Poll: Which of the following music media, if someone suddenly handed you a piece of music recorded on it, would you be able to play without making additional purchases?
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@hittitezombie see second post in thread
@mcc D'oh! Done now.

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@christinelove honestly i'm as surprised as you are. i assume it's because nobody on mastodon throws away their old computers
@mcc @christinelove in my case it’s because BD-R / M-disc are pretty good solutions to the problem of “I want to keep an archival copy of this data long term”.
But also the other thing.
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@mcc @christinelove I figure it’s got to be that, right? The CD revival is underway but no way is that responsible for this hitting 94%.
@misty @mcc @christinelove I have a modest CD collection (a fun combination of rarities and "Amazon MP3 + physical CD was somehow cheaper than Amazon MP3 by itself" from 10+ years ago) and they're all ripped to FLAC via a USB DVD burner which is my primary optical media.
But when I first saw the poll, my first thought was "circa 2010 24 inch GE LCD TV with an integrated DVD player in the guest room, which can also play CDs", and assumed everyone still has something like that sitting in a corner.
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Poll: Which of the following music media, if someone suddenly handed you a piece of music recorded on it, would you be able to play without making additional purchases?
@mcc For better or for worse, I can only handle streaming in my home.
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@adriano @mcc @christinelove Good point! And I've even used my xbox to play music CDs in the last year!
@virtualsid @adriano @mcc @christinelove Same, my Xbox One plays CDs
have never been into specifically collecting stuff for playing old media, nor did I ever get into the vinyl / cassette revival. but I have enough DVDs and CDs and games on disk that I appreciate the Xbox still being able to do it
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Poll: Which of the following music media, if someone suddenly handed you a piece of music recorded on it, would you be able to play without making additional purchases?
@mcc When I made my overseas move and had to rehome about 90% of my accumulated stuff, I kept one walkman and one discman to go with the CDs and cassettes I kept.
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Poll: Which of the following music media, if someone suddenly handed you a piece of music recorded on it, would you be able to play without making additional purchases?
I've not had anything that could play the last 3 for nearly 20 years.
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Poll: Which of the following music media, if someone suddenly handed you a piece of music recorded on it, would you be able to play without making additional purchases?
@mcc Own a vinyl player, Discman and recently fixed my old Walkman as well
I did just have to look up if, and was surprised that my PS5 can NOT actually play music CDs! -
@mcc I _think_ my tape deck still works...
@izzy @mcc same... I have a glorious late 1970s tape deck, which was already running slow back when I used it in the 1990s, so there's a chance I'll get something - but also a chance the belts are all gone now.
As a backup, I also have an early 1980s cheap crap plastic "Walkman" type thing - again, might get something out of it but likely to be wobbly as hell
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Poll: Which of the following music media, if someone suddenly handed you a piece of music recorded on it, would you be able to play without making additional purchases?
@mcc i really need to fix my cassette deck
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Poll: Which of the following music media, if someone suddenly handed you a piece of music recorded on it, would you be able to play without making additional purchases?
@mcc I said only CD but I'm pretty sure I could read all the rest with what I have here ... but it would imply probably weeks of engineering to basically build players out of random bits I have laying around

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Poll: Which of the following music media, if someone suddenly handed you a piece of music recorded on it, would you be able to play without making additional purchases?
@mcc
You'd want to ask if voter is in USA or Europe.
The USA fitted 8-Track (Lear Jet Audio) to 1 or 2 brands of car as standard.
Players were very rare in UK (likely in all of Europe) and cartridges rarer.
Compact cassette already existed.
8 Track issues: No FF, no rev or rewind, recorders rare. High wear, wow & flutter due to endless loop. Shorter than cassette. Head moves when foil hits & goes out of alignment.You can't buy 8T for decades. The others are still made. Had 1 once. 1 cart.
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(BONUS POLL)
Which of the following music media, if someone suddenly handed you a piece of music recorded on it, would you be able to play without making additional purchases?
NOTES:
- If the answer is "none of the above" ,click "Show results". We can probably compare the previous poll to judge the significance of the scale of responses.
- Rather than worrying about differences between reel-to-reel formats, answer "reel to reel tape" if you can play at least one reel to reel tape format.
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Poll: Which of the following music media, if someone suddenly handed you a piece of music recorded on it, would you be able to play without making additional purchases?
@mcc Where's the "none of the above" option
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@mcc Vinyl only. I don't see a point in CDs – when it comes to ease, playing from drive/stream beats everything, so there needs to be a reason to have additional media. And vinyl has the biggest covers, lovely leaflets and looks pretty while spinning.
@ljrk @mcc
Vinyl wear is very fast. 20 plays loses most above 10 KHz.
Distortion is high
Noise much higher than CD.
33 vinyl recorded with less dynamic range than 45 to extend playtime. Both less than CD.CD best way to buy a copy of music to play anywhere. You never own streaming and needs Internet.
CD trivial to store on PC/Flash etc with automatic track names.Cassette is best for audio books as location is "saved" between players. Quality OK for that but marginal for music.
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@mcc
I'm not kidding about having an 8-track player! It was included as a component in a combined AM/FM radio and 8-track player. The radio is still in regular use, because it is an excellent stereo set with an antenna and two good speakers. No modern radio can beat it. Sadly, we haven't seen an 8-track tape in years. But if one should ever fall into our hands, we would be able to play it!
@CommonSparrow @mcc
I saw a home 8 Track player once, ever.
Never saw one in a car, though I had a S/H car 8T in the house for a while 1999 & 1 cart. -
(BONUS POLL)
Which of the following music media, if someone suddenly handed you a piece of music recorded on it, would you be able to play without making additional purchases?
NOTES:
- If the answer is "none of the above" ,click "Show results". We can probably compare the previous poll to judge the significance of the scale of responses.
- Rather than worrying about differences between reel-to-reel formats, answer "reel to reel tape" if you can play at least one reel to reel tape format.
@mcc I suppose *technically*, I could feed the player piano roll through my scanner and write some code to do image recognition on that and then process the holes into something that would generate MIDI. That's not buying anything new, but it's probably cheating for the purposes of this poll.
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Poll: Which of the following music media, if someone suddenly handed you a piece of music recorded on it, would you be able to play without making additional purchases?
@mcc
None of the above, unfortunately. -
Poll: Which of the following music media, if someone suddenly handed you a piece of music recorded on it, would you be able to play without making additional purchases?
@mcc I still have one or two optical drives in the house if I look hard enough.
Definitely one on the TV/media center Debian box, and I'm pretty sure there's one more kicking around downstairs somewhere but I never use it.
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Poll: Which of the following music media, if someone suddenly handed you a piece of music recorded on it, would you be able to play without making additional purchases?
@mcc None of the above