Good-bye audio cassette. You're headed for eternal repose among the cobwebs of technological obsolescence. Give my best to the eight-track when you reach your permanent cobweb. I'll miss you all.

The audio cassette has long been dead as for as the music industry was concerned. It was replaced by the CD, which itself is rapidly being replaced by devices that can snatch tunes off the Internet. But it enjoyed an afterlife in the literary field. Publishers put books on audio cassettes, allowing people to enjoy their literature, self-help books and motivational writings while cruising in their automobiles. Now, according to The New York Times, the book publisher Hachette, which had published audio books, has bowed to vanishing demand and held a formal funeral service for the genre. Its last audio book, released in June, was the novel "Sail," by James Patterson and Howard Roughan.

I never cared much for books on tape, but the audio cassette answered for me a need I had felt for a long, long time. As a newspaper reporter, I spent a lot of time in my automobile, and I wanted to be able to listen to the stuff I liked and not to the stuff some DJ spun to please the popular taste. My musical tastes tend toward the traditional, with an admixture of the oddball. The audio tape enabled me to indulge those tastes.

My first automobile with portable music was a 1978 Ford Fiesta. After buying it new, I bolted an eight-track player to the dashboard. I rummaged through a display rack that had a number of marked-down eight-tracks nobody else wanted. There were marches from operas, classical stuff by Lizst, Chopin and Borodin, and a whole tape of songs by a guy named Ivan Rebroff, a German who sang Russian folk songs. He had the most spectacular voice range I had ever heard, able to move smoothly from a low bass all the way up to soprano. His repertoire included Russian and gypsy folk ballads sung in the Russian language. "Dark Eyes" ("Ochi Chornya") and "The Song of the Volga Boatmen" were among my favorite pieces.

My love affair with the eight-track was short-lived. When I took a new job in Roanoke, Va., I stayed temporarily in the Patrick Henry Hotel and parked in the parking garage. One night somebody browsed the parking garage and helped himself to my eight-track. I could replace Lizst, Chopin and Borodin, but Ivan Rebroff would be lost to me for another generation. By then, everybody was listening to the audiocassette. So that's what I got in my next automobile.

The nice thing about the audiocassette was that you could easily copy music from your vinyl LPs onto the tape. Just start your LP to playing, mash a couple of buttons labeled "Play" and "Record," and pretty soon you could listen to your favorite songs on your automobile's tape deck. I loved to listen to those old LPs at home and had often regretted that I couldn't take the music on the road with me. Now I could.

My son Matt took woodworking in high school and made me a neat case with slots to hold my tapes. My daughter Angie — who picked a bluegrass banjo — contributed a couple of LPs of sea ballads by Gordon Bok, a folk musician from Maine with a voice as deep as a foghorn and a guitar that sounded like the bells on a buoy. She had picked them up at a place in Norfolk called "Rambling Conrad's," a music store named after a homeless guitar player who had been befriended by the proprietor. You could drop into Rambling Conrad's and hear a rich mixture of music you were unlikely to hear on the rock, country or pop radio stations.

Bok's LP offerings quickly found their way to my audiocassettes.

The cassettes had a way of aging and breaking and clogging up tape decks, but if you kept the LPs, you could always replace the tapes. When my favorite songs disappeared from the charts, they still rang through my tape deck. I could listen to the Brothers Four singing "Four strong winds that blow lonely, seven seas that run high" long after the tide of folk music had ebbed. We enjoyed singing "They Are Rioting in Africa" around the campfire: "The whole world is festering with unhappy souls; the French hate the Germans, the Germans hate the Poles; Italians hate Yugoslavs, South Africans hate the Dutch; and we don't like anybody very much." The hatreds may have shifted like players in a game of musical chairs, but the song is still cynically catchy.

The cassette was replaced by the compact disc, and I suppose there's a way to burn something from an audiotape onto a CD, but I don't know how. My life is so busy punching words into a computer that I haven't found time to keep pace with the technology of sound. I did Google Ivan Rebroff and was able to buy a CD of his songs, though not the same ones he had sung into the eight-track. None of my friends had heard of him except for Margaret Cheek, a native of Germany, who recognized his voice immediately when she heard it coming from the CD player in my car.

I'll hang on to the CD until that medium becomes obsolete or the disc gets lost in my haphazardly maintained music collection.

I still had, packed away somewhere, all the old LP albums that for so long had stocked my collection of audiotapes. For our last anniversary, Miss Peggy presented me with a record player with a turntable for the LPs, slots for CDs and audiotapes and an FM radio that will pull in a station from Highlands, N.C., that plays much of the good stuff we used to listen to.

Unfortunately, it won't record an LP onto an audiocassette or burn it onto a CD.

But it will play Ivan Rebroff and Gordon Bok. I hope the machine lasts as long as I do.

Readers may write Gene Owens at 317 Braeburn Drive, Anderson SC 29621 or e-mail him at WadesDixieco@aol.com