This is my tape collection.
This was my tape collection. A part of it.
There were 284 of them.
Lovingly nurtured and cared for over a period of some twenty years and surviving two intercontinental and numerous domestic moves, the time has come to bid farewell to this past passion and hobby, too.
Like most who remember these relics of a previous generation, the bug bit at an early age (1980, to be approximate) with crude recordings of farting sounds and TV theme tunes via the mono boom box’s microphone through to recordings off AM radio, FM stereo, friends’ and the record library’s vinyl and cassettes before finally culminating in finely-tuned, precisely-timed, carefully-selected and poorly-named mixtapes compiled from compact discs.
Then, suddenly, compact discs became recordable. Cassettes became passé.
Tape #284 was completed in 2000 (07-08-2000, to be exact) and is, coincidentally, titled Tape2Tape. The CDr may have dug the hole but it was the ubiquitous MP3 format that put the final nail in the coffin of the humble audio cassette — made truly portable by Sony’s Walkman.
There are three projects that the elimination of the collection spawns:
- Submitting the few original and legal cassettes to discogs;
- Converting the content of the tapes to MP3;
- An as yet untitled and slightly secret online project.
Analogous to the VHS collection I’m getting rid of and have largely replaced by nice ‘n legal DVDs, most of my tapes have long been replaced by nice ‘n legal CDs — although for the third project I’ve actually gone to the extreme of collecting more tapes that other friendly folks are getting rid of. And I’m still collecting. Gimme!
The iPod might be dancing on the walkman’s grave but I’ll be pissing on iTunes by listening to my old tapes… on my SonyEricsson phone!
Photo credits: hmvh DOT net
