I am more sentimental about tapes than vinyl as that was what I grew up with.

I can't throw out all the mixtapes I made, or cassette albums that I long since replaced on CD. I can't throw out the copied albums with painstakingly drawn band logos.

They've all still got the dents from my pencil case banging against them in my school bag.

I love tapes

I did ALMOST the exact same thing yesterday (except I didn't throw mine out)! Finally got around to hooking my cassette deck up again and went into the loft to retrieve my pre-recorded version of the first Lone Justice album (see earlier thread). Probably got about a 100 tapes in a box and although I have several of them on vinyl/CD I can't really see myself chucking them out! Although that may change as I'm moving soon and the thought of having to box up the rest of my music/movie collection is already beginning to stress me out!

The vast majority were record library filches with nearly a record on each side of a C90, often with no relation between side 1 and side 2. Quality poor, reproducibility absent, replacement of any worth performed, mainly, it is true, courtesy limescale, in the days when I did, based on my "logic" that I "owned" a version already. Did the same with videos. Tried to flog off my vinyl, but Mrs Path refused to let me, appreciating what strange worth I place in round plastic, both black and shiny. Thanks, Darling.

Almost as mad as a box full of frogs because I don't have a tape player anymore.

And yet all my vinyl went to charity and friends.

Those little cassettes, my first copy of so many albums was on cassette, back in the days when home taping was killing music....

Only two weeks ago I slung out, with very few exceptions, the lot.

I decided to car boot my collection of 300+ pre-recorded tapes because the CD had taken over. I must have picked the right time, because I sold the lot in about an hour, even really dodgy 80's stuff like Hue and Cry. Didn't make a huge amount of money but it did lessen the pain. Truth is, the cassette was a compromise - portable but very fragile and susceptible to damage. It was replaced because the CD was a better invention. Vinyl of course will hang on for a while longer because in some respects the sound has not been bettered.

The only tape I missed was Motive by Red Box. It only had a limited release on CD so I never found a replacement until recently, thanks to the miracles of BitTorrent.

Love cassettes. The MP3 of the eighties. Cheap as chips, easy to make, and portable. I still have my old Sony Walkman, in the back of the wardrobe somewhere; it's a design classic.

While doing the student thing in Bristol back in the 80s I used to cycle to the public library on a Saturday morning and pick up a handful of albums from the music section. You could order stuff in if they didn't have it! When it arrived you got first borrow, or in my case, first taping. By teatime I'd have committed twenty quid's worth of pristine vinyl to TDK SA90, cycled back to the library, returned the first lot and borrowed another half dozen. Over a period of about a year my music collection killed music to the extent of three shelves full of tapes. I catalogued the lot in a little letter-edged note book from WHSmiths, and I still have both the tapes and the index notebook. Despite acres of vinyl and three walls of CDs, I still have a very soft spot for my cassettes.

Someone elsewhere on another thread mentioned those albums that have long since been deleted on vinyl, yet never issued on CD. Guess what? I've got most of them on SA90.

a few years back and have regretted it many times since. Not for the ones with albums on, but for the mixtapes. I wish I could reproduce them in iTunes, but it's too late! :-(

stored away in a box in the attic of our old house, i hadn't listened to any of them for years. So when about 7 years ago we moved to our new house, I hid them away in a dusty corner of the loft, and left them there.

I like to think of the new owners of the house, exploring the loft and thinking they have discovered some treasure. Bet they chucked them out.

As you can probably see, was never a great fan of the cassette.

.that I've kept most of my cassettes. I've stuff like Alan Freeman Shows, Great Easton Express (Radio City Rock Show, Phil Easton sadly passed away a couple of weeks ago), Johnnie Walker Show etc.

They're like photographs for memories, I dated them all.

I'm so sad, I've still got reel to reel tapes of things like Alexis Korner, done by putting the mike right by an old vhf radio we had.

They sound tosh, but memory wise, they are priceless.

Stuffed with cassettes. Some totally unwanted and binned. Many put on one side to copy onto computer thanks to new-fangled cassette-2-USB-socket-thingy. Oh such joy!

So far I have a half-hour session by a very young daughter from 20+ years ago, a trailer for a John Peel show with the man and Walters doing an Archers sketch during the Alan Freeman show and a personal message from Tom Champagne (as personal as the Hepworth letter for subscribers).

In the pipeline; a whole box of Kenny Everett shows on Radio 2, old Round The Horne segments, Todd Rundgren in Concert on Radio 1 and the entire series of SFX magazines - I promise to post the interview with Andy Partridge where he imitates the characters from Space Patrol.

I might not see the summer sun this year I fear.

sound great! i MUST get one of those.

still languish in boxes and will be cleared out at some point (If Mrs Phil has her way). Like VV above our local library was a good source of material despite the scratches and occasional blobs of jam stuck to the vinyl's surface. All recordings were cherished, numbered and catalogued on index cards.

In reality I guess there will be many recordings that will never be worth keeping. BASF tape always seemed to leave a layer of ferric particles over the tape head each time they were played so by now any of those would have probably disintegrated completely. The ones worth keeping will be gigs recorded from the radio (Genesis, '76; Yes, '78 etc).

What could be more interesting is an even older reel to reel collection which apart from scary recordings of me aged 4ish also includes the Milligan, Sellars, Miller & Cook skit - Bridge over the River Wye. I just hope the aged machine will work long enough to get them digitised!

I'm a bit baffled about the number of people that keep their cassettes in boxes etc. What's wrong with shelves?! If Mrs JW can put her ornaments on shelves then so can I!

I HATED tapes...they were a tool of the devil. A necessary evil to make music portable.

The frustration of trying press "pause" in exactly the right spot, the wrist shredding necessity of rewinding spooled tapes with a biro; the poor sound quality - even my Amstrad hifi turntable delivered a better sound that anything on a TDK or That's Metal finest could muster - without going on to mention the stretching and wowing, the snapping, the picking bits of tape out of the heads...tapes were just plain WRONG, 8 track was the, albeit pricier, way ahead. I did somersaults when the mini-disc came along!

Having started this thread, I am fully aware that the cassettes I've "binned" are currently sitting in my garage. The bin men come on Thursday.

The question is, will I have a change of heart before then? Imagine my dilemma, especially now I've heard so many examples from you all of exactly how ingrained the cassette tape is in our culture!

I will be strong! (but I might have one more sort through just in case a few more require salvaging!)

I have a series of cassettes of music I compiled from recordings I made of David Hepworth's GLR radio shows in the 90s. Despite the inherent limitations in the tape sound quality I still enjoy listening to them occasionally - they are pretty eclectic.

Afraid I chucked all mine out when downsizing - they were all sounding really crummy plus I don't have a cassette deck any more anyway. Actually I threw out all my vinyl at the same time, they were all scratched to hell as well. What's the point? Move on!

F*ck 'em, chucked the lot 3 years ago when i realised that I have quality sound considerations in my music taste too, didnt want badly warped or stetched music, unless i was listening to Aphex Twin!

Cassettes, the worst invention since cassettes....

assuming you have access to said abode take em down there. Buy a ghetto blaster that still plays tapes and you will be surprised how good a lot of them sound.

even better plug into a stereo via the headphone socket and rca leads into the amp .

I wonder how many people decrying cassettes listen to MP3 format on their ipod or through their sound system via itunes MP3s rather than lossless formats

but there are a lot of Massive members (oo-er matron) who seem to have suffered from crap tape deck syndrome in the past. I'm still using the mid-to-high range JVC deck I bought in 1982 as a feed to the PC for cassette based material, and the big f-off Yamaha I bought about 6 or 7 years ago as part of the main living room system. Even cassette recordings I made 20 years ago still sound damn fine. I never used anything less than an SA90 blank, and I always took the time to do the levels properly. I've even been known to adjust azimuth settings. I suspect that with tape based systems, you really did get what you paid for.

3 fully working decks here, 2 semi functional, 1 dead, all stereo with a mixture of Dolby B+C+S. Maybe it's my BFO! Yamaha amp but pretty much everything from 96k mp3s to old BASF Chromdioxid C90s sound great.

I still love cassettes

I have hundreds in specially made drawers that I never open. I have a £300 when new Nakamichi Cassette Deck (not currently wired into the amp) and probably now worth £25 on eBay. I can play tapes in the car but don't.

I can't bring myself to throw them away or sell the deck for such a pitiful amount of money.