[HN Gopher] Nostalgia for Physical Media
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Nostalgia for Physical Media
Author : ingve
Score : 31 points
Date : 2025-02-16 08:28 UTC (2 days ago)
(HTM) web link (www.sicpers.info)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.sicpers.info)
| j-pb wrote:
| SD-Cards are a currently widely used physical media.
|
| Even my streamlined slimed-down minimalistic MacBook Pro has an
| SD-Card slot.
|
| We can make SD-Cards with music and movies on them a reality, we
| just have to walk to our nearest convenience store, grab a 64Gb
| version for 10 bucks, put stuff on it, and give it to a friend.
| pdntspa wrote:
| That's probably exclusively because pro cameras still use SD
| cards
| vel0city wrote:
| It would be interesting to see a world where more media than
| just Nintendo videogames were sold as physical media cartridges
| like read-only SD cards.
|
| My kids have these music players called Yoto players. They're
| extreme DRM, but still fun and really accessible for little
| kids to use. Content "comes" on these NFC cards about the size
| of a playing card. You stick the card in a slot on the top of
| the player, it plays the music cached from "the cloud". It
| would have been neat to have something about as durable as this
| but not an entirely closed single-vendor system.
| alabastervlog wrote:
| Misses a couple of the main things about vinyl: reduced
| temptation to skip tracks, and side-based thinking about and
| listening to your albums. It's a format for albums, or at least
| for halves of albums. You put on a side, and you play that side.
| If there's a single track that gets listened to on its own, it's
| probably track one on side A or B of an album. It affects how you
| experience and live with your music.
|
| This would remain true if they sounded just like CDs but
| otherwise worked like vinyl.
| tombert wrote:
| Similarly, something I kind of miss is being "stuck" with an
| album.
|
| When I was a teenager, I would occasionally buy a CD and put it
| in my car. A lot of the time, that was basically the only music
| I listened to for a month, maybe more, so I would become pretty
| intimately familiar with the album, and it would play
| continuously as I was driving. I would listen to all the songs
| on the album over and over again, and a lot of the time songs
| that I initially didn't like all that much actually became my
| favorites.
|
| With the advent of Spotify and its brethren, it's much easier
| to only listen to songs that you instantly liked, because
| pretty much every song ever made is directly available to you.
|
| Obviously, you _can_ just play the whole album on Spotify, and
| maybe if you 're self-disciplined enough then you could force
| yourself to listen to an album over and over again on there,
| but I have always found that pretty difficult, and my streaming
| ends up being kind of an echo chamber of stuff I already know I
| like.
|
| To be clear, I _do_ think that the streaming services are,
| generally speaking, much better than what we had in the 90 's
| and early 2000's, but there are aspects that I miss.
| alabastervlog wrote:
| This is one of those "the medium is the message" things. The
| album _per se_ became a widespread art form because the
| _message_ of LPs is the album. It 's how you experience that
| medium. It was preceded by an era of long-form live high-art
| music and short-song-focused popular music, in early mass
| reproduced recordings and as played by folk and popular
| musicians--when we got LPs we started collecting those
| haphazardly onto albums for convenience, then artists began
| crafting the LPs as their own, whole works, or at least
| paying close attention to song arrangement and selection on
| them.
|
| We're back to a world of disconnected songs, in some ways.
| It's not uncommon for an artist to release a bunch of singles
| then just, later, collect those into a nominal "album" for
| physical sales, like the earliest days of LPs. Some artists
| seem to _only_ release singles for streaming (I see this a
| lot in off-mainstream hiphop). I think only the idea and
| marketing power of the thematic album-tour is really keeping
| the form of the album alive as a shaping force for music.
| thaumasiotes wrote:
| > We're back to a world of disconnected songs, in some
| ways. It's not uncommon for an artist to release a bunch of
| singles then just, later, collect those into a nominal
| "album" for physical sales
|
| As my parents have often informed me, an album on which you
| liked two of the songs was a good one, and one on which you
| liked three was a great one. Mostly you bought an album for
| a single track that was on there. But, publishers would
| frequently release "greatest hits" albums consolidating
| many popular songs onto the same album.
|
| This seems to be basically identical to the system you
| describe that we have now, except that in the "single
| track" phase of the process, the track costs $1 instead of
| $15.
| alabastervlog wrote:
| Yeah, totally, it's not like all listening was to albums
| crafted as albums, and there's some hindsight-benefit
| where modern listeners who like vinyl favor the albums
| that _succeeded_ at being an album-as-artform and ignore
| the ones that only had like two good tracks. Plus, radio,
| jukeboxes, and 45s existed at the same time as LPs.
| allturtles wrote:
| Well, yeah. Even at the time, there was far far more
| music published than anyone could buy, especially
| considering the existing back catalogs. Why wouldn't you
| just buy the good stuff? This isn't 'cheating.'
|
| If you were/are careful in your purchases, you could/can
| find plenty of albums that are wall-to-wall magic. Some
| that I enjoyed in my youth:
|
| - Beatles, Revolver - Beastie Boys, Ill Communication -
| Led Zeppelin IV - Led Zeppelin, Houses of the Holy -
| Metallica, self-titled ("Black Album") - Nirvana,
| Nevermind - Pearl Jam, Ten - Pink Floyd, Dark Side of the
| Moon - Radiohead, OK Computer - Snoop Dogg, Doggystyle -
| Weezer, self-titled ("Blue Album")
| tombert wrote:
| Yeah, despite me missing the positive experiences, I
| definitely would buy albums as a teenager and end up
| hating most of it. I remember really disliking Light
| Grenades by Incubus, for example, after buying it purely
| because of a song I heard on the radio.
|
| I think the reason that Dark Side of the Moon, for
| example, is so loved is in no small part because it is
| _was_ well tailored to be an album. The songs blend in to
| each other, there are repeated motifs throughout the
| album, it comes together as one big cohesive unit, and as
| such I can 't really listen to "one song" on it, I
| usually have to put on the whole album (or at least side
| 2).
| stryan wrote:
| I've been on a journey the past few months to listen to every
| single album I own (a little more than 800 or so) and if you
| can find that discipline I do recommend trying to listen to
| music in albums again. Even if it's just when it first comes
| out, listen to the whole album once and then just listen to
| the individual songs you liked. I've found so many songs that
| I wouldn't have liked otherwise but they either A) grew on me
| (similar to what you talked about) or B) I liked them within
| the context of the album.
| euroderf wrote:
| > It's a format for albums, or at least for halves of albums.
|
| Or thirds! See: Monty Python's three-sided record.
| alabastervlog wrote:
| Sure, and of course double (or more!) albums were/are a
| thing. There was even a limited effort at players that could
| automatically drop a second album on top of a first when a
| side finished, then start playing the second record, and some
| pressings that put sides A and C on one record, and B and D
| on the other, so you could play two sides back-to-back
| automatically (by stacking the two albums on such a player).
| Though I don't think those were ever popular enough to much
| affect the art form.
|
| Then there's e.g. classical music, where it wasn't unusual
| for one purchased unit of music to be a small _box_ of
| several LPs. The album-as-an-artform, where "album" is
| usually one or two records created as a semi- or entirely-
| cohesive piece that was nonetheless broken into a bunch of
| shorter tracks and all crafted for the form and experience of
| the LP, was mostly a phenomenon for popular forms of music.
| IDK if "classical" music that was actually composed during
| the height of the LP was meaningfully and in some widespread
| way shaped by the LP record like pop music was, or not (I
| just don't know much about that music).
|
| [EDIT] To be clear, what I'm talking about as far as the
| medium affecting the form the art took and how it was
| experienced isn't just things like full-on "concept albums",
| but attention to things like consistent tone or flow or
| placement of songs at the start of sides, or attention to
| which song ends a side and how that acts to draw one to the
| next side, or to close the current one, or whatever.
| bregma wrote:
| Most home stereos had a drop spindle, and most double
| albums has sides 1 and 4 on one platter and 2 and 3 on the
| other. Double albums were sure-as-heck an art form and not
| just a collection of singles. Between the 80 minutes of
| coherent music and the gatefold album cover art you could
| waste many an evening listening and looking at just what
| the artist(s) intended.
| reptation wrote:
| It also misses that vinyl records degrade more gracefully than
| CDs, IMO.
| Mistletoe wrote:
| I love Minidisc but I did feel like it was slightly less good
| sounding than CD. I wish CDs had followed the form factor of
| Minidisc and had the little integrated holder for it. It tickles
| my cyberpunk retro futurism cassette cool tendencies to be
| putting something like that in and out of the player when you
| load it.
| camtarn wrote:
| Early models of the AppleCD CD-ROM drive used caddies! Our Mac
| LCs at school had them. They were, indeed, very cool.
|
| https://i0.wp.com/www.aventure-apple.com/blog/wp-content/upl...
| Mistletoe wrote:
| It's just so freaking cool. I'm imagining the chrome utopia
| we would be in right now if this had continued. Yes I get
| that it made the blanks cost more, but it's just so cool and
| commercial CDs needed a case anyway.
| nchagnet wrote:
| At least pertaining to vinyls, this seems to mostly discuss
| practical and technical aspects, but misses the more "ceremonial"
| aspect which in my opinion explains its popularity. Buying a
| physical record requires some intent and choice which you don't
| have in a spotify catalogue of millions of tracks. And playing a
| record has this physical action aspect a lot of people cherish: I
| enjoy it because it feels like a treat I set up for myself.
| gxs wrote:
| Yeah, related to this is that for some subset of people who
| enjoy things like physical media - it could be as simple as
| nostalgia and them missing they used to do.
|
| That's also an element of why this is popular
|
| Add all those together and they become, well, popular
| lars512 wrote:
| Ah, minidiscs, they still have a kind of futuristic cool to them
| even now! When I was younger only the kids from Hong Kong had
| minidiscs and minidisc players.
| allturtles wrote:
| I think OP is overly focused on sound quality. When I was a kid,
| I didn't appreciate any material difference in sound quality
| between vinyl, CD, and cassette. I listened to music on cheap
| walkman headphones or a small boombox, or in a car with standard
| cheap speakers. Cassettes were better than vinyl because you
| could play them in your car and because they were writable: you
| could record songs off the radio or make mixtapes on them. CDs
| were better than vinyl because you could play them in your car
| and better than cassettes because you could replay or skip tracks
| with a push of a button.
| frereubu wrote:
| I've been buying CDs and LPs for a while, based on what media the
| music was recorded for, and I've really been enjoying the things
| that other commenters have enjoyed about those formats. However,
| the one thing that this article doesn't mention - in my
| experience CDs scratch / degrade too, and when they do they
| become almost entirely unplayable because sometimes it's
| impossible to skip past the scratch / defect depending on the
| player. The one _huge_ advantage of digital media is that it
| doesn 't degrade in any meaningful way (aside from random tracks
| being accidentally deleted, which Apple iTunes Match decided to
| do to my library a few years ago, after which I never really
| trusted it again).
| dualboot wrote:
| | The one huge advantage of digital media is that it doesn't
| degrade in any meaningful way (aside from random tracks being
| accidentally deleted
|
| That assumes you're using a storage platform that routinely
| validates the integrity of the data at rest.
| bregma wrote:
| "Nice collection. It would be a shame if something accidental
| happened to it. Keep paying us and we'll make sure nothing
| does."
|
| I'm pretty sure there used to be a word for that, back in the
| before days.
| cassepipe wrote:
| It seems like an exaggeration. As a child I have been
| instructed that a LP/CD/DVD is either is its sleeve or in the
| player but never anywhere else. My parent's CD collection have
| either no or very minor scratches, all of them most definitely
| playable. And they _have_ been listened to, a lot. Some of my
| friends took almost no care of their CDs (left them without
| protection in the room /car) and even then it was rare that one
| wouldn't play.
| recursivedoubts wrote:
| I would love it if someone (let's be honest, nintendo) would
| bring back large physical cartridges for games. It's such a
| pleasure to put a large piece of physical media into a console to
| start playing, an opportunity for artistic expression, etc. With
| todays hardware you could make the games boot up instantly.
|
| The "thingness" of older hardware had a pleasure all its own.
|
| Also, you owned it.
|
| EDIT: I tapped into this nostalgia in a way when I released htmx
| 2.0 on 5.25 & 3.5 floppy disks for the first week:
| https://swag.htmx.org/products/floppy
| palata wrote:
| > Also, you owned it.
|
| Don't worry: we could still make a physical cartridge with DRM
| that would stop working after you unsubscribe from the service
| :-)
| recursivedoubts wrote:
| sonfoa
| rwl4 wrote:
| Somewhat related: Anyone recognize the keyboard in the header
| image? Looks extremely similar to an HP 95LX series but isn't one
| I recognize.
| GrantMoyer wrote:
| One important aspect (to me, at least) that the article doesn't
| mention is that physical media comes with actual ownership rights
| (first-sale doctrine), and that by whatever lucky coincidence
| publishers weren't able to introduce widespread DRM to physical
| audio media.
| lukifer wrote:
| I use 4K Blu Rays when I can, for the best possible quality. And
| I continue to be staggered at just how bad the UI/UX is, compared
| to DVDs (which was arguably somewhat worse on average than VHS).
|
| If I didn't know better, I'd think the manufacturers were
| actively trying to sabotage physical media. That the default UX
| should be "insert disc, wait three seconds, hit play" is not
| exactly rocket science.
| DoneWithAllThat wrote:
| I find interesting that the slow fading of physical media is one
| thing sci fi has gotten wrong for the last hundred years or so.
| Even the most futuristic visions involved some kind of physical
| media and/or connection.
| Acrobatic_Road wrote:
| Yeah but physical computers have been replaced by holographic
| tablets and artificial intelligence.
| karaterobot wrote:
| This seems to be conflating nostalgia with performance
| characteristics, isn't it?
|
| For example, CDs are listed preferable to vinyl because the sound
| quality is better. That's not my understanding of how nostalgia
| works. People who grew up with vinyl records may be nostalgic for
| them not because they're a superior format, but because they
| evoke a memory of former times.
|
| For myself, personally, I'm only slightly nostalgic for vinyl (we
| didn't have a record player in my house, but my babysitter did),
| but I have a ton of nostalgia for his lowest-ranked format,
| 8-tracks. That's what my dad had in his 60s-era Chevy pickup with
| an aftermarket 8-track player. I think of riding next to him on
| the bench seat and pulling out a tape from the black leather case
| that fit under it, containing a total of, I think, 6 options. We
| could both sing every song on them, and would do that in the
| parking lot when we waited for my mom to get off work. It was a
| terrible format, but the nostalgia factor is through the roof.
|
| CDs, I can take or leave, I guess. For me, the CD was a thing I
| could burn MP3s onto and play through my CD player, attached via
| cassette interface to my 1987 Beretta.
| Acrobatic_Road wrote:
| Cassette tapes are underrated. They sound great on my cassette
| desk, and they will always be cheaper than the other formats. If
| you sold your physical media a long time ago, or are building a
| collection for the first time, consider getting some tapes.
| gambiting wrote:
| We have a 3 year old and came back to CDs for night time stories.
| I know now every company under the sun sells these special NFC
| equipped speakers where you buy little statuettes of your
| favourite characters, you put them on the speaker and it plays a
| story. But even ignoring the cost of the speaker, the figurines
| cost a fortune, like PS15 each usually. You know what doesn't
| cost a fortune? An old Sony CD player and an album of 100CDs with
| Disney(and other stories) from eBay. And my son has as much fun
| picking the story to listen to with CDs as they always have a
| colourful label on them.
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