Inspired by several blogs (like this one and this one) on the topic of downsizing, I decided a long time ago to gradually digitise all the media in my house - Vinyl, Audio Cassettes, VHS Cassettes, DVDs, CDs, Photos. The advent of enormous hard disks makes this achievable, although it's no mean feat, believe me.
I'm pointing out the obvious, but the issue is that all the analogue stuff (all but the DVDs and CDs) has to be digitised in 'real time', which means playing every record, every cassette, every videotape and turning it into ones and zeroes as you go. No big deal for the odd few here and there, but when you're talking about a lifetime's worth of accumulated media it's nothing short of a marathon task.
Today I finally finished the audio cassettes, and I think the task has taken on-and-off around 2 years to complete (believe me, there's only so much of this you can do in one go without going bonkers). Each file was ripped to MP4 (a bit like MP3, but better) and now sits amongst the countless thousands of other files in my iTunes Library. iTunes tells me there are 144 cassette recordings, constituting 3.8 days of continuous recording. That's quite a big chunk of my free time, and remember, I had to be on-hand the whole time to flip the cassette over, start and stop the recording and label each file before I forgot what it was.
What a palava! Why am I bothering? Well, it's all in the name of downsizing the amount of
So, today I hurled the last batch of tapes into the dustbin and kissed goodbye to a media format which has been in my life for more than three decades. Of course the reality is that I won't miss them much now they're gone, but there's no escaping the fact there are countless memories bound-up in all those miles and miles of magnetised tape, and it's amazing how clear the flashbacks are associated with each and every one of them. There were the ones from the 70s, compilation tapes which my Dad created, himself recording from vinyl to tape in real-time. Each was meticulously labelled and every song therein noted down on a little piece of paper slipped inside the case. There were the pre-recorded ones that survived (I swear most were designed to self-destruct after a few plays), like Madness' Absolutely, Yazoo's Upstairs at Erics, The Cure's Faith. In some cases I can actually recall moments when I was playing those cassettes and where I was at the time. In the case of the Madness cassette it was on one of those very early Sony Walkmans - this exact one in fact, and I was standing on the platform of Ipswich station, waiting for a train to Bury St Edmunds.
Then there's the eponymous MixTape. Creating a mixtape for someone, a collection of favourites for a relative, or a collection of meaningful songs with subliminal (but more often rather more overt) messages you wanted to convey, was truly something special. A gesture with meaning, personal, thoughtful. Even more special, in the days before Skype, the tapes where your girlfriend recorded her own voice, interspersed with a few of her favourite songs. It's hard to get much more personal than that.
I was always a Japanese tape manufacturer kind of guy. It had to be TDK, Sony or Maxell for me, and sure enough, every one of those cassettes stood the test of time and held their contents reliably over the decades so that one-day, totally unforeseen when they began their journeys in life, they could be played for one last time and fed into a computer where they would take up 0.00002% of a hard disk about the size of 4 tape cases!
But back to the memories, and here's the BIG problem with digital media, there's simply no way a file on iTunes can evoke memories the way one of these lovely old formats can. If I'm lucky my strange but remarkably effective memory for useless information will recall the cassette and then the memory associated with that cassette when I listen to those files. However there's no tactile experience, nothing unique about each file apart from the order and quantity of ones and zeroes. There's no soul. I remember thinking the same when CDs came along and displaced vinyl LPs. Lost now is the pleasure of putting a record on and sitting back with the album cover to read and enjoy the artwork and sleeve notes. In a way it's sad that the younger generations who've grown up in the digital era will never be able to attach memories to the unique carriers of their music, since there are no unique carriers anymore. The closest they have is which model of iPod they were using when they heard this song, or that song. Progress?
As I write this I can hear the reader asking - so why get rid of all these memory-prompters then? Well, it's a question of weighing-up the pros and the cons, and about a wider philosophical reasoning to do with letting go of the past and lightening the burden of 'stuff' we carry through our lives, but again, I'll save that for another post.
For now I just want to mark the day the last audio cassette left my house, and left my life. RIP Audio Cassettes.
