[dfe]

Did people just forget the era of CD burning? Cassettes sucked.

Normal non-tech people were ripping CDs with iTunes. "Rip. Mix. Burn." was a nationwide if not worldwide advertisement.

All of this still works, if you have a CD drive.

If you're going to bother buying a cassette player... what's the allure for that over a CD-R and a basic CD player. CD players in cars are going away, but they're still around in houses and inexpensive small boomboxes.

But then... what's the allure of that over say any old audio player that takes SD cards or just a USB stick. A lot of modern cars and also stereo receivers and TVs will take a USB stick and play files from it. These players are incredibly prevalent and very easy to use. And loading the music from a computer or even a tablet is easy.

Of these three, cassette is the absolute least likely to be available anywhere.

You can still have the experience of making a playlist and even putting the files on a USB stick for someone. Importantly, they can actually play it on their own listening device.

[Touche]

CDs skip very easily so they're not good for portability. So that limits their use to in the house, and they're you're competing with vinyl. Cassette fill a niche in the nostalgia world being something you can more easily use on the go.

[vel0city]

I had lots of CD and mp3-CD players with good anti-skip. Some would even buffer enough or the song to stop the CD for several seconds at a time, especially so on my later mp3/ATRAC CD players. The crappier ones added crappy audio compression to fit it's tiny memory, but better ones could do the raw data and had no (at least to me) loss in quality and later the mp3/ATRAC ones would just buffer the actual file data.

I don't think I've ever experienced a car CD player skipping due to shock. I'm sure it could happen, but I don't do much trail driving at high speeds personally.

I listened to my CD players while biking, hiking, and more. No reason to leave the CDs at home unless you already upgraded to one of those fancy hard drive mp3 players.

[seized]

There were many portable CD players with enough buffering that they'd never skip. Panasonic Shockwave (IIRC) for example. And car heatunits.

You had to get a very old or seriously cheap portable player to get skipping.

[ares623]

Cassettes get distorted too when moving (.e.g running). There’s very cool tech in some models that prevent this distortion but they are more expensive.