Who still owns audio cassettes?

I do. They’ve been gathering dust in the closet because I can’t bear to part with them. The reason? They contain songs I like but don’t own in any other format. Don’t get me wrong, I do own some of them on CD, most notably all my Cure and Depeche Mode albums, but that’s about it.

Quite frankly the idea of getting rid of my Cure cassette collection makes me break out in a sweat. It’s illogical, I know – I own every last cassette, and then some, on CD, but for some reason I feel they hold more value than the CDs because The Cure was the first band I really got into and had to own everything they ever released. Buying just one cassette was so exciting to me. And the year I got four albums for Christmas? Best year ever!

Anyway, most of the cassettes I own contain only one or two songs I enjoy so I don’t feel it’s worth the expense of buying the full album on CD. While I haven’t listened to these songs in years, I don’t want to part with them for good.

In addition to albums and singles, I also have two cassettes of some of my favorite songs recorded off the radio sometime between 1998-1992. The problem is I’m not sure I documented the titles correctly because I can’t find many of them online. In addition, there’s an adaptation of The Devil Went Down To Georgia called The Devil Came Up To Chicago that even Google has minimal information on.

I guess I need to figure out an inexpensive way to get these cassettes digitized. I’ll have to put this on my list of projects. If you have any suggestions, let me know.

And before you suggest iTunes, please don’t. I dislike how they won’t let you convert the songs to MP3. I realize that option exists but every single time I choose it I’m told the song is copyrighted and I cannot do it, so what’s the point? It’s like they hold the stuff you buy hostage. I prefer listening to my music using Winamp anyway and don’t enjoy being forced to use iTunes. Plus it runs hella slow on my computer.

All other suggestions are welcome, however.