Revisiting tapes in your collection

[Cranial Blast]

Curious to know how often the average listener goes back to revisit tapes in their collection and what length of time is to long for tapes to sit dormant, before being played again? I've heard that it's not good for cassette tapes to be stored for long periods of time without having some playback. I was curious to know if anyone else has heard of this before.

[Theodore]

I am ashamed to say i wont be surprised if i have a batch of tapes i forgot to ever listen, and i dont have huge collection. Just the way i store the tapes, in boxes, in the closet, usually up. So revisiting is very random once they stored there, whatever box happens to catch. And some need whole excavation to be made to be reached, haha.

I've heard that it's not good for cassette tapes to be stored for long periods of time without having some playback.

In theory yes. In practise i have bought 30-40 years old tapes that had decades to be played, if not mint old stock, and they play and sound great.

[Zeno Marx]

I think of my tapes all the time, but for various reasons, I end up not playing them. I've had some problems with my main deck making clicking noises at various points, and it's the first thing I think about when I think of a tape. "What problems am I going to have now?" is my first thought, so I just skip the entire thing.  Playing tapes is a whole set of mental nonsense that I do my best to avoid all together.  It's stupid, but that's where I'm at these days.  And then I often find myself thinking, "I should get to finding all the tapes from X.  I need to fill in all the gaps."  For artists who released most of their work on tape.  Just what I need:  a stack 30cm high of things I don't use.

[Manhog_84]

Curious to know how often the average listener goes back to revisit tapes in their collection and what length of time is to long for tapes to sit dormant, before being played again? I've heard that it's not good for cassette tapes to be stored for long periods of time without having some playback. I was curious to know if anyone else has heard of this before.

Yeah and you should store them upright, not stack on top of each other. It's supposed to be bad for tapes but I don't even do that myself...I have them lying around in piles here.

[Cranial Blast]

I am ashamed to say i wont be surprised if i have a batch of tapes i forgot to ever listen, and i dont have huge collection. Just the way i store the tapes, in boxes, in the closet, usually up. So revisiting is very random once they stored there, whatever box happens to catch. And some need whole excavation to be made to be reached, haha.

I've heard that it's not good for cassette tapes to be stored for long periods of time without having some playback.

In theory yes. In practise i have bought 30-40 years old tapes that had decades to be played, if not mint old stock, and they play and sound great.

Haha, I hear you. My closet is filled to the door and it would take some good time just to get to the boxes.
I think a lot of it to might be the type of environment where they are stored and the general overall handling, definitely a lot of variables to factor indeed.

[Cranial Blast]

Curious to know how often the average listener goes back to revisit tapes in their collection and what length of time is to long for tapes to sit dormant, before being played again? I've heard that it's not good for cassette tapes to be stored for long periods of time without having some playback. I was curious to know if anyone else has heard of this before.

Yeah and you should store them upright, not stack on top of each other. It's supposed to be bad for tapes but I don't even do that myself...I have them lying around in piles here.

I've got all my tapes that are in boxes upright, but same here the ones I've got to listen to yet, I got those lying in piles too. I've also heard once that you should never leave a tape like halfway or part of the way through and put back into storage, like you should let it go through entirely or rewind back entirely, could just be more hear say...who knows.

[burdizzo1]

Yes, the tape should be played to the end. A bit of a drag if you only want to listen to a short part at a time!

I must say, at this point tapes are my least favourite format - and that's despite having being more or less reared on them.

[ritualabuser]

Solely collect tapes and CD at this point, and tend to play my tapes as a release is discussed or comes to mind otherwise.

I have them all stored alphabetically, so it makes it easier to find a specific tape, but eventually have to spend a few hours filing everything back after I've gotten a bunch out. The storage situation is extremely inconvenient; bunch of boxes in the closet, as seems to be the case with most in the thread.

[Cranial Blast]

Solely collect tapes and CD at this point, and tend to play my tapes as a release is discussed or comes to mind otherwise.

I have them all stored alphabetically, so it makes it easier to find a specific tape, but eventually have to spend a few hours filing everything back after I've gotten a bunch out. The storage situation is extremely inconvenient; bunch of boxes in the closet, as seems to be the case with most in the thread.

Yeah I know it, it's very inconvenient indeed. I've gotten to where I've started digitizing a lot of my tapes and then that way their in my library on my laptop, then at least the music is there for when I want to hear stuff again more immediately. I've actually got stock tape player in my old rusted pick up truck, so I try to play everything there when I'm on the go, once again at home and then digital file and then stored away and hopefully one day I can have the proper space to move all of this shit out the closet and get it more properly organized.

[moozz]

Like so many others I have my tapes in boxes, drawers, piles and random shelves but I am in the process of building a proper shelf that should hold about 1000 tapes. It will be so much easier to find a particular tape or just be inspired by a tape whose existence was already forgotten (so I would have never looked for it in one of the boxes).
I recently did the same with my effect pedals. Having them on shelves visually available instead of boxes/drawers is already a source of inspiration.

[Cranial Blast]

Like so many others I have my tapes in boxes, drawers, piles and random shelves but I am in the process of building a proper shelf that should hold about 1000 tapes. It will be so much easier to find a particular tape or just be inspired by a tape whose existence was already forgotten (so I would have never looked for it in one of the boxes).
I recently did the same with my effect pedals. Having them on shelves visually available instead of boxes/drawers is already a source of inspiration.

Yeah for big collections it pretty much has come down to building your own shelving as a last resort as today you cannot find any sort of shelving, especially that's worth a shit. Since tangible media has become very scarce in society, so to has the shelving. Every so often you'll see some CD tower shelving unit at some thrift store that holds made 50 CDs at best, usually a surplus of that type of shit, but as far as big quality shelving goes, you're probably best to make it.

[KillToForget]

About 1/4 of my tapes are easily accessible and stacked on a couple shelves, and I listen to these often (including replaying). The rest are in filing cabinets in the same room, and every couple months I will swap out which tapes go in the boxes and which are on the shelves, depending on mood, familiarity etc

[Andrew McIntosh]

Keep meaning to, because I keep meaning to rip as many of them as possible so I've got them on digital file. I don't listen to any physical format these days. I know I'll never get around to doing all of them, but hopefully some of the better ones one day.

[Cranial Blast]

Keep meaning to, because I keep meaning to rip as many of them as possible so I've got them on digital file. I don't listen to any physical format these days. I know I'll never get around to doing all of them, but hopefully some of the better ones one day.

It's certainly time consuming creating these digital files of your tape collection, but it also sounds like for most of us, it's just as much work going through boxes upon boxes and moving things here and moving things there, just to get to the boxes. I always have music playing while driving and I'm fortunate to have a great tape player in my truck, but now a days you'd be hard pressed to even find a CD player in most newer vehicles, so digitizing your tape collection could be beneficial in this case to. I've got an Ipod loaded with digitized tapes, since I don't have a Walkman anymore, but if I'm driving a vehicle that's newer the Ipod comes in very useful that way too, especially if and when I'd like to hear something that was only put out on tape, however iPods are becoming somewhat of thing of the past too and the only thing Apple has ever made worth a shit, haha.

[MT]

I try to revisit as much as possible, I spend a lot of time in front of the tape shelf and choosing tapes to listen to, emphasis on the ones I don't have strong recollections of. And I also like to keep my tapes and collection in general in sight, browsable. Only special packaged tapes are in a box but it's also in the record shelves. I don't have that much tapes yet, that they would pose a problem when shelving, I can always throw all my "normal" CD's to a closet, I don't listen to them anyway.