Sure the sound quality isn't great, but cassettes have a great user experience.
My kids listen to stories on CD and Cassette. With Cassettes you can just stop and continue later exactly where you were. On CD they have to remember the chapter and the number of minutes. Which they never do so they are less motivated to continue listening.
The same is true for VHS. One of the great benefits of Netflix is that you don't have to keep track of where you were in a series and can quickly continue. DVD or separate downloads never had this, with Netflix you can just continue. The same is true for VHS, you can just pop it back in and continue where you were.
Also, with both cassettes and VHS you could very easily record things. This was never easy with DVDs, so much so that it basically wasn't a feature. HDD recorders were also quite bad.
Quality of sound and image is just one part of the equation. I would never listen to a music album on cassette, but the medium, from a usability point of view, is great for specific use cases such as stories and creating your own mixes.
They are fragile, they sound terrible. Unless you had a very expensive player, they also introduced a wobble in the sound that drives me fucking crazy.
Yes, there is cover art, I miss decent cover art and the thought that some people put into it.
VHS can also fuck right off. Sure I loved the stuff that was on them as a kid, but I fucking hated them as a medium. A nice Humax from the early 2000s obliterated VHSs.
Don't get me wrong, everything else about digital media suck arse, the shitty player and bollocks practices. But the experience of the media it's self is far far better.
We generally encourage people to buy a NetMD device as their first player, so they can simply drag-and-drop music onto disks via USB. Probably any working machine, except an Sony N1 or Sony N10.
I left JetBrains in January after a very long time; with the new UI, there was realistically not a lot separating it from VSCode, and it was clear where all the fun was.
I didn’t really want to switch to VSC but the extensions made it easy to find things that you just couldn’t do in IntelliJ, and… I haven’t looked back. Haven’t really missed the suite at all.
An excellent piece of work, although needed and continues to need more horsepower than I have readily available. UI not super-useful but I am going to dig in and see if the API can be utilized to get what I would like - better exposure of underlying file structure to quickly navigate by date.
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