[herrh]

In order to make my kids (2 and 4) be able to play music on their own without having to use a smart device or screen i bought an old boombox for like 10 dollars a couple of years ago. We buy a lot of records, though exclusively in goodwill-like stores, and they love it. They have a lot of audiobooks for kids but also cd:s with music. A favourite right now is Aquas debut album Aquarium (the one with Barbie Girl)

I think it is really nice for kids to get something physical they can look for themselves in stores and find music that they think looks interesting rather than just what the algorithm would give them were they to use screens (They watch some tv though). But they also seem to love just looking in the booklets and the pictures of the artists or they characters from the books. But it also gives them more freedom to just put on a record if they want rather than having to ask me to put something on our Google Nest.

Vinyl records are still too hard to put on and there isn't that much good kids stuff you can find and cassettes are so easy to accidentely tangle. They are still not that good at handling the cd records so they get smudged and jacks and stuff, but i'm looking into buying a CD-R writer so i can easily make new copies of the cd:s that stutter and won't play.

[21asdffdsa12]

Anyone else remember the superb manuals that used to come with games? The starcrat and warcraft manuals. Drawings and lore. Diablo. Those old games came with books.

[mk_stjames]

Nothing was worse however than getting a game used and not getting the manual included, when the manual contained very necessary information to progress through the game, and in an era where 'The Web' still wasn't really a thing....

I'm looking at you, 1993's Journeyman Project....

[kevstev]

Journeyman Project... that brought back a deep rooted memory. Its still not clear to me if my Packard Bell came with a full version or a demo, because I remember being stuck about an hour in and could not figure out how to progress. I also was mildly interested in the game, but had better ones to play- Myst, X-Wing, etc.

[mk_stjames]

Actually, yes, this was the experience I was recalling... it was 1995, not 1993, and it was the 'Turbo' version of Journeyman Project, which came in a CD pack bundled with Windows 95 by Packard Bell (a surprisingly large compilation of software to bundle with such a computer at the time. Man, it was a golden age of progress in the PC world back then). Since it wasn't the retail version of the game, it did not come with the original instructions; instead they buried the door access code and some other numerical codes you needed during the game in a bundled instruction book for the CD box set. [0](the little teal booklet in this photo) No one ever knew to look in there, because it doesn't appear to be branded to have anything to do with the game.

There are entire sects of people on the internet that share this incredibly frustrating memory from their childhood. [1]

[0] https://www.worthpoint.com/worthopedia/1995-packard-bell-sof...

[1] https://steamcommunity.com/app/359420/discussions/0/13550947...

[kevstev]

That's really interesting- I wish I could go back 30 years and verify that- I am a bit skeptical to be honest, as a young sponge with my first computer I was reading everything available to me- which wasn't much, a book on windows, and the manuals that it came with. But maybe I missed it.

That booklet doesn't appear to be available online anywhere :(.

[kibwen]

The Civ III manual was 242 pages long: https://archive.org/details/Civilization_3_-_Manual/mode/2up

[FacelessJim]

I remember the smell of a freshly opened game, damn still gives me shivers of excitement

[bigstrat2003]

Yeah. I remember going to the store to buy Starcraft 2 physically, specifically because Blizzard had always had such good manuals. Then there was nothing in there. It was such a letdown.

[criddell]

The Infocom games always had fun stuff in the box.

https://gallery.guetech.org/hhgttg/hhgttg.html

[krogenx]

I remember fondly spending countless hours looking through the Icewind Dale manual.

Unfortunately, I purchased Baldur’s Gate 1/2 many years later with no manual. I’m sure it had an awesome manual as well.

[hazbot]

Can confirm the Baldur's Gate 2 manual was an endlessly fascinating tome.

[hibikir]

Those came with spiral bound manuals, as they were that tjick, attempting to explain at least some of D&D 2nd edition, even when the full rules were out pf scope

[CalRobert]

TIE Fighter even had a novella that worked in-came commands in to the story.

I recall SimEarth having a multi-hundred page spiral-bound manual (though my memory is hazy)

I pored over them obsessively.

[justsomehnguy]

https://archive.org/search?query=SimEarth+manual&tab=all

[thaumasiotes]

Lemmings 2 came with a short story describing the journey of Jimmy McLemming around the Lemmings world. It was great.

[Eddy_Viscosity2]

Even if those books were to come back now, they would be AI-generated slop. I am sad for the future of creative works.

[iamben]

One of my absolute favourite things as an impressionable teen getting into music was reading through the liner notes in the CD booklets.

You'd read the lyrics, see some pictures, and best you'd scour through the thank you section and those would be the bands you'd look for next time you were in the record shop. Great times.

[DoesntMatter22]

The pictures. They told a thousand words. I loved those times. Made me think about what the artist was thinking. 90s had some great CD and cassette booklets

[hoherd]

My way of giving my kids access to music without screens was to buy a battery powered mp3 playing radio, then fill an SD card with music and pop it into the player. I put a mix of kids songs, classic songs, and things I enjoy that I'd want them to also enjoy. I have some very cute videos of my daughter skipping through the songs. It was always a bit heartbreaking for her to get to one of my favorites and then skip over it, but it was also adorable to watch her stop on a song unexpectedly and sing along with it. One video in particular that is dear to me is her singing along to If I Fell by The Beatles. Also funny is she'd play All I Ask of You by Skrillex over and over.

[edbaskerville]

Exact same story here. Same age kids (well, one just turned 5). I wonder how many CDs are being sold just because of parents trying to protect their kids from device addiction.

[m463]

I agree on physically exploring.

It is always nice to take younger folks to the used DVD/CD store and let them explore. It is not expensive.

There's also a strange paradox, where the better stuff is cheaper. (technically it is probably popular stuff is cheaper). The dvds of season 1 of Friends is usually $1.

and sometimes you can get 4k UHD disks for cheap.

[loloquwowndueo]

> Vinyl records are still too hard to put on

Nonsense. Me and my bro happily put records of fairy tales and Disney movie adaptations back in the 80s on our crappy portable record player (don’t you dare call this thing a turntable). Harder than a cd? For sure. Too hard for a 5 year old? Certainly not, as long as you don’t mind the record itself facing some rough handling. Which they survived just fine, anyway.

[gib444]

> A favourite right now is Aquas debut album Aquarium (the one with Barbie Girl)

That's awesome. I remember when that song came out. Those were the days...

(I hope it isn't driving you crazy haha(

[gyulai]

I've been on a journey to rediscover cassettes as a medium this year, both for myself and my kid.

For myself, the motivation was ownership over streaming and wanting to support the long tail of artists (or, anyways, the subset whose music I happen to like).

For my kid, my motivation looks just like yours: not wanting to give him access to smart devices and wanting to keep him away from screens.

The big learning was that, almost inevitably, one has to divorce the medium used for purchase from the medium used for consumption (which eliminates vinyl from consideration right there). When I started actually buying cassettes from artists on BandCamp, I quickly realized that I was paying way more for shipping costs and customs duties than for the actual media. Artists often offer the cassette including the digital album on BandCamp at similar prices to just the digital. Makes sense, if you consider that the digital doesn't add any real marginal cost. But, once you factor in the cost of tape stock, production, packaging/handling, often done by the artists themselves, I almost feel bad about taking advantage of their generosity. My intention is to financially support them, but I'm finding it hard to believe that, on the other end of all of these costs, there is any money left over for them. ...so, I tended to use the BandCamp feature for tipping/overpaying, but too much of that got eaten up by taxes and my collector / music enjoyment hobby just became too expensive over all, that way.

So, I stopped buying physical. My plan is to set up some kind of system to help me stay organized with self-hosted music files, and then re-booting my collecting hobby by buying one-time digital downloads on BandCamp Fridays or directly from artists. Maybe, I will also make mix tapes from time to time for myself or to give to other people. -- I think, in this context, the degrading-quality of analogue is a feature not a bug, because the ideal outcome would be for friends to enjoy single tracks from albums in degraded quality from the mix tapes, and then look up the artists they like and buy full albums as high-quality digital downloads, and support the artists that way.

For the kid, I got a vintage Fisher Price cassette player, and am finding it hard to believe that anything based on CDs could match the sturdy build quality. Also, with a toddler, it's a given that the media will be in contact with the floor a lot and scratch. So, this is another area where the cassette is a clear winner.

The third learning is about the actual process of making the cassettes: Right now, I have a tablet connected to a vintage tape deck through an analogue cable, and that's a surprisingly low-friction way to turn any kind of content that you can actually play into a cassette. Trying to stay within the digital realm to burn a CD means fighting the DRM platforms of each channel you're sourcing content through separately (with each presenting a moving target through time). That can get quite exhausting. I guess, if quality is not so much of a concern (which, with cassettes you're throwing out the window from the get-go), one can always use some kind of a screen-recording tool to record desktop audio, so, maybe, this is not a fair comparison.

Fourth, cassettes are easy to recycle: If I have a mixtape that I no longer listen to, or my kid outgrows a given piece of content, I can just record over it. I can buy boxes full of old cassettes as attic-finds on e-bay dirt-cheap, and get some use out of that stuff. This seems more environmentally friendly and sustainable than paying an industry to keep producing something that will inevitably be garbage one day. Maybe CD-RWs present a similar opportunity; not sure (never really looked into it much).

I also buy some new tape stock from Recording The Masters, though, because I dig what they're doing, and want to support them.

So, regarding that whole trend of bringing back physical media, my pick is the cassette.

[herrh]

Yeah, i also started considering introducing cassettes for several of the reasons you state above, especially the ease in which you can make the cassettes. I have been a little hesitant because it feels like buying empty cassettes is pretty hard when it comes to the cost, it is pretty cheap to buy a lot of empty CD:s (In Sweden you can get 10 for less than a dollar each) but cassettes are several times more expensive and there is a much bigger lack of options for cassettes in second hand-stores.

But you have a great point regarding the durability (and the sound and esthetics). I have been a bit afraid of them playing with the tape and me having to detangle it, but maybe that is not such a big problem. Especially when it comes to compact players, i bought a cheap second hand portable cd-player for my 4 year old to listen to with headphones, but they seem very easily breakable compared to an old tape deck. But now i'm feeling pretty inspired so I think I might try getting hold of an old portable tape deck and try!

[dyauspitr]

Why cassettes besides the nostalgia though? I still remember that hiss and how crap they sounded. Almost as bad as those 480p DVDs.

[gyulai]

...well, the "audiophile" angle is simply not where I'm coming from (see my argument about bad sound quality being "the feature, not the bug"). From an audiophile perspective: Absolutely, cassettes have no place in the modern world.

I think the way to go is lossless digitial downloads purchased as one-time purchases and optimized for lowest non-artist revenue share for sourcing and then probably also hobbyist archiving (combined with sensible backup strategies, etc.) Recording to tape then instantiates the tape as the medium that creates an enjoyable experience and cultural artefact around it. But there's no reason not to have your cake and eat it too, going back to the digital for maximum quality. -- I just don't think the two are in competition all that much.