All this time I have kept the portion of my music collection on LPs and cassettes with no way of listening for lack of a player that worked. But a new toy I got today will let that part of my collection transcend its obsolescence onto CD once and for all.
The new Memorex CD recorder is the first time I have owned a record player that worked in, I don't know, 10 years? 15? The LPs have been put away a very long time, I do know that. Cassettes slipped off the music radar relatively recently...I guess about it's been about five years ago since I could listen to those, not counting the half-ass player in the pizza car.
Now all those sounds have been brought back to life once more. But I didn't buy this thing to just listen for old times' sake. What sold me on it was the fact that I can transfer those recordings onto CD and listen in modern format, so to speak.
The new Memorex CD recorder is the first time I have owned a record player that worked in, I don't know, 10 years? 15? The LPs have been put away a very long time, I do know that. Cassettes slipped off the music radar relatively recently...I guess about it's been about five years ago since I could listen to those, not counting the half-ass player in the pizza car.
Now all those sounds have been brought back to life once more. But I didn't buy this thing to just listen for old times' sake. What sold me on it was the fact that I can transfer those recordings onto CD and listen in modern format, so to speak.
Oh, and it also has an auxiliary jack, to plug in another source of music, such as...a microphone? Hmm.....
The first transfer I did was a cassette, of me on the radio as a DJ. I got to be a guest on my friends' regular show in December 1993 on KCHU 770AM in Valdez, Alaska, and ever since then have treasured the tape as much for the memory of my time there as much as the music. I feel better with it safely stored on CD and listenable again. Next was The Rolling Stones Tattoo You, an LP I bought my senior year in high school at Turtle's in Eastwood Mall, thinking the Stones probably didn't have many albums left in them (shows all I knew!)
Now comes the tough part--going through the collection one last time and deciding what makes the transition, and what goes away.
Later, I am going to consider trying to make back the purchase price of this handy new gadget by making CDs for other people. I am thinking, $5 for those who furnish their own blank CD, $6 if I do. Does that sound like a fair price to get back one's music, a piece at a time?
The first transfer I did was a cassette, of me on the radio as a DJ. I got to be a guest on my friends' regular show in December 1993 on KCHU 770AM in Valdez, Alaska, and ever since then have treasured the tape as much for the memory of my time there as much as the music. I feel better with it safely stored on CD and listenable again. Next was The Rolling Stones Tattoo You, an LP I bought my senior year in high school at Turtle's in Eastwood Mall, thinking the Stones probably didn't have many albums left in them (shows all I knew!)
Now comes the tough part--going through the collection one last time and deciding what makes the transition, and what goes away.
Later, I am going to consider trying to make back the purchase price of this handy new gadget by making CDs for other people. I am thinking, $5 for those who furnish their own blank CD, $6 if I do. Does that sound like a fair price to get back one's music, a piece at a time?
2 comments:
I did the same thing years ago when my brotherr bought a similar contraption. I had to do some musical housecleaning, so to speak, so I decided which of my tapes would stay and which should go. Which ones were burned to CD and which ones went into the trashcan forever. I no longer own a tapeplayer anymore, so why the hell was I holding onto these cassettes? I was a member of that Columbia tape club when i was in junior high and like many kids my age who got screwed by those clubs, I ended up having to buy about 50 tapes that I never listended to really.
I had a tape player in my old Pathfinder that I drove when i worked at the newspaper - put roughly 250,000 miles on it (most of which came from driving to and from Talladega every day for four years).
Anyway, I made "mixed cd's" of the songs I liked from tapes that really sucked (i.e. some latter-day Lou Reed after he stopped using drugs, those two halfway decent songs off Mick Jagger's awful solo record in the mid-80's, and a lot of other "one hit" crap. I had already slowly been replacing my Stones, Replacements and REM tapes with CD's, so that wasn't a problem.
In any event, I am now completely cassette-free.
But it's kind of sad, really....
I am well into the process of "CD-ing" my old stuff and now I realize why I kept it so long: most of it still kicks ass! Sure, there are a few clunkers, but about 90 percent of what I've dug out so far, has reminded me how much I liked it. It probably has something to do with not being able to listen to it for so long.
I can go you one better on the music club experience. They were * TRACK TAPES the first time I joined. Those are long gone, claimed at a yard sale years ago by my pack-rat neighbor. I think the music clubs are still around, just without the "send the card back or else" sales approach. I would think downloading digital music will eventually supplant the "clubs" but I am pretty sure I got junk mail from one of them in the last month or so.
There were three Mick solo albums. She's The Boss dropped (like a turd) in 1985 and I have it on vinyl. Then there was Primitve Cool later in the 80s, followed by Wandering Spirit circa 1993 it got pretty good reviews but I refused to bite.
I just about have a batch of old vinyl and cassettes big enough to fill the bag I plan on using to tote them to the thrift store. There's just something about shitcanning stuff I paid money for...the thrift store is the garbage can that people get to look through for a while, I figure.
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