We'd listen to the radio station / We were too damn poor to buy the eight track tapes o/~

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

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?
- 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

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.
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.
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

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.

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.

Nobody forces you to replace your vinyls XD

He'll I'm buying them again

Sit Ubu, sit.

Ah man I’m an old millennial and that works for me too.

And now back to records again.

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.

No you don't you whiney bitch. People choose to use them because they are easy and of good value.

-The Ultimate Eighties Page-

The MP3s could be ripped from the CDs and you don't need a subscription to listen to them.

I'm not a mad genx. I skipped mp3 and directly ripped my cds to flacs. Still have all my flac from 20-something-years ago. I also skipped silly streaming. I grew a massive library and use MediaMonkey. No need for stupid spotify.

Tape was superior in theory, but i hated the noise, no matter how great your equipment was.

In short: i welcomed every change, despite the last one. Instead of better quality we got lousy streaming (except tidal).