vimeo, 1 min, 57 seconds
January 2019
audiocassette j-card - preliminary (2)
I have a series of music releases on bandcamp, Generic PC (Vols 1-5) that I was thinking about condensing to a 60 minute cassette tape.
Am experimenting with what can be done with a home printer. The above packaging is a placeholder to test size and potential layout.
Probably the track listing will be in smaller type.
I bought tape supplies a few years ago from a US business, National Audio Company. They have since stopped offering blank cassettes with "Chrome Type ii High Bias" (the standard above-average tape sold by companies like Maxell before The Man killed analog).
Possibly quite a few indie musicians were surprised to learn that no company makes this chrome tape anymore. NAC had been buying it in bulk from pre-digital-era manufacturers and respooling it onto their blanks.
I still have a box of their chrome tapes left but I need to rethink my "marketing." I'd been offering 10-song releases on a single side of a 40 minute tape. This now feels (more) wasteful. So my next releases will be two-sided, which means I won't have room on the label to list the songs and track times, and I'll need to make j-cards (which I had been avoiding).
NAC's pre-scored j-card stock doesn't print very sharply, unfortunately. I will likely use Epson "Enhanced Matte" paper and hand trim the j-cards. See above for initial tests.
Update: Instead of the Generic PC release, have decided my first two-sided tape will be a collection of beats I made from 2007-2013. Am appropriating some of the packaging ideas and graphics above for that tape.
waah, they can't delete facebook
Bloomberg has a story with the shocking headline "Samsung Phone Users Perturbed to Find They Can't Delete Facebook" (hat tip JR).
Two years ago no major news outlet would have written this. Post-Trump and Cambridge Analytica it's suddenly acceptable to express concern about Zuckerberg's enterprise.
The story, intriguing but not eye-opening to privacy buffs, provides a gauge of mainstream sentiment regarding tech giants. Eric Schmidt's company could be said to rival Facebook in the sinister department, yet its products (email, browser, etc) also can't be deleted from a Samsung phone. (Because Schmidt's company makes the operating system the phone runs on.)
About fifteen years back a programmer friend lamented the "demise of the general purpose computer." To some extent that's been happening because Apple and Microsoft make it harder to tinker with devices running their software. But it's also come to pass voluntarily, because of the mass migration to "smart" devices with undelete-able programs.