Does Anyone Remember Tapes

Motley Crue

Earlier I stopped for a look in a charity store, and to my surprise, found 3 cassette tapes for £1

Guns N' Roses - Use Your Illusion 1
Faith No More - Introduce Yourself
Faith No More - Live at the Brixton Academy

They brought back a lot of memories so I decided to purchase them. Low and behold I discover we still have a cassette machine in the house - the girlfriend uses it for work - and spent about an hour listening to this stuff on tape. Sure, I could have looked them up on YouTube, but the nostalgia of actually having to fast forward to get to my favourite song took over lol

So, I was wondering, anyone out there still have any cassette tapes lying around? Any you purchased when the album was originally released? Any signed?

Could someone even tell me when they STOPPED making music cassettes commercially in this part of the world?

Does anyone actually miss cassette tapes, making a mix tape for a friend you'd prob only see every Saturday in town, meeting up and tape trading, and trading music with each other the old fashioned way?

GrizzlyMan

yeah I actually have a huge box of them in the attic, some great albums but re bought most of them on CD!! yeah loved the old mixed tapes.

Anyone remember taping the John Kenny metal show on 2FM hahaha i used to be waiting to press the record button when some songs came on that I wanted:rolleyes: Although that show helped me get into some serious good bands back in the day Dissection, Immortal etc

But I really dont miss the Tapes at all fast forward/rewind, tapes getting stuck in the tape player etc :mad:

fluke

Does anyone actually miss cassette tapes, making a mix tape for a friend

I make mix cd's now. Still fun and easier to do than it was with tapes, but I do miss the idea of a Side A & B from a mix & album perspective, that was present on Tape & Vinyl. It gave the listener a chance to hear a mix/album with two different sides (tonally) on the one format.

Some bands still make albums with this perspective. Pearl Jam spring to mind.

PeterIanStaker

Yes I do miss it actually. Getting all nostaligic now. My dad and my uncle allowed me to copy their 70's stuff - Purple, Lizzy, Sabbath, Zep, Floyd - onto cassette, provided I rewound the originals and tidied up after myself. Then, guy at school gives me mix tape of Metallica (from Kill Em All to Black - this is before Load or any of that w@nk was released) I remember making AC/DC mix tapes for people too. Ah the good old days . . . .

Malice

I'd say all posters of a certain age will remember tapes. The young 'uns won't though

Kess73

Miss cassettes? I can remember when they were eyed with suspicion and people thought they would never take off and take over from vinyl.

Patricide

Kess73 wrote: »

Miss cassettes? I can remember when they were eyed with suspicion and people thought they would never take off and take over from vinyl.

I miss vinyl... Cassettes are gone and rightly so. They sounded horrible and would get worse the more you played them.

That being said one of the first pieces I ever bought was a michael jackson cassette, i still have it somewhere.

seanybiker

Used to love taping from the radio. Almost breaking my two fingers pressing the huge buttons.

Kess73

seanybiker wrote: »

Used to love taping from the radio. Almost breaking my two fingers pressing the huge buttons.

And trying to get as much of the song as you could before the DJ said anything.

Kess73

Actually a lot of my early vinyl and cassette buying days bring back memories of Pete Burns and Probe Records. Julian Cope worked there at the time as well but he never stood out as much as Mr Burns.

Can safely say that buying singles in Probe records was an experience unlike that of any other record store in Liverpool at that time, hell unlike that of anywhere in the UK at the time.:D

o1s1n

I recently bought one of these beauties, came with 34 tapes too.

Catari Jaguar

Used to record ours onto blanks and design the inlay card with the band logo. Hahah!



Still have the originals of Nevermind, Kill Em All, The Bends, Experience... loads of them at home in my parents house

stateofflux

the tapes of nirvana and pearl jam i have since i was 16 sound way better than the cd's....close to vinyl...sound is warmer and fatter and for some reason i can hear extra stuff in the background which is buried on cd versions....hard to explain.....tapes rule.....

colblimp

Lil Kitten wrote: »

Used to record ours onto blanks and design the inlay card with the band logo. Hahah!

I did exactly the same, and the bigger the inlay card, the more cool it was! Me and the other guitarist once did an inlay card about 2 feet long - it wouldn't fit in the tape case lol!

Jemmaa

Patricide wrote: »

I miss vinyl... Cassettes are gone and rightly so. They sounded horrible and would get worse the more you played them.

I agree. I respect vinyl it was interesting 'cause you can change speed and play much faster if nobody's home and it's funny and and it was actually many ways to use for various experiments but tapes was horrible and unreal I never liked it.

DublinWriter

I used to own a record stall in Temple Bar in the 80's when a mate of mine asked me if I could get any bootlegs of an obscure metal band called VOIVOD.

I duly sourced a bootleg, played it to myself to check the quality and it sounded like someone had put a mic in a petrol lawnmower and drove it over a gravel path. I apologised to him for the quality, but he came back a week later and said it was the best recording of them that he'd ever heard.

A few years earlier I had 'borrowed' a few tapes from a cupboard of the school religion room, they were marked 'Heavy Metal' and my curiosity was piqued. That mix tape (probably confiscated by the school nun) turned me onto Accept and Black Sabbath.

o1s1n

Patricide wrote: »

I miss vinyl... Cassettes are gone and rightly so. They sounded horrible and would get worse the more you played them.

That being said one of the first pieces I ever bought was a michael jackson cassette, i still have it somewhere.

Unless you're super careful with vinyl it also gets worse the more you listen to it due to scratches.

Also it depends on what tape was used. The quality between different types differs dramatically. Good tapes can have a great sound.

The thing that annoyed me about them was track selection. Fast forwarding and rewinding is a pain in the arse.

Patricide

Your right, and vinyl(especially some of the thinner vinyls they made during its downfall) is also prone to warping. But when you look after them and you have a good vinyl player, theirs no beating that sound.

o1s1n

I know what you mean. Nothing beats that analog sound. I really miss it with digital music. The clarity is great but it just sounds harsh and cold.

I bought that Akai reel to reel beause I miss it so much. Vinyl records were produced from reel to reel master tapes. So it'll be spot on sound wise. (Will actually sound better than vinyl)

I actually miss some of the scratches that were on my dads records. I listen to the same song on cd and expect to hear it..and then nothing

DeadSkin

I have a blast of 'em up the attic. Must take a look some someday, I'm sure there'll be a few surprises.

Any one else fall victim to a tape being chewed up in the player, mostly players with auto-reverse.
The hours I spent with cellotape/glue on repairing them.

My first cassette was Slayer's 'Reign in Blood'. Simple inlay card, no lyrics printed and a black cassette.

When cds came out first, I thought balls to this, they always cost more. Took me years to accept cds, in the end I had no choice.

Star Bingo

i loved making compilations w/ tapes you could meld tracks together, make em seem seamless throw in funny clips from TV/movies.. Minidiscs were even better i found for it and didn't degrade like the tapes. but tapes were around for decades and the minidisc didn't even dent their popularity, came n went almost unnoticed

komodosp

Does anyone actually miss cassette tapes, making a mix tape for a friend

Can't say I actually miss them... have a load of tapes here and never listen to them, I think I have all of them (the ones I want anyway) on CD anyway.

Although when I was young I used to tape off the radio various songs I liked so it is interesting to play a tape full of bits of different songs and hear bits of Larry Gogan and Dave Fanning from the 80s and 90s...

I definitely don't miss taping for friends, making CDs is a lot easier, and there's no danger of it being shorter than the original and the end of the last song being cut off.... although it was fun to insert a cheesy Starship song ("Nothing's gonna stop us now!") or Zig and Zag's "Christmas #1" in the middle of the Metallica tape they asked for just to piss them off

Not the same doing that with the CD as they can easily just skip the track...

Or I got the odd taped album where they must have had a mic plugged in as well or something as sometimes you could hear them "ehh..." or something between accidental pressing of stop... or one friend of mine who didn't have a double tape player but did have two tape recorders so used to hold a mic up to the speaker when recording from one to another!

Ahh the memories...

Rockee

Funny a thread about tapes should come up because yesterday I found my 11 year old Fostex 4 track recorder! Used it at band practice last night and I gotta admit I got a nice little thrill from fast forwarding and rewinding to have a listen to what we jammed on!

Amalgam

Trying to fit a TDK tape sleeve into a big golfball typewriter and the fact that it was glossy, with those bumps\ridges at the fold of the spine, drifting off, leaving the print at a slight angle..

Going down to O'Connell bridge 2 or 3 days after a metal concert..

Motley Crue

I only listen to cassettes
Thurston Moore of Sonic Youth

In the audiobooks application, where recordings may span several hours, cassettes also have the advantage of holding up to 120 minutes of material whereas the average CD holds fewer than 80. I miss this because you could fit more onto a cassette. More music = good!

If I remember correctly it was Pearl Jam who released a cassette last year with the box set version of Ten, a recreation of the original demo that signed the band?

Apparently another band, The Dirty Projectors, released an album on cassette last year commercially

Irish Halo

Amalgam wrote: »

Going down to O'Connell bridge 2 or 3 days after a metal concert..

Yeah I only have a few tapes left but the ones I need to keep are the bootlegs from concerts you used to be able to pick up around Dublin. Don't see them now though

That actually reminds me to slap them on this evening, may even try and rip them to FLAC this weekend.

peter1892

I got rid of a huge amount of tapes a few years ago. I had nothing to play them on & in a lot of cases had replaced them with CD's (and downloads of individual tracks).

For a few years after I got my first CD player I still bought TDK D90's to record the CD's onto so I could listen to them on a walkman!

Looking back on them the sound quality was poor, and they got damaged easily. But there's a nostalgic element for a lot of us I suppose. But I don't miss them.

anti-venom

I still have hundreds of the damned things. They're mostly from the 80s and 90s and mostly old punk stuff. There's benefit comps, comps of very obscure hardcore stuff from around the world, pirate radio shows, spoken word stuff (like Henry Rollins live in London), Demo tapes (Ash's first demo is here somewhere), live bootlegs, tapes I traded with people around the world etc etc. I rarely play them but I won't get rid of them either even though they're a pain in the arse to store.

blastman

Have loads of them stashed away all around the house. I recently bought that ION thing that looks like a walkman to transfer some stuff to CD, actually.

It wasn't a great format from an audio quality point of view and they were notoriously fragile and prone to being chewed (I've lost count of the number of times I had hand-wind my cassette copy of The Wall - long double albums on a single tape aren't a good mix!), but the one thing they did bring was portability, particularly when the Walkman arrived. For that alone, anyone with even a passing interest in music, as well as everyone that currently has a phone or MP3 player in their pocket right now, should be forever grateful to cassettes.

Tigger

Istill listen to my tapes but I prefer the world now

I rember throwing a party an having five albums stole all megadeth all important

Nowadays I have all the music I could want in my car but tajes ruled for a lo ng time

records were for the olde crew and CDs for the kids

Catari Jaguar

Ooh, I have Pearl Jam Ten on casette as well! That defines my grungey childhood

Also just remembered that my bro had all the RHCP stuff I was about 8 or 9 and he was 10 or 11. My Dad picked up Freaky Styley for him in Golden Discs. We used to go to the seafront market and look for tapes.

I remember when we got Blood Sugar Sex Magick I was obsessed with it. Loved the inlay card with all the tattoo pictures. Had such a crush on Anthony Kiedis & Dave Navarro The lyrics on that album were not supposed to be read by a child!! But I suppose I didin't understand half of what I was singing...