HiWire

RIP, Mark Lanegan

Happy Birthday!

Happy Birthday!

Getting Audiocrazy... Chinese company mods Chinese boombox... things are getting very meta in here. Does it meta? "Japenese" tape mechanism to avoid it never eating tapes... my takeaway? Don't get mono. 🚮

Loudermilk

Happy Birthday!

Happy Birthday!

Perfect sound forever! I do like the ability to make perfect digital copies. It's subjective whether digital sounds "better" than analog, but it certainly is easier, faster, and cheaper.

You can get superior quality and easier file handling for practically free with digital music. That's why I think the people evangelizing cassettes are nostalgic above everything. Cassette decks take so much maintenance and the parts are getting hard to find... all for inferior performance and deteriorating quality. I get that cassette has that analog sound, but it was never that good at the budget level. I thought were cassettes were fun as a kid, but that is because I didn't have my own stuff. I recorded stuff on a boom box or my mom's radio/cassette player. No hi-fi stuff.

I was excited to fire up my portable cassette player (not a treasured high-end relic) a few weeks ago, only to discover it doesn't work any more. I doubt I can summon the wherewithal to get into cassettes again... my dad has several cassette decks, so I might bring my small bunch of cassettes (fewer than 15) back at some point and try to digitize them. It's not worth the effort, though, as most of the cassettes are purchased (Dolby B ) and the few I recorded came off AM radio and they were recorded badly.

American McGee's Alice might be coming back in a new game, Alice: Asylum

Happy Birthday!

AI is generating some weird stuff... BattleTech as an 80s science fiction movie:

Probably live music and other random stuff. The budget is super low, which is why I've started at around $200 or so. I already have GarageBand and Adobe Audition, so I should learn to use them.

Modern Talking – Cheri, Cheri Lady Paramore – Running Out of Time Naxatras – Omega Madness

I've got nothing... started investigating a Zoom iQ6 stereo microphone for the phone and the Rode VideoMicro II for a nonexistent camera. Purely for hobby recording. Compact, low-cost, maybe reasonable quality? Doing research on vintage cassette Walkmans and MiniDisc recorders revived my curiosity in field recording.

I read Slant first, too. Finally getting to Queen of Angels.

Greg Bear – Queen of Angels

Flash Gordon: The Greatest Adventure of All no commercial release in the US – broadcast on NBC on August 21, 1982 https://archive.org/details/flash-gordon-the-greatest-adventure-of-all-1979

Chris Rea – Era 1 (1978-1984)

On the subject of compact cassettes... everything I watch and read about the cassette revival makes me love digital music more:

Happy Birthday!

Happy Birthday!

The claimed performance gains are decent. I'm looking forward to the benchmark tests. It looks like the M2 iMac is delayed or waiting until the M3, and fanboys are already enraged about the Mac Pro. I'm particularly happy about the increased memory... today's high-performance applications are becoming more and more memory hungry.

New M2 Mac Mini and MacBook Pros announced today... performance gains, increased RAM, improved battery life... increased prices: https://www.macworld.com/article/1475274/m2-mac-mini-m2-pro-upgrade-option.html https://www.macworld.com/article/1475272/m2-pro-and-m2-max-macbook-pro-cpu-gpu-battery.html