Don’t toss those old cassette tapes in the trash

We live in a digital age and nowhere is that more apparent than in the world of recorded music. Analog media such as vinyl records and cassette tapes are all but extinct. It’s all CD, DVD, and MP3.

Yet you are out there and you know who you are. You’re the ones who still have a huge music collection of hundreds, even thousands of cassette tapes.

While you may still locate someone to maintain your antique cassette player, you know that eventually your valuable collection is doomed to go the way of the 78 RPM record and eight-track tape. And that doesn’t even factor in the fact that the magnetic tape inside all your cassettes will eventually decompose and become useless anyway.

But fear not, as there remains hope for your rapidly deteriorating cassette tape collection. Now there is the PlusDeck 2, made by BTO ( www.plusdeck.com). It’s a fully functional cassette deck for your personal computer, an internal drive that fits into one of the available 5.25 drive bays inside your PC.

After installation, you simply insert a cassette into the drive. The included recording software allows you to transfer all the music from the cassette directly to your computer’s hard drive and converts it into MP3 or WAV files.

Or, you can use the PlusDeck 2 as a standard cassette player. Just pop one in and listen to the music directly from the tape through your PC’s speakers.

And if you just can’t ever let go of the medium, you can take all your computer’s audio files and record them onto blank cassettes you insert into the PlusDeck 2 (if you can still find any).

Free movies for AOL customers

Subscribers to America Online’s broadband service are now able to download movies free from the video-on-demand service Movielink. The companies announced recently that they extended an existing agreement, which give AOL members access to movie downloads for 99 cents each.

In the next month, 10 “classic titles” will be made available at no cost, including “Steel Magnolias” and “Charade.” In subsequent months, five films will be offered.

AOL said its deal, allowing 99-cent rentals, boosted the movie service’s downloads by 15 percent

Kazaa falls behind eDonkey

Kazaa’s long-standing position as the most popular online file-sharing software appears to be over.

In September, the daily average of file-swappers on the FastTrack peer-to-peer network, which includes Kazaa and related programs, was surpassed for the first time by users on the eDonkey/Overnet network, according to online tracking firm BayTSP Inc.

EDonkey/Overnet averaged 2.54 million users a day while FastTrack averaged 2.48 million, the firm said. Kazaa users make up the largest proportion of FastTrack, said BayTSP spokesman Jim Graham.

Graham said there has been a steady decline in Kazaa users and a commensurate rise in eDonkey users since BayTSP began monitoring file-sharing networks 18 months ago for piracy on behalf of film and music companies.

Kazaa quickly became the most popular file-sharing software following the demise of the original Napster network, which shut down in 2001 after losing court battles with the music industry.

Over the past year, Kazaa distributor Sharman Networks has been one of the main targets of lawsuits and monitoring by the entertainment industry. The recording industry also has sued thousands of file-sharers, many of them Kazaa users.