Secondly, many people I have spoken to in the last year believe in the cassette multitrack (as well as larger tape formats) for one reason or another. I myself use my old Tascam to mix multiple sources when I need a cheap-and-nasty version of something I might not otherwise get. Like doing weirdo sonic experiments with mics on TV speakers, bleeding radiators, the kitchen sink, and three analog delays running with all knobs turned to the extreme right.

Yeah, Gearwire people are a little nutty. I listened to far too much Coil, Throbbing Gristle, Boyd Rice, and Ennio Morricone in my formative days as a musician.

Ok, so tape isn't dead. But your machine could be unless you care for the old thing properly. If you are running tape, you're battling the elements of decay.

The decay is in your tapes. From the moment you use them, the bloody things are practically spewing themselves all over your heads, and the older your tape is, the worse it gets. Tape residue builds up on the heads, and your tapes wear slowly wear out, one playback at a time.

You need to clean the heads of your machine with 91-percent isopropyl alcohol, or denatured alcohol. Everybody who knows better screams, "Don't use rubbing alcohol on your tape heads!" It's true. You'll get a residue at least as bad as the buildup that's on there now, probably worse. Why do people even think about using rubbing alcohol? 'Cuz it's what they usually have lying around the house, instead of denatured alcohol.

Here's where the cleaning gets tricky. You can swab the heads and the plastic parts of the tape transport mechanism, but swapping out the rubber in there can cause cracking. Don't do it.

Also, don't bother using a Q-Tip or other cotton swab to clean the heads. Use a brand-new foam swab instead. Don't recycle them, either. The foam will being flaking off into your recording mechanism. Not good.

If you want to avoid a lot of tape head cleaning, avoid running your tape over the playback heads as you fast-forward or rewind. Yeah, we all love that annoying chipmunk-from-hell noise, but it increases the amount of tape residue that builds up on your heads. It also wears out the tape faster.

At some point, you may need to demagnetize your heads. A demagnetizer looks a little like a soldering gun, but with a plastic or rubberized tip. You can find these on eBay for around ten bucks. You need to de-magnetize the heads because your tape magnetic tape creates a little magnetic field over time on the heads, which can muddy up your recording or playback.

If you buy a demagnetizer, it is absolutely vital to keep the damn thing far away from all computer gear. In this era of shielded speakers, people forget that it is very bad to mix magnetic fields and computers. Take your 4-track tape machine into the bathroom where there are no CPUs of any kind, demagnetize the heads according to the instructions on the demagnetizer, and you should have no problems.

With clean and demagnetized heads, you should be able to squeeze enough life out of an old machine to get your library of old multitrack recordings dumped to disk. If you have purchased a new cassette rig, you can use these techniques to prevent your recorder from succumbing to premature wear and tear. Whatever you do, just get that material off the tapes and onto a hard drive as soon as possible, before your tapes break, wear out, or get scotch-n-soda spilled on them.