You don't have to use it, but you could, it's a very nice piece of furniture that you also have a connection to.
A piece of contemporary history.

I recently digitized some compact cassettes with Audacity. You have to sit with them though, so 2x 45 minutes.

Spoiler: From cassette to PC with Audacity

From cassette to PC with Audacity
To digitize songs with Audacity, you need a cassette player with audio output, a jack cable with 3.5 mm plugs, a PC with line-in or microphone input and the free software Audacity .

1. Connect the audio output of the cassette player to the line-in or microphone input of your PC.
2. Insert the cassette you want to digitize and, if necessary, rewind to the desired location.
3. Start Audacity and select Preferences > Edit.
4. Under "Recording", select the appropriate input on your PC. Choose whether you want to record in mono or stereo .
5. Then press the record button (the red dot) in Audacity and play the tape.
6. Press Stop on the cassette player and Stop Recording on Audacity to complete the process.
7. You can now listen to the recording. If you are satisfied, click "Export Audio".

 

I have boxes of cassette tapes, and I still have about 40 sealed blank tapes mostly Maxell and a couple Sony's.So I have plenty of source material to digitize into mp3 or flac - though Flac just seems to be a format for people with to much hard drive space. I recommend "how music got free" the audio book, to understand how much development went into the MP3 and how manageable the quality level is.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/How_Music_Got_Free

that audiobook is definitely one that should be on the sister site..

much as I like cassettes and am sure they will outlive me, I can see no reason to dub them onto fresh tape, better to make CD's or mp3's. I like my old handmade cassette recordings of over the air broadcasts, because i frequently just let the tape roll, so its a historical document, that includes the weather forecast at the time, upcoming concert promo's, hifi stereo sales and all the other day to day minutia that made up our lives. its a freakin audio time machine..

I'm sure vinyl will last longer than cassettes, simply because vinyl records have no moving parts, they are the first solid state recording media. ha,ha, ha......but analog..................

 

Shortly before the turn of the millennium, when all computers were supposed to crash, I bought the Yamaha MT 50 Multitracker Cassette Recorder with my small salary. I had no idea what else was to be invented. I then had a double tape to record my recordings and give them away or sell them. The MT 50 was very clear and easy to use and the cassettes were very cheap.

But analogue was disappearing more and more and today almost everything is digital.

 

nice...
analog was the path abandoned. I wonder what could have been had it continued development?
Digital is easy-peasy and somehow souless, an ipod no matter the model is not as human and interesting as walkman for instance..



or



hell they don't even have headphone jacks anymore...

 

Soulless is a simple but apt expression...we all look at our screens all by ourselves...! In the past, you would rent a video from the video store and have a video night with a few friends. I suspect that when the AI business is over in two decades, people will long for the analog world and a black market for the real feeling of life will emerge.

 

I bought an old Alesis ADAT machine about three years ago because I have a few tapes that I recorded on in the 90's in a drawer that I took with me 22 years ago when I moved across the pond. I haven't even plugged it in yet. I'm curious to see if it actually works. This thread is pushing me to crank it up to see what is on the tapes as I don't have the track lists any more. We shall see what we see.

 

because of high speed duplication and very stingy record companies, factory audio cassette were far inferior to albums (vinyl) or CD. We used to buy the Vinyl and make our own tapes using better quality cassettes and decks, and also editing out the crappy tracks. Still have some nice tapes of some jazz albums my roommate at the time had. A lot of those old jazz albums never made it to CD... so nice to have a copy ...

The factory(from the record companies) cassettes, had in my opinion a higher chance of jamming or geting eaten by the tape deck, I think they had the cheapest possible shells and mechanism inside the shell, the tape quality was bottom of the line, never chrome or fe and hardly ever even dolby.