“Assortment #2” was correctly catalogued, and there wasn’t anything on it I didn’t already have.

Forty-five left.

“Assortment #3” also looked good, but I double-checked by playing a few bits to make sure they match the list. They did.

Forty-four.

“Assortment #4,” on the other hand, has an index card listing a few songs and a note saying it isn’t finished, so there’s no telling what’s on it. It also appears to have at least one Led Zeppelin song that came from somewhere other than my record collection.

They won’t all be this easy, folks — I’m deliberately doing the easy-looking ones first. In fact, I decided to leave “Assortment #4” until later; instead I pulled out one labeled “R1 – Rolling Stones Part 1.” According to the enclosed list, it’s a couple of Stones albums I have, plus “Between the Buttons” and “Beggar’s Banquet,” which I don’t.

And upon playing it, it’s just what it says — well, it’s got Side 1 of “Beggar’s Banquet,” anyway, with Side 2 on the next tape.

Which brings me to a question. In cases where the only stuff I don’t have on a tape is easily-obtained classic albums available as MP3 downloads, should I bother recording and converting them? I mean, this is music I haven’t played, or missed enough to replace, in at least twenty years and probably closer to forty. If I’ve gotten along without “Beggar’s Banquet” all these years, do I need it?

Or, really… well, I did record those three sides. And the quality isn’t very good — it’s an old recording, on the cheapest tape I could find. (I hadn’t yet realized there really was a difference in quality.) I’d need to do some clean-up, and the records they were recorded from were scratched a couple of places, and I can’t fix that. So I haven’t bothered to do the editing and conversion to MP3. Instead I went to Amazon and put both albums in my MP3 shopping cart — but why bother to click the “buy” button, when I haven’t felt a need to buy these albums in all the intervening years?

The next tape, by the way, is “R2 – Rolling Stones Part 2,” which is Side 2 of “Beggar’s Banquet,” then (going purely by the written list, which is incomplete this time) “Exile on Main Street,” and “Goat’s Head Soup,” and “Get Yer Ya Yas Out.” At the very end is “Brown Sugar” and “Sway,” presumably from the beginning of “Sticky Fingers.” I have “Goat’s Head Soup” and “Sticky Fingers,” but not the others. There’s no MP3 download of “Get Yer Ya Yas Out” available for sale, so I’d have to buy the CD of that one, if I bought it.

For now, I’ll just do without. I can always buy them later if I change my mind.

Meanwhile, I’m still trying to figure out what to do with tapes when I’m done with them. There’s no after-market for homemade tapes, even if selling them were legal. I don’t know anyone else with a reel-to-reel tape recorder, so I can’t give them to friends. I don’t have an obvious use for miles of brownish streamers.

Sigh.