My father had a lot of music on vinyl, but there was one other format that my father truly loved, and that was the 8-Track tape. I have fond memories of sitting in the living room with him while he made 8-Track tapes for his car from the many records he had. I would make up cassettes for myself when he played a song I liked. I wish I still had some of those cassettes, because they would be interesting to listen to now. My father had an 8-Track player in his car well into the 80's and long after it was fashionable. It had to be one of the worst music formats of all time. The tape was on a continuous loop and divided into four tracks on the tape. If a song happened to be between two tracks there would be a click sound in the middle of the song. I remember the first album I ever asked for was Billy Joel's Glass Houses. I thought it was obvious that I wanted the cassette version, but on Christmas morning I unwrapped an 8-Track. I was really disapointed, but that did not stop me from listening to it a lot. The coolest thing ever involving myself and this format actually made me some money. While out thrift shopping, I found the 8-Track tape for Gary Numan's Pleasure Principle album. It cost me a dime. I found out that some 80's 8-Tracks were quite rare, so I listed it on Ebay, where it almost made a hundred dollars.
The cassette was my main format up until a few years into CD's being around. In the 70's and early 80's I would make mix tapes by recording songs off the radio. (I also wish I had some of these) My favorite time to record would be the weekend, when the radio station would play the top 40 songs for the week. I would sit patiently with my finger on the record button of my boom box, waiting for a good song to play. In my early teen years, I also built quite a collection of pre-recorded cassettes.
I loved my cassette collection until I decided to upgrade to CD's. That was pretty much the end of listening to music on tape for me.
