There's also lo-fi hip hop, where adding bad radio, tape or vinyl static to songs is basically a given (as the name kind of implies I guess).

I think it makes a kind of sense, in the same way white noise can be soothing

lo-fi basement dweller black metal is another one, I mean feast your ears on https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0oFnjWS4cpU. Ironically, that album has been released on everything; cassettes, FLAC, 4 lp wooden box set, and a wooden USB stick with 128kbit MP3. The medium is part of the art?

Anyway, taste aside I can appreciate this particular artist and their work, it's a lot of midrange noise but the musical elements (mostly percussion tbh) emerge from the swamp with a good listen.

A very long time ago some of the Darkthrone tracks I downloaded from Napster were corrupted and had glitches/noise in them. I didn't know they were glitches, and I listened to this for years and thought it sounded great. I actually regret not having those "damaged" MP3s any more.

60s-era blues is another good example. The recording equipment at the time certainly wasn't bad, but it was not yet perfected. It added a certain sound to recordings from the time that I kind of miss in later recordings.

Way back when mp3 encoders weren't very good, I could hear some of the compression artifacts that were common in the commonly used reference encoder.

I pointed out that sound to someone who thought it was part of the song and forever cursed them with also hearing them everywhere. It's like learning about kerning ...

Or leaming about keming...

You may enjoy these pieces a local ceramic artist made for me:

https://geary.smugmug.com/Art/i-qCBqjqb

That yellow tin is just ... evil. You are a bad person and you should feel bad :D

Compact Disc audio is uncompressed.

To me this is analogous to the incredibly common practice of applying scanned grain from 16mm or 35mm film stock in digital cinematography workflows, making the result “feel” more like film — or our expectations and perceptions of cinema. Sometimes high fidelity media isn’t what we really want.

Meanwhile digitization of actual film is manipulated to make it look more like digital cinema, with the grain and scratches removed, interpolated to 60 fps with jitter and shake suppressed.

I went to see Tarantino’s The Hateful Eight projected in all its original glory. I didn’t like the experience: the jitter, the scratches, the flicker of the blindingly bright snow... And the movie itself didn’t seem all that good.

I watched it three times on a blue-ray I bought a year later, and I loved everything about it, every time.

I think it's for more of us who are old folks for nostalgic reasons and cinephiles who want to see what it felt/looked like back in the day. It's not meant for regular people or younger audiences who aren't into the grindhouse nostalgia.

Or adding old photo filters to instagram. It gives it a nostalgic feel but you may regret it if you don't save the originals :)

Wouldn't you be able to get the same effect by applying some digital filter to the music? Same goes for warmer sound some people claim for analog amplifiers. I would think you should be able to tune your digital devices to produce the same sound.

In theory you could compress and add some flutter. [1]

The problem is, you don't have access to the master - if you try to apply this filter on top of a final mix destined for CD/digital, it won't sound the same as tape, and will deteriorate the signal even more. That's why some bands still release on cassete, you actually need to mix w/ tape in mind.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZS34GN4UHpQ&ab_channel=MrAud...

That's how lo-fi gets produced.

This is one of the more popular tools for that job: https://www.xlnaudio.com/products/addictive_fx/effect/rc-20_...

I still have a cassette player in my work out room but I don't think I've had a cassette in it for over a decade. The radio and speakers still sound great though and the CD player in it works fine :)

Or you Just add that sound in the mix yourself...