CHEEPER BY THE HUNDRED

I love audio cassette tapes. Though they've fallen out of favour with North American consumers, this venerable medium still has its plusses.

One of my pet peeves with digital media is that most CD players won't resume playing at the point when I stopped the track. Cassettes and their players have no such problem. They resume at the same place when you've stopped them.

CDs and DVDs are fragile. One little scratch at the beginning and the whole disk is ruined. My mom discovered that fact when she scratched her name into the metal coating of her disks. Cassettes, on the other hand,  can take moderate abuse. Even if the tape snags in the machine, it can be carefully extracted and wound by hand back into the shell. The sound at that point is garbled but the whole recording isn't ruined.

Many third world people still use cassette players and recorders. I'm in contact with a retired minister who puts out a cassette magazine for blind subscribers. As many seniors find digital media, especially accessing it on computers, to be confusing to them, cassettes are still ideal for providing their entertainment.

My minister friend also sends cassettes overseas to missionaries in Nigeria and Philippines. Since he doesn't know how to use a computer, I tape good Christian programming from web sites and send the cassettes to him. He then sends them to blind subscribers of his Vision Tape Ministry and to missionaries. Some episodes of UNSHACKLED!, which I send him, are translated into local languages by missionaries. I've heard that the people they work with are delighted to read the stories in their mother tongues.

Thanks to National Audio Company, I have an ample supply of brand new cassettes. They even have some on sale from time to time. I was able to buy two-hundred C-62 leaderless cassettes for only twenty cents each. Now I have plenty of tapes to record good teaching programs on from my computer.

I've also been able to buy used tapes from local folks and reuse them for spreading good Bible teaching. Two women even gave me some commercially-produced music cassettes of varying lengths to recycle. This is helpful when a sermon isn't long enough to put on a C-62 tape.

In my heart, there's a soft spot for the tape traders of the nineties. Independent musicians found that the cassette was a good medium to reach audiences with their music. People often traded those tapes or made compilations of underground bands' tracks. I treasure those home-made albums. The photocopied graphics give them a unique quality not found in slick commercial tape productions.

I wrote about my own music in How I Was Razed: A Journey from Cultism to Christianity. Check it out at Amazon, Barnes & Noble, and Powel's Books.