I mourn the loss of the audio cassette.

I used to spend hours recording things onto cassette. I remember when my brother and I used to use a tape recorder to make silly commercials and pretend that we were talk radio hosts. It was a lot of fun.

I then became interested in DJing and would make mix tapes on a weekly basis. I recorded rap radio shows and listened to them over and over again. Everywhere I went, I took my walkman with me and stuffed four tapes in one of my jeans pockets and two or three in the other one. It was great.

I held on to the format long after the market had completely fazed them out. I was buying cassette tapes from music stores when most of my friends had converted to the CD format.

When I heard that cassettes were no longer being made, I went out and bought packs and packs of them because I was not going to let them die. Today, I found myself thinking about what happened to all those tape manufacturers. I looked up BASF on Wikipedia and was surprised to see that it is still a thriving company that deals with plastics. Sony is still doing well without the audio cassette as well. So is 3M. It seems that everyone has moved on.

I dug out my old cassettes and rented a CD burner from an Audio store. I spent the entire week copying my cassettes to CDs so that I can preserve my favourites. I kept the colour inserts of the tapes and put them in the new CD cases.

It’s nice having these old memories and albums on CD now. But it is not the same. I miss tapes. I miss having to flip them over, rewind them, hear the beeping noise at the front of the program, being able to make my own tapes of anything, and the feel of them in my pocket. I just miss them.