Hi April, and Everyone,

I liked that article. I do remember sitting in front of my stereo and
making tapes for people and going through CD's to see what I wanted to put
on the cassettes. I remember trying to ballence the recording levels with
head phones on. It was fun. I even remember making one of the Carpenters
songs longer than it was. You couldn't even tell what I had done, except
the end of the song was longer, actually, it was continued into the same
song again. lol. I don't even remember which Carpenters song it was now
that I did that to. lol.

Oh I use to do a lot of fun things with cassettes. Now, I have a brand new
duel cassette deck that I bought in August of 2003 to replace after the
tornado. It's not even been hooked up yet to my stereo up here, and the
same goes with the cd recorder I bought at the same time. lol.

Poor Vernon is keeping busy finishing projects. He's doing excellent, and
he really does want to get them finished.

I think we finally got all the CD's cleaned up just a few weeks ago, from
the tornado.

Today we've owned this house for exactly 2 years. It's also the day that
Vernon's Dad died.

Okay, I've rambled on long enough now.

Love and Blessings,
Pat Ferguson
At 02:29 AM 7/28/05, you wrote:
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>I know this is off-topic, but I found this quite an interesting article.
>
>Not long left for cassette tapes Cassettes The cassette is facing erasure
>Some 40 years after global cassette production began in earnest, sales are
>in terminal decline.
>
> From its creation in the 1960s through to its peak of popularity in the
>1980s, the cassette has been a part of music culture for 40 years.
>
>But industry experts believe it does not have long left, at least in the
>West.
>
>The cassette may have hissed, been prone to wow and flutter, and often ended
>its life chewed in a tape deck, but it ruled for four decades before MP3s
>and downloads.
>
>However, the cassette's reign now seems to be over.
>
>"Cassette albums have declined quite significantly since their peak in
>1989 when they were selling 83 million units in the UK," Matt Phillips of
>the British Phonographic Industry (BPI) told BBC World Service's The Music
>Biz programme.
>
>"Last year we saw that there were about 900,000 units sold.  It's clear to
>see that cassette sales are dwindling fast."
>
>Mix tape Dutch electronics giant Philips perfected the design of the
>cassette in the
>1960s.
>
>It was designed to be a new form of portable entertainment, launched into a
>market dominated by vinyl LPs and reel-to-reel tape recorders.
>
>Oddly, Philips did not charge royalties on their cassette patent, allowing
>numerous other companies to use their design for free.  This ensured the
>quick acceptance of it as a new form of media.
>
>Nick Hornby Hornby's High Fidelity highlighted the dilemmas of a mix tape It
>went on to accrue enormous worldwide sales.  At its mid-80s peak, it sold
>900 million units a year, 54% of total global music sales.
>
>The music industry itself, however, remained concerned about cassettes, in
>particular the ability of people to record music on them.
>
>They feared piracy, arguing that home taping was "killing music", a similar
>argument to the one occurring today over downloading.
>
>One thing home taping allowed was the creation of the mix tape - a
>compilation of songs often put together as a present for a loved one.
>The process of creating the mix tape was immortalised by Nick Hornby in his
>novel High Fidelity.
>
>New York music writer Joel Keller laments that personal computers have
>killed the mix tape star, and that the "drag and burn" method of creating
>compilation CDs is simply "less fun."
>
>"I liked it when I sat in front of my stereo, my tape deck, with a big pile
>of CDs, deciding on the fly which songs to put in what order," he said.
>
>"My play and record fingers got a little sore because I had to time it
>right.  Listening to the song as it played, finding the levels - it seemed
>like more of a labour of love than it is it do CDs now."
>
>Legacy However, while cassettes are disappearing quickly from the music
>stores, they are clinging on in the UK in bookshops.
>
>Having begun as a way of providing titles to the blind, a third of all audio
>books are still sold on cassette.  An audio recording of a bestseller such
>as The Da Vinci code can sell between 60-70,000 copies in the UK alone.
>
>Dan Brown Dan Brown's The Da Vinci Code has been a success on cassette
>"Audio tapes are like an old friend that doesn't go away," Pandora White of
>Orion audio books told The Music Biz.
>
>"I think it's the accessibility of it.  Where you stop and start is
>immediately where you left off, whereas CD can be a bit more tricky."
>
>And outside of the music stores of the West, cassettes do continue to
>survive as a music format, in countries such as Afghanistan and India.
>
>In some markets, performers record directly onto cassette.
>
>Keith Joplin, a Director of Research at the International Federation of
>Phonographic Industries, said that Turkey still sells 88 million cassettes a
>year, India 80 million, and that cassettes account for 50% of sales in these
>countries.  In Saudi Arabia, it is 70%.
>
>However, he added that this is because the penetration of CD players "is not
>100% in those markets."
>
>With the US's largest magnetic tape factory ceasing production earlier this
>year, there are fears that even if cassettes are wanted in future, there
>will no longer be anything to wrap around the spools.
>
>However, terms such as fast forward, rewind, record and pause, everyday
>words bequeathed to us from the tape era, ensure that in the English
>language at least, the legacy of the cassette will survive.
>
>April Reisinger
>
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