Home taping is killing music! Oh, wait, it isn't. That was 20 years ago. No, these days illegal down- loading is killing music. And it's such a violent crime that music companies are now in the process of suing 17 Irish people who have illegally distributed music online.

Following the US Supreme Court's "Grokster" ruling, which decreed that the makers of peer- to-peer file sharing software are legally responsible for what customers do with that software, it seems that the days of the illegal download may finally, after all the hype, really be numbered.

So bearing this in mind, I'd like to pay homage to that once dangerous and still undetectable bootlegging device, the humble cassette. Sure, the sound quality wasn't great. And yes, tapes had a habit of unravelling, forcing you to wind the entire thing back onto the reels with a pencil. And sometimes players would chew them up and spit bits of them out. But for a generation, they were simply what made our music collections.

For all of my teens, the vast majority of my large music collection was taped off other people. I didn't even know what the cover of the Violent Femmes debut album looked like until three years after I first taped the (itself taped) copy from a girl in Irish summer college. Taping was how I, and pretty much all of my friends, got hold of our favourite bands. In the days when pocket money was a fiver a week (nearly a pound of which always went on the still- inky NME), we couldn't afford to spend nearly a tenner on all the new albums we wanted to hear. So, rather than go without, we'd find someone to tape them for us.

One of the best things about tapes was putting stuff in the space left at the end of each side of the C90, trying to figure out exactly how long you had before the tape ran out. It was a great way of accessing 7-inch singles and EPs - you were more likely to listen to them attached to an album than on their own. It was also a fantastic way of recommending bands to your mates, or discovering new stuff if you were the recipient of the taped bounty.

And that blank space was also the perfect place to put stuff taped from the radio. If you were short on funds, listening to Dave Fanning's eight o'clock show with your finger hovering near the record button was the best way to capture new indie singles. More work than downloading, mind.

But then, tapes were more work in general, because you couldn't skip tracks easily. You had to listen to an album in order from beginning to end. This could be annoying, but it also meant that songs had time to grow on you and that you experienced the album as a collective work, rather than a random bunch of songs. Of course, if you wanted a random bunch of songs, you could make a compilation tape.

There was a fine art to making the perfect tape, much more so than making a mix CD. As well as charting the musical mood throughout each side, you had to figure out exactly how many songs would fit and then dive across the room to the stereo every time a song drew to a close. You had to make sure the gaps between songs weren't too long or too short. Sure, it was time- consuming and frustrating, but damnit, you had to work for your entertainment in those days.

But how quickly we forget! The iPod has replaced the Walkman and a generation is growing up in a tape-free world. But maybe we're being too hasty.

A couple of months ago, the CD-playing part of the stereo in my kitchen gave up the ghost, and for the first time in ages we found ourselves listening to tapes. Tapes that had lurked unheard for years in boxes, tapes that contained all the music we'd loved when we were 15, compilation tapes made by long-lost friends.

The random songs taped at the end of various albums were the most pleasantly nostalgic at all - Lazarus by the Boo Radleys, Her Jazz by Huggy Bear, Wolves, Lower from REM's Chronic Town EP. I actually owned the latter on "official" tape, so I'm not sure why I decided to put my favourite song from it at the end of a taped copy of Throwing Muses's Hunk- papa album. That's 14-year-olds for you.

It was so long since we'd listened to this stuff, it was like getting a bunch of free music. Rather like downloading, except without the risk of getting sued.