At the Rialto

[threemonkeys]

Nostalgia ain't what it used to be. Nor was it ever.

I have a smallish number of books on tape - compact cassette that is. I used to listen to them in the car - normal reading and driving being somewhat incompatible for me. But my current vehicle does not have a cassette player and I even took the cassette deck off my sound system to make way for something more useful. At least a few of the tapes are worth another listen or two, so I thought a bit of format shift for them might be in order, what with replacements not being available anywhere. Even the production companies don't exist any more.

People hold nostalgic feeling for various older technologies - vinyl records, steam trains etc. I can't help thinking that the compact cassette is not going to be one of those technologies. You might understand how I arrived at that conclusion if you could see me fishing the tangled mess of ruined tape out of the mechanism of my cassette player.

Comments

[hravan.livejournal.com]

the only good thing about the compact cassette really was that for a 1960s innovation it was compact - and it was fully read/write... the only reason i'd consider buying another cassette player is to play some old cassettes that I already have

otherwise yeah - as a medium the compact cassette is well and truly gone...

[threemonkeys.livejournal.com]

As dead as the 8-track.

[hravan.livejournal.com]

heh

too right

you can always digitise your tapes - I found it a time consuming pain in the bum though

[threemonkeys.livejournal.com]

Thats what I was doing then the tangle happened. One afternoon into the process and I have decided that I am going to be very very selective in what I digitise.

Good riddance tape!

[sentinelonlj.livejournal.com]

The cassette tape (both music & video) is something that I am glad to be rid off. Many live recordings off the radio & tv have been sacrificed to the Gods of Magnetism over the yaers (including most of my Doctor Demento broadcasts from the 1980's!!!)

Other reasons why I despise the tape is that it is trown into the overhead wires of trains which invariable cause delays to trains (especially when I wanna go home !))

Waaahhhh!!!

Re: Good riddance tape!

[threemonkeys.livejournal.com]

I've had a couple of rounds of disposing of tapes and this marks the beginning of another one - possible the final one. I imagine you'd like to do something to the tapes-on-wires idiots what I'm planning to do to the tapes - toss them in the rubbish.

[thoatherder.livejournal.com]

Any yet, almost every compact stereo or boom boom box comes with the ability to play cassettes. Why? Clearly somewhere there is still a market for them, or a demand, although we are starting to see portable players coming out with only CD and MP3 options.

I have a friend with about fifty tapes of south American music purchased in the markets of South America. I digitised a fair whack of them some years ago, and then he discovered that as I'd changed computers in mid stream, some were in mono (not all sound cards are equal).

so I loaned him a computer with the appropriate sound card, and then he started thinking about making multiple rips, and merging them with software to remove transcription errors and the tapes sit unripped, decaying a little each day.

There are people on the interweb who specialise in preserving old stuff, like the old time radio show fellow http://www.otrcat.com/index.php

Copyrights are of course a complete bugbear in this area.

[threemonkeys.livejournal.com]

I'm sure you are right about tapes surviving longer in boom boxes longer than on stereo racks. I suspect the read/write nature of tapes and their lower cost kept them going longer for that generation. Still as you note, even there, the tape drives are disappearing.

Copyright *shudder* - its a real minefield.