable. Now you can do the same work and get a month of access to everything in a giant library.
Phones? They're not status devices anymore. With the democratization and commodification of computing power even a $50 phone in your pocket has more power than a 1990 supercomputer and can run subscription music apps. They're probably built into the phone. Hell, the penetration of smart phones among homeless people is like a third of them. If you can make $70 a day panhandling then what's $40 for a month of MetroPCS or Sprint? That's less than a twentieth of a month of begging on a cell line.
Plus, nobody is stopping you from the analog hole and making mixtapes to trade with your friends. Buy the track for 99c and you can give it to whoever you want because there's no DRM. Lose it? Who cares you can redownload the digital copy. You can record the output back into the input of another phone if you want and not even pay for a blank. Even if you don't have a 3.5mm output you can get an adapter for a few bucks. Or record that same shit off the radio for nothing because most radio stations (legally) stream audio in the clear.
A lot of things are way more shitty than they were two decades ago but music today is so much more unbelievably accessible. It might not feel like it but access to the world's cultural library of music has never been greater for the poor. The only problem is that it's a rentier model of capitalism. It's shitty and I get that's what some people don't like about it. But don't try and pawn this off as an access issue caused by the digital age. Analog and offline music consumption utterly sucked. That's why Napster and Kazaa were giant, unpopular failures and the RIAA waged thermonuclear war against it.
posted by Your Childhood Pet Rock at 11:28 AM on May 11, 2020 [4 favorites]
OK. First of all, yeah, $6 for a tape but how often are you buying that tape? The minimum wage in the US prior to October '96 was USD$4.25 an hour. People were paying an hour and twenty minutes of their lives minimum for a tape that wasn't even that durable. Now you can do the same work and get a month of access to everything in a giant library.
Phones? They're not status devices anymore. With the democratization and commodification of computing power even a $50 phone in your pocket has more power than a 1990 supercomputer and can run subscription music apps. They're probably built into the phone. Hell, the penetration of smart phones among homeless people is like a third of them. If you can make $70 a day panhandling then what's $40 for a month of MetroPCS or Sprint? That's less than a twentieth of a month of begging on a cell line.
Plus, nobody is stopping you from the analog hole and making mixtapes to trade with your friends. Buy the track for 99c and you can give it to whoever you want because there's no DRM. Lose it? Who cares you can redownload the digital copy. You can record the output back into the input of another phone if you want and not even pay for a blank. Even if you don't have a 3.5mm output you can get an adapter for a few bucks. Or record that same shit off the radio for nothing because most radio stations (legally) stream audio in the clear.
A lot of things are way more shitty than they were two decades ago but music today is so much more unbelievably accessible. It might not feel like it but access to the world's cultural library of music has never been greater for the poor. The only problem is that it's a rentier model of capitalism. It's shitty and I get that's what some people don't like about it. But don't try and pawn this off as an access issue caused by the digital age. Analog and offline music consumption utterly sucked. That's why Napster and Kazaa were giant, unpopular failures and the RIAA waged thermonuclear war against it.
posted by Your Childhood Pet Rock at 11:28 AM on May 11, 2020 [4 favorites]
From the article:
For a cassette adapter, instead of pressing all the information onto an entire ribbon ahead of time, you apply it, via the digital signal of the headphone jack, onto a small piece of tape looping continuously.
That's not how they work at all. There is no tape, just a transducer (ideally with 2 channels) which presses against the cassette machine's playback head and feeds it the electromagnetic signal.
The adaptor stripped down in the YouTube video is relatively complicated as it has gears designed to force auto reverse decks to "go" in the right direction. This is needed because an auto-reverse stereo deck has a 4 channel playback head and it has to be told to use the correct two channels out of four.
posted by w0mbat at 11:35 AM on May 11, 2020 [10 favorites]
For a cassette adapter, instead of pressing all the information onto an entire ribbon ahead of time, you apply it, via the digital signal of the headphone jack, onto a small piece of tape looping continuously.
That's not how they work at all. There is no tape, just a transducer (ideally with 2 channels) which presses against the cassette machine's playback head and feeds it the electromagnetic signal.
The adaptor stripped down in the YouTube video is relatively complicated as it has gears designed to force auto reverse decks to "go" in the right direction. This is needed because an auto-reverse stereo deck has a 4 channel playback head and it has to be told to use the correct two channels out of four.
posted by w0mbat at 11:35 AM on May 11, 2020 [10 favorites]
You kids and your newfangeldy cassette players! This what you oughta have!
posted by evilDoug at 11:37 AM on May 11, 2020
posted by evilDoug at 11:37 AM on May 11, 2020
but my mind was blown by the USB reader built into our 2014 Honda Accord, which handles a ton of music pretty well.
My Hyundai has a USB port, but it is an ipod usb port, so it won't read from a regular usb drive only from apple products.1
But only some apple products, near as I can tell it only likes products that came with the big connector, so now I have an ancient ipod with a spinning drive plugged into it.2
Screen is cracked, clicky wheel doesn't work half the time, but the car stereo recognizes it so that's all that matters.
1 Nor android, which is a pain since we are an android family.
2 Can't use anything newer becasue at some point apple made it impossible to put music onto an ipod without itunes.
posted by madajb at 11:39 AM on May 11, 2020 [2 favorites]
My Hyundai has a USB port, but it is an ipod usb port, so it won't read from a regular usb drive only from apple products.1
But only some apple products, near as I can tell it only likes products that came with the big connector, so now I have an ancient ipod with a spinning drive plugged into it.2
Screen is cracked, clicky wheel doesn't work half the time, but the car stereo recognizes it so that's all that matters.
1 Nor android, which is a pain since we are an android family.
2 Can't use anything newer becasue at some point apple made it impossible to put music onto an ipod without itunes.
posted by madajb at 11:39 AM on May 11, 2020 [2 favorites]
it's kind of only great if you can pay for it, over and over and over again.
Yeah, it really is unreasonable to charge less than a single album used to cost for access to millions and millions of tracks.
Nothing's stopping you from buying individual albums, in fact you should, because the streaming services pay the artists next to nothing. But the $120 you're complaining about spending per year gets you access to ~120 tracks if you buy an album a month. If that's all the variety you want over the course of the year, the streaming services aren't for you.
posted by Candleman at 11:47 AM on May 11, 2020 [1 favorite]
Yeah, it really is unreasonable to charge less than a single album used to cost for access to millions and millions of tracks.
Nothing's stopping you from buying individual albums, in fact you should, because the streaming services pay the artists next to nothing. But the $120 you're complaining about spending per year gets you access to ~120 tracks if you buy an album a month. If that's all the variety you want over the course of the year, the streaming services aren't for you.
posted by Candleman at 11:47 AM on May 11, 2020 [1 favorite]
Steve Jobs had a vision splendid, of a world where nobody has to keep track of where they put their music because all the recordings they ever paid for are forever available on every device they own, wherever they go, because cloud.
Back in the real world, those of us who always considered Woz to be the Apple founder worth admiring have always understood that keeping track of where I put my music is not that difficult; certainly not difficult enough to be worth giving over control of my entire listening life to the ever-shifting whims of the marketing and licensing departments of a private corporation headquartered on the other side of the planet from me, and certainly not difficult enough to be worth restricting my driving to places where 4G cell service is reliably available.
Back in the real world, desktop hard drive storage can now be had for AU$32 per terabyte and I can literally store more music on one computer than I have the years left to listen to.
Back in the real world, it takes me almost as little time to load my phone up with a week's worth of M4As as it used to take to find 20 albums on cassette and pack them into the car case.
And back in the real world, I have an aftermarket stereo in my old second-hand car that my phone sees as a plain vanilla Bluetooth speaker when I ask it to, and that doesn't try to kill me by facilitating the making or taking of phone calls while behind the wheel. It sounds rather nicer than the old stereo did through its cassette adapter.
Streaming is capitalist world-domination convenience-addicting bullshit. Just say no. Preserving your autonomy is worth the five minutes a day that Siri might offer you in exchange for it.
posted by flabdablet at 12:02 PM on May 11, 2020 [6 favorites]
Back in the real world, those of us who always considered Woz to be the Apple founder worth admiring have always understood that keeping track of where I put my music is not that difficult; certainly not difficult enough to be worth giving over control of my entire listening life to the ever-shifting whims of the marketing and licensing departments of a private corporation headquartered on the other side of the planet from me, and certainly not difficult enough to be worth restricting my driving to places where 4G cell service is reliably available.
Back in the real world, desktop hard drive storage can now be had for AU$32 per terabyte and I can literally store more music on one computer than I have the years left to listen to.
Back in the real world, it takes me almost as little time to load my phone up with a week's worth of M4As as it used to take to find 20 albums on cassette and pack them into the car case.
And back in the real world, I have an aftermarket stereo in my old second-hand car that my phone sees as a plain vanilla Bluetooth speaker when I ask it to, and that doesn't try to kill me by facilitating the making or taking of phone calls while behind the wheel. It sounds rather nicer than the old stereo did through its cassette adapter.
Streaming is capitalist world-domination convenience-addicting bullshit. Just say no. Preserving your autonomy is worth the five minutes a day that Siri might offer you in exchange for it.
posted by flabdablet at 12:02 PM on May 11, 2020 [6 favorites]
That's not how they work at all. There is no tape, just a transducer (ideally with 2 channels) which presses against the cassette machine's playback head and feeds it the electromagnetic signal.
Yep. And that transducer is just another cassette tape head, as is clearly visible in the photo that accompanies that howlingly incorrect explanation. What they're effectively doing is turning two separate tape heads into the two halves of a little coupling transformer.
They sound as shitty as they do because keeping the physical relationship between a pair of tape heads stable is hard, especially in a bouncing car, double especially when one of them is mounted in a wibbly wobbly piece of plastic crap. Crosstalk between left and right channels in these things is just chronically bad. And don't get me started on equalization.
posted by flabdablet at 12:13 PM on May 11, 2020 [2 favorites]
Yep. And that transducer is just another cassette tape head, as is clearly visible in the photo that accompanies that howlingly incorrect explanation. What they're effectively doing is turning two separate tape heads into the two halves of a little coupling transformer.
They sound as shitty as they do because keeping the physical relationship between a pair of tape heads stable is hard, especially in a bouncing car, double especially when one of them is mounted in a wibbly wobbly piece of plastic crap. Crosstalk between left and right channels in these things is just chronically bad. And don't get me started on equalization.
posted by flabdablet at 12:13 PM on May 11, 2020 [2 favorites]
Streaming is capitalist world-domination convenience-addicting bullshit. Just say no. Preserving your autonomy is worth the five minutes a day that Siri might offer you in exchange for it.
lol.
Anyway, the "having access to everything at all times is actually bad" crowd is dying out (literally), just like the rust on your plastic tape. I would suggest that everyone wishing for the good ol' days of cassettes to go dig them up and see if any of them still play, or if they have oxidized all the way to "clear".
But, capitalist oppression or not, the kids these days are never ever going back to the old ways. Besides just generally being a shitty listening experience, the world has just moved on from not being able to play absolutely everything at any time.
Also, your views on "which founder worth admiring" aren't necessary shared by the rank and file of the company you are speaking about.
posted by sideshow at 1:12 PM on May 11, 2020 [2 favorites]
lol.
Anyway, the "having access to everything at all times is actually bad" crowd is dying out (literally), just like the rust on your plastic tape. I would suggest that everyone wishing for the good ol' days of cassettes to go dig them up and see if any of them still play, or if they have oxidized all the way to "clear".
But, capitalist oppression or not, the kids these days are never ever going back to the old ways. Besides just generally being a shitty listening experience, the world has just moved on from not being able to play absolutely everything at any time.
Also, your views on "which founder worth admiring" aren't necessary shared by the rank and file of the company you are speaking about.
posted by sideshow at 1:12 PM on May 11, 2020 [2 favorites]
I might still have one of those somewhere; came with a Discman™ I definitely don't have anymore.
posted by farlukar at 1:21 PM on May 11, 2020
posted by farlukar at 1:21 PM on May 11, 2020
When I got my first car, I had to buy an adapter so that the 8-track would play cassettes.
It was either that or listen to KISS 'Double Platinum' over and over and over and over...
posted by MrJM at 3:05 PM on May 11, 2020 [2 favorites]
It was either that or listen to KISS 'Double Platinum' over and over and over and over...
posted by MrJM at 3:05 PM on May 11, 2020 [2 favorites]
Anyway, the "having access to everything at all times is actually bad" crowd is dying out (literally), just like the rust on your plastic tape.
I already had access to everything - they just found a way to start charging for it again and randomly taking stuff away!
posted by atoxyl at 3:07 PM on May 11, 2020 [3 favorites]
I already had access to everything - they just found a way to start charging for it again and randomly taking stuff away!
posted by atoxyl at 3:07 PM on May 11, 2020 [3 favorites]
My real opinion on this is somewhat more nuanced of course but since people are being a bit snarky about it I'm just saying - the pre-streaming music listening experience of my specific cohort was not the "buying $18 CDs and trying not to break or lose them" experience.
posted by atoxyl at 3:13 PM on May 11, 2020 [4 favorites]
posted by atoxyl at 3:13 PM on May 11, 2020 [4 favorites]
...preemptive?
posted by entropicamericana at 5:00 PM on May 11, 2020
posted by entropicamericana at 5:00 PM on May 11, 2020
In 2012 after my mom's husband died she offered me his 2002 Park Avenue for $1000. I had teenager just turning 16, so I flew to Atlanta to pick up the car and drive it back to Virginia. I brought my portable FM transmitter with me, so I'd be able to play podcasts through the car stereo. As I started home I discovered the FM device was broken, so I resigned myself to a day of the radio. By the time I hit the SC border on I-95 I had already heard Freebird 3 times. I hadn't seen a cassette adapter in years, but I figured if any place still sold them, it would be a truck stop.
I figured correctly.
posted by COD at 5:02 PM on May 11, 2020 [8 favorites]
I figured correctly.
posted by COD at 5:02 PM on May 11, 2020 [8 favorites]
I would suggest that everyone wishing for the good ol' days of cassettes to go dig them up and see if any of them still play, or if they have oxidized all the way to "clear".
Huh? I literally spent last weekend sorting through our cassettes from the 90s and they sound fantastic. Like, perfect. Cassette tape is one of the cleanest, longest lasting formats you can keep. It's not practical for some modern reasons and applications, but my love for tapes will never die. And my husband and I still regularly use them for our music recording projects.
posted by tiny frying pan at 6:03 PM on May 11, 2020 [1 favorite]
Huh? I literally spent last weekend sorting through our cassettes from the 90s and they sound fantastic. Like, perfect. Cassette tape is one of the cleanest, longest lasting formats you can keep. It's not practical for some modern reasons and applications, but my love for tapes will never die. And my husband and I still regularly use them for our music recording projects.
posted by tiny frying pan at 6:03 PM on May 11, 2020 [1 favorite]
Cassette tape is one of the cleanest, longest lasting formats you can keep.
No, they're not. They were never terribly high fidelity to begin with, even if you had an expensive Nakamichi deck, and time causes the adhesive that holds the iron oxide to the plastic to degrade. Not to mention the possibility of the tape machine mangling the tape due to a feeding problem. A stamped CD has a much longer lifespan than a cassette.
posted by Candleman at 7:15 PM on May 11, 2020 [2 favorites]
No, they're not. They were never terribly high fidelity to begin with, even if you had an expensive Nakamichi deck, and time causes the adhesive that holds the iron oxide to the plastic to degrade. Not to mention the possibility of the tape machine mangling the tape due to a feeding problem. A stamped CD has a much longer lifespan than a cassette.
posted by Candleman at 7:15 PM on May 11, 2020 [2 favorites]
When I got my first car, I had to buy an adapter so that the 8-track would play cassettes.
Came to speak of these. You could daisy-chain an 8-track to cassette adapter, cassette to 3.5mm adapter, and end with a 3.5mm to Lightening adapter!
posted by MrGuilt at 7:55 PM on May 11, 2020 [4 favorites]
Came to speak of these. You could daisy-chain an 8-track to cassette adapter, cassette to 3.5mm adapter, and end with a 3.5mm to Lightening adapter!
posted by MrGuilt at 7:55 PM on May 11, 2020 [4 favorites]
I did this! In the not-too-distant past, I had a '78 Ford Bronco with the factory 8-Track. I had an 8-track to cassette adapter, and one of these cassette-to-aux adapters. Something about playing my iPhone through the factory 8-track player just made me grin.
posted by xedrik at 9:08 PM on May 11, 2020
posted by xedrik at 9:08 PM on May 11, 2020
I too had to have the 8-track cassette adapter in my first car. Early 80s teenagers represent!
posted by Windopaene at 9:56 PM on May 11, 2020 [2 favorites]
posted by Windopaene at 9:56 PM on May 11, 2020 [2 favorites]
at some point apple made it impossible to put music onto an ipod without itunes.
YMMV, as is usually the case with these kinds of things, but I've had good experiences with Sharepod.
posted by box at 7:32 AM on May 12, 2020
YMMV, as is usually the case with these kinds of things, but I've had good experiences with Sharepod.
posted by box at 7:32 AM on May 12, 2020
If you think cassettes sound great, have your ears examined. Seriously.
We had, for a little while, a car in the suck point of audio options: post-cassette, but pre-aux. There was no way short of a shitty transmitter to play anything other than CD.
It was super annoying, and honestly contributed to us keeping the car less time than we might’ve otherwise.
posted by uberchet at 9:51 AM on May 16, 2020
We had, for a little while, a car in the suck point of audio options: post-cassette, but pre-aux. There was no way short of a shitty transmitter to play anything other than CD.
It was super annoying, and honestly contributed to us keeping the car less time than we might’ve otherwise.
posted by uberchet at 9:51 AM on May 16, 2020
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posted by Kirth Gerson at 9:33 AM on May 11, 2020 [4 favorites]