I have written here previously that I no longer have a turntable hooked up at my house. Even before I unhooked it, I hadn’t used it for several years. I still have all my vinyl, however, taking up space here in the office. It’s still here mostly because I can’t think of a good way to get rid of it—and I would get rid of it. I am no longer interested in owning the physical objects—MP3s are fine with me.

We also have a substantial collection of cassettes. The Mrs. was a cassette buyer during her high-school days, and virtually all of the pre-recorded cassettes that are boxed up somewhere in the basement are hers. Over many years, I recorded a lot of albums (and later CDs) onto cassettes, and although I occasionally played them in the house, they got most of their play in the car.

Sometime in high school, I started making compilation tapes—8-tracks at first, then reel-to-reel tapes in college, and finally on cassette. In the early 90s, when I had a lengthy commute to and from work each day, I hit upon the idea of putting songs in chronological order. I started with 1976 because of course I did, but over the next few years, I assembled what I called the Magnum Opus. It eventually covered January 1969 through December 1979 and included every radio hit I could lay my hands on, from CD, vinyl, or cassette. I don’t recall how many tapes there were, mostly C-90s with a few C-60s mixed in (never C-120s—too fragile), but I am guessing I could have driven to Hawaii and back without repeating one. As I added missing songs to my vinyl and CD collections, I re-recorded sections of the Magnum Opus to fit them in.

During the 90s and 00s, I killed countless evenings and weekend afternoons working on it. Making a tape had to be done in real time, so it took a couple of hours to do a C-90.  It required physical manipulation of the source media, removing albums or singles from sleeves, putting them on the turntable and lowering the tonearm in the proper spot; unboxing and cueing up a source cassette to the right spot; that kind of thing. If several songs in a row came from CDs, I could program the CD changer to do the heavy lifting for me. My first cassette deck did not have a digital readout like my later ones, so as I got toward the end of each side of the tape, it was guesswork to see if a particular song was going to fit.

After I got a CD burner, I did not try to recreate all of the Magnum Opus on CD (although I did one year’s worth—guess which one). I do not have digital files for all of the vinyl and/or cassettes, and every time I think about going out to YouTube and trying to fill in the gaps, it scares me off. And compared to the analog/real-time tape-making experience, burning a CD feels like cheating.

My current car, which I bought in 2013, has no cassette deck. I own two different home-stereo decks, but neither one of them works anymore, and I haven’t seen the need to get them fixed. So there’s really no point in hanging on to the cassettes. They’re merely taking up space, and as I said at the top of this post, I am no longer interested in owning the physical objects that contain the music. So the other day, the Magnum Opus—however many cassettes it was, however many songs, from “Cloud Nine” by the Temptations through “Message in a Bottle” by the Police, which kept me company over tens of thousands of miles and something like 20 years—went out to the curb.

It was painful to do, and after I dumped them into the bin, I thought a couple of times about digging them back out. But our firetrap of a condo has too many physical objects in it to begin with, and while getting rid of the Magnum Opus won’t solve the problem, at least it doesn’t make it any worse. Everything dies, and for the Magnum Opus, it was time.