Is transport the bit that reels the tapes? I watched a YouTube video recently about these that said that it seems all these modern ones are using basically the same mechanism from a PRC factory, and thus the minimum size is quite large.

Since Sony doesn't manufacture their phenomenally small mechanisms anymore, the era of the tape sized tape player is gone unless someone invests millions in r&d and setting up manufacturing.

Also in terms of quality: fine, but the video found better quality from vintage units he had cleaned up.

I don't have the video saved sorry.

They’re not very good. As the other comment said, they all use the same mechanism. It gets the job done, but that also means the “premium” models are rip offs. Basically lipstick on a pig, so to speak.

Sadly I don’t see new mechanisms appearing anytime soon. But there is still hope. There have been new film cameras with modern innards recently released.

I was in the market for my kid who is going through a hipster phase

A review of one unit said that it didn’t honor the cutout tab so if you accidentally pressed record with any tape you would dub over your music

I shopped for a while and came to the conclusion that these are mostly kitsch.

From what I've heard, that seems to be the case. I suppose that's part of why legit Walkmans are going for so much now. I love cassettes and it would be cool to have a good portable tape player again, but it really can't compete with my phone. Unless we go back to carrying around all the individual things a phone can do. It's tempting but just not as convenient.

I still play around with tapes at home. I have a modded player with speed controls, a couple of decent tape decks, and a 4 track recorder. I have a couple of loop tapes to play around with too. But yeah, as a portable music format, not sure I want to go back to that.

Yes, pretty much:

https://www.theverge.com/24295971/we-are-rewind-fiio-cassett...

Tbh, i loved my minidisc player, robust and shock resistant (I guess it buffered ?) rewritable media. Compared to even CD players it was ahead of the game.

There was a good video on YouTube that talked about the Walkman resurgence, and why they're so large these days. Almost all of these walkmans are using the same internal mechanism because there was only one place to source them. I don't know if that's still the case now.

https://youtu.be/2DWtkSVNvTg

I have found that sometimes it is nice to have fewer choices when selecting media. It helps prevent analysis paralysis for me.

Yeap, it comes across as anemoia false nostalgia pining for a "utopia" than never existed. I had Weird Al and Metallica on cassette and a cheap-o, bulky Walkman and Koss Porta Pros. It didn't really ever play at a constant speed and ate batteries like they were free. When CDs came out (which was actually around 1981), they were a million times better, but it took forever to get the Discman down to a halfway decent price and not skip like crazy on the slightest bump. A good example of a portable CD player that worked well was the '94 Sony D-828K Car Discman that also wasn't just for cars.

And the 80's and 90's weren't that great. The best thing that happened was George Carlin on pirated analog HBO telling us how Americans were morons and that everything sucked. ;o)

Flash storage bit rots. As do consumer writable optical media. RAID HDD or you ain't got nothing.

> The only downside of CDs was that you couldn’t record from the radio and Napster eventually solved that better than radio ever did.

This was far from the only drawback with CDs especially early on, at least in mobile applications: the media (and thus player) is bulky, cases are fragile (in part through increased leverage), it has low resilience to physical damage, and before memory prices hit low enough for significant buffering the slightest g forces would lead to skips.

MDs were real progress on that front. Shame it was quite expensive and the digital models were hobbled by horrendous software. And obviously flash-based pmps then smartphones are their lunch entirely.

I'd like to see the minidisc come back but the sheer cost of the units is bonkers today :)

Those were the days and gone they have.

eventually I bet someone'll put a sd cassette in one and we'll be back to square one. I enjoy my atrac discman with writable disks, fits a lot of music but I'm not going to pretend I use it more than my phone

Vinyl is populair, inconvenient and doesn't have crisp audio quality. Cassettes are also inconvenient and have poor audio quality, plus they are cheap and portable. So I definitely also see them stick around. I also see plenty cassettes being issued on e.g. bandcamp for years already.

The poor audio quality can be seen as desired feature btw. It brings a certain lofi or warmth with it.

> They were very inconvenient.

They were also very affordable!

minidisc has a lot going for it. you can easily carry a few around with you. you dont really need to carry the outer cases. you can put some album art directly onto them. if your player has netMD support then you can just use a web browser to manage the tracks on a disc.

the only downside i can think of is the loud screeching every once in a while when the disc is seeking. but that could just be the player that i have maybe

Believe it or not the iPod community is alive and well! There are plenty of people buying them, replacing the battery and hard drive, performing some cosmetic mods, and daily driving them (me included)

It's popular enough that if you look on eBay, the price of an old iPod has become majorly inflated

No, not if you rewind them. At least mine doesn't. But I can't trust the tension on a new tape.

USB front slot with USB memory sticks? One stick per playlist/album. Different form factors so you can locate the right one without taking your eyes off the road. Possible to embed into larger enclosures if you find them to small.

(Personally, I do prefer the modern Bluetooth+mobile+app+voice control).