For some reason, cassettes are coming back.
The nostalgia and appreciation for music on vinyl makes sense: the fun pops and cracks as the needle makes its way around the waxy circle, the lushness of the audio, the great cover art and liner notes that give a band a little more room for creative expression.
But cassettes? Who hasn’t been annoyed by having to find a pencil to rewind or fix the tape? Or the frustration of hearing a favorite song get warped by being played too much and the tape starts to wear out? Where’s the fun in that?
Some will argue cassettes are cheaper and easier to make than CDs or MP3s, that the community feeling around swapping tapes has been replaced with something colder and less personal. Spin even went so far as to put together a list of the 10 best cassette releases so far this year. And oh good grief, there’s even a Cassette Store Day scheduled for Oct. 17. This is a terrible idea.
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I have a bunch of cassettes I need transferred over to MP3. Some old radio shows I was part of, my first time on CFTR, MIX, CJEZ. Some old college radio shows I loved. Taping songs off the radio show. Old mixtapes I made for people. Besides the whole sentimental value thing, records are still my thing.
For crappy consumer audio, cassettes rank second behind 8 tracks. The tracks were so small on both that any tape “wander” over the head resulted in phasing and other problems such as playing two tracks at once, etc. Cassettes were also the most prone to “tape hiss.”
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I just bought a cassette recorder. From an antique shop. I don’t know if it still works – haven’t tested it – but it’s the same model I used when I was a child. Nostalgia, not function.
I remember making mix tapes & doing early programming loops on these cassettes. When moving found a Walkman –aka Footloose (original) & have a boom box that takes these.
Started a Pinterest board of tech I have lived through http://pinterest.com/jhengstler/tech-julias-lived-through/