I abandoned tapes several years ago, but I think I'm gonna in at least some way jump back in. Been browsing a bit at a record store with a ton of interestingly packaged limited tun cassettes of oddball noise bands and such for pretty cheap and I thought grabbing a few of those would be fun. Also, just thought it would be fun to make a few mix tapes from old vinyl for a couple friends who still play tapes.

Anyway, I went ahead and ordered a tape deck that should be coming next week. Anyone out there either still hanging onto cassettes or who has re-explored them recently? If so, anyplace online have decent blank tapes for cheap? Seems any decent tape on Ebay is NOS and crazy expensive.

And no, I'm not at all saying cassettes sound better than other formats. I remember them well and their limitations are obvious. I mean, a good tape recorded on a good deck can sound damn good, but it's not the quality of the original vinyl or CD and pre-made tapes are usually fairly shitty and they all degrade faster than anything else. And with CDs and iPods being even more portable and convenient, there is no good, practical reason and I'm fine with that. This is just for kicks.

Blank tapes are expensive because they're like buggy whips- dey don' make 'em no mo'.

Really? I've got like 3-4 10packs that are unopened just sitting around.

Did anyone else ever get into MiniDiscs?

I have found a few places that make chrome blank tapes in bulk, but you have to order 100 at a time and I have no idea the quality.

Eh...what you doin' with those tapes Rabbit?

Every vinyl record or new indie band I recorded while working at my college radio station I still have on cassette including a couple of my shows. I'll never get rid of my tapes. I dig through my tape drawer at least a couple times a year and grab a few albums.

There was also a time my freshman year of college where I didn't have a cd player in my car so it was all tapes, all the time. There was also a time at the dawn of the Ipod (when there weren't Ipod players) when my parents pontoon boat only had a tape deck and I'd make tape mixes to hang out on the lake with.

I also recently had one of FemDerris friends donate all of her tapes to me for whatever reason when she last moved. All kinds of great shit and recently she told me she shouldn't have gave them to me. She isn't getting them back.

So, Derris, Pro tapes.

It was more fun to make a mix tape than it is to make a mix on CD or for download.
When I made mix tapes, I had to set aside a couple of hours to pour through my vinyl and CDs, and then sit there and listen to each song as I taped it, adjust the recording levels (on the VU meter), to assure that all songs were the same volume. There was just more put into a mix tape than there is now.
When the wife and I took roadtrips, I would make a new mix for each one. And we took a lot of roadtrips.
I have many fond memories of making those tapes. Just as many as I do of the actual trips, themselves.

That is probably the only thing that I miss about cassette tapes.

I'm pretty much in the same camp.

Tapes are like memories, maaaaan.

I still have my deck, and a box of tapes that I can't get on any other format, but of my cassettes I gave away to a charity auction. i probably won't ever buy any more.

I still have 10-20 mini-discs from my Syracuse Community Radio days. if anyone wants them, let me know (you can record over them, right?)

I wish I hadn't thrown out all my tapes. Also, I wish I'd have not thrown out my Atari 2600 back in 1999, but the reality was that I couldn't fit that much into my Ford Escort when I moved to Chicago. If Ebay had only existed back then...

IIRC, Finchy was a big fan of MD's at one point.

I have and use and love my tape deck and I am building a nice size collection of new bands making tapes.

I recently found tons of blank tapes and cases real cheap...covered the holes, primed them, and then spray painted and stenciled the cases and made mix tapes to give away at dj gigs.

FYI (not my listing)

New Blank Audio Cassette Tape LOT- 21 - Mixed Brands
http://cgi.ebay.com/New-Blank-Audio-Cassette-Tape-LOT-21-Mixed-Brands-/220774265712?pt=BI_Blank_Media&hash=item33672bf370

$9.99

I've got tapes from a dozen or so local/Michigan bands from the years before CDs were super easy to produce. Definite time capsule stuff and I have a tape deck on the shelf system in my office should I ever need.

I'm not much of a fan of the recent indie uptick in tapes as a music vehicle. It blows right past the line between clever and being anachronisitic. But then again one of the most popular food trailers in town lets you pick through their 8-track library and play some tunes if you stick around to eat, and people love it. The lesson; I don't know much.

I realize the cassette is an anachronism, but I appreciate the care I see put into those little indie releases. Some kid hand painting 50 cassettes to sell for no more than what they cost just to get their music heard is kind of nice in a way. The things are really more like mini-art pieces than anything even the people making them consider a viable music delivery system.

Besides, I saw one that was wrapped in aluminum foil and slipped into a zip lock bad along with a pig's ear. I can support packaging like that.

Hey St. Louis... I still have an old cassette from The Unconscious. remember them?


Doesn't hold up. But that is one of the first things I think of when I think of indie cassette releases from the 80's and 90's.

I used to date a girl who was a big fan of theirs. I actually kinda thought they sucked, but I saw 'em a bunch because of that.

I've got a Technics RS-BX501 tape deck. Can't say I use it very much but I never throw anything away. I also have literally bin bags full of blank tapes in a cupboard.

I've also got a Sony MDS-JES510 Mini-Disc deck that I used to record a lot of BBC radio on to off my tuner. Again don't really need it now but I have probably about 5 or 6 years worth of John Peel shows recorded on minidisc and loads of Chris Morris as well.

I've still got a Sony dual-deck cassette machine. Probably haven't used it in 2-3 years.

yeah, i still listen to tapes. the car i drove from 2000 through last year had a tape deck, so i never really stopped listening to tapes. i have a deck hooked up to my nice stereo. i don't listen to them much now, but every now and then i'll be looking for something that i don't have on vinyl or digitally anymore.

i went to a record fair a few weeks ago and there was an entire row of vendors that had tapes as well as vinyl. they seemed to be selling well.

The majority of my physical music purchases are still cassette--and everything I sell is either cassette or 3" CDR. Completely agree with the you on the mini-art side of things--I put a lot of work into each cassette and appreciate when others do the same.

Hell, I have a John Wiesse tape that is wrapped in barbed wire. I've had the thing for 10 years or so and have yet to figure out how to remove the tape without cutting the wire--maybe that's the point, I don't know, but it looks pretty fucking rad sitting on a shelf. Hanson has always put out great cassettes though, probably my favorite is this Dead Machines I got awhile ago
.
But yeah, a ton of great cassette labels out there right now.

I buy my blanks from here: http://www.deltamedia.com/pg_blank_audio_cassettes_new.html. You can get 25 packs from them for pretty cheap and they are great quality.

I buy a ton of stuff from this joint also--super cheap and great selection of insanely hard to find cassettes: http://www.rrrecords.com/catalogue.html. Of course for higher end stuff Yod is pretty great now that they are back online--so damn expensive though.

I figured you'd have the hook-up and still buy cassettes.

Yeah, it's pretty ridiculous at this point. I would say probably 60-70% of emails I recieve on any given day are from cassette labels with something new coming out. It's a bit of a catch-22 and kind of interesting--the tape is usually associated with pre-internet music listening--yet the internet has made it so all of these tape labels can now reach a wider audience (as such we have had the sprouting of 1000s of such labels it seems). So before, unless you were in Ann Arbor, or Lowell, or whatever that little hippy town in Maine is that Matt Valentine hangs out in, you were kind of screwed on the releases that were limited to 25 copies or so. Now if you're quick on the trigger you can grab so many of those--the downfall is of course there is such a lack of quality filter.

It seemed for awhile (has gotten a little better the past two years or so) that every jackass with a contact mic, delay pedal, and recorder was putting out tapes on a weekly basis. There was so much really bad/uninteresting noise that everything really started to blend together and honestly the "cassette community" as a whole suffered by becoming what all of the PE/harsh noise detractors had always claimed--just a mess of noise, the art and invention piece was muddled and lost in a big way. As a result it seemed some great labels went away from the format almost to regain any sort of sonic credibility (Toth's Polyamory is the most significant loss in this category in my opinion). Also, some pretty amazing artists really cleaned up their sound--made it more accessible--seemingly to just separate themselves from the influx of poor product/imitators of what they had been doing (I submit as evidence my former favorite band Emeralds).

Fortunately, it seems to be getting a little better, or I have just found labels/artists that I trust at this point so don't really get burned by crap releases these days. It's hard to sort out though for sure when first getting into tapes, you can wind up spending a lot of money on some really bad stuff. On the plus side, each individual cassette that you grab for $5-10 isn't going to kill you--and it's a fun way to discover some new stuff somehow (can't really explain that, so just trust me on it).

I still have a deck as part of my home stereo system. I don't use it though and it's not even hooked up at the moment. My car is old enough that it still has a factory installed tape deck in addition to the CD player I installed after purchase.

I have a big box of the mixes I made and drank to back in my college days. I didn't keep everything but I couldn't bring myself to throw out the ones that looked good or were the source of a lot of memories the last time I moved. I doubt I'll ever actually listen to them again though and don't know that they would they would serve another move.

2011 is my year of minimizing, so off went thousands of dollars in photocopied journal articles and probably nearly that much in cassette tapes, dating back to the early 80s. It stung a little but I'm glad they're gone. They've been untouched for more than a decade.