[soylentcola]

I'm much more of a tinkerer than any semblance of serious musician but I remember how awesome it was to get a cheap 4-track at a pawn shop in my teens. Until then, my "workaround" had been two boom boxes, some blank tapes, and some splitter cables.

I'd pop a tape into a boom box, record the rhythm guitar part with my little "headphone amp" routed to the aux-in, then rewind. Plug a headphone cable in and split it so the right channel went to headphones and the left channel went into the left aux-in on the second boom box. That way I could record the leads or other parts while listening to the rhythm over headphones.

You could bounce back and forth a couple of times as long as you had some stereo-to-mono adapters but quality degraded quickly. Still, I was a teenager with a $100 guitar, some old boom boxes, and a lot of time.

Still, I can't imagine cassette is easier or cheaper to record and distribute compared to digital or even CD-R today. I'm guessing it has as much to do with "novelty" (which is funny to say about deliberate anachronism) as ease/cost of distribution.

That said, if people dig it, then more power to them. I like picking up vinyl records at Goodwill because they're 4 for a dollar and sometimes I find something that ends up being pretty interesting. I also buy vinyl new releases sometimes because there's something more psychologically pleasing about getting a "thing" for your money instead of a file that could just as easily be duplicated infinitely. I really like how vinyl often comes with a digital download code so I still get a 256-320k/sec mp3 copy for portability and convenience but I also get the big cover art and something tangible. Album art really is something I miss about physical media and vinyl 33's are large enough to offer great, big cover art.