Tuesday, December 2, 2014

Christmas Present #24

ION Tape Express Portable Analog To Digital Cassette Converter
 
Been hunting for this bad boy for years. It transfers old school cassette tapes to MP3s, which you can then play on your computer, iPod, phone, or burn to a CD. So what's the big deal?!? We have a 60 minute cassette tape from our high school days of Christmas music. Best we can guess, it's probably from 1984. Back then, one or two FM stations played 36 hours of Christmas music. The "marathon" started at noon on Christmas Eve, and ended at midnight on Christmas night. That was it. Nothing at all like today where you can find stations playing the yuletide tunes starting the week of Thanksgiving.

Anyway, one year Our Dad came up with a brilliant idea. "Let's tape a couple of hours of the Christmas music on cassette and save it to enjoy next year." The following year, when we were probably 15 or 16, we decided to be a rebel and record our own Christmas tape! The next year we unsheathed it on December 1 and listened to it on our Walkman and in the car. By pure luck, 99% of the songs are absolutely timeless classics performed spectacularly. The tape became an annual Christmas thing. There were a couple of years when we had a car sans a tape deck. No problem. We just brought our boom box in the car with us (loaded with D batteries) and played the tape. For 30 years we've listened to that tape every December. No lie. No exaggeration. Now, the tradition is we listen to it in the car on December weekends.

For the past five years or so, we've worried that one of these advents the tape is going to get eaten by the cassette player we still have and/or the cassette player our 2005 Camry sports. (Sadly, The Wife's 2012 Volvo doesn't even have a tape deck.) So after procrastinating for years, we finally did some research last December and found the above model was rated as the best in the land. Of course, it was sold out. So yesterday we found it on Amazon and immediately clicked. Through the beauty of Amazon Prime, it will be here on Thursday. And we will transfer the cherished tape to an MP3 file, thus preserving it forever, as well as burn it into a CD.  (More about the tape another day, as it will undoubtedly appear on the Christmas present list here.)


@ThePitMaster

No comments: