Are Radio Shack cassettes any good?

Factual Questions
1

The humble audio-cassette has had a great run, but clearly the end is near. Most of my music collection is still on tape and will remain that way for the foreseeable future. (I don’t consider it worth the trouble to convert them to MP3’s.)

A long time ago, back in the 70s*, I bought some Radio Shack cassettes and taped some LPs from a roommate who moved out a few weeks later.** A few weeks after the roommate moved out and went to another state, the tapes bombed. The reels on one simply refused to move, and the others developed that squeal a tape gets when the binder goes bad. Because of that, I haven’t bought a Radio Shack cassette for something like 30 years now.

In addition to that, 8-trackers report that the last blank 8-track tapes Radio Shack sold were some of the poorest quality 8-tracks ever made and have very unfond memories of them.

But now I seem to be in something of a dilemma.

You can find Type I tapes at your local supermarket or drug store, (usually Maxell but sometimes Sony). However, I much prefer Type II (chromium). Even on a cheap system like mine, the difference clearly shows. Problem is, nobody but Radio Shack actually carries Type II any more, and Radio Shack only carries the store brand. Type II is the only kind I find acceptable for recording music. I’d like to stock up on two or three dozen Type II audiocassettes before they become impossible to find anywhere. I’d also like to know that more are easily available if I want them.

Name brands like Maxell and Sony can still be purchased over the Internet, but I’d prefer as a matter of convenience to be able to buy them locally.

So, has anybody out there had any experience with Radio Shack Type II cassettes? Are they lousy, mediocre, superb? Did they bomb right out the wrapper, or did they last for twenty years?

Use a scale of 0 to 10***, and thank you very much for your input!

*God, my age is really showing!

**I’m an outlaw, no lectures about copyright violation please.

*** Zero means you hated the tapes so much you’d like to have a baseball bat and ten minutes alone with the guy who sold them to you. Ten means you loved 'em so much you want to invite the guy home for dinner with your mom and dad.

2

It’s been a long time since I’ve bought a Radio Shack tape. The reason why I stopped buying them is that they sucked (IMHO). The quality of their tapes was really inferior compared to other brands, and in my experience they didn’t last as long either. Unless they made some dramatic improvements in quality in the past 10 years, I would avoid them like the plague.

Keep in mind that audio tapes age. Your music is decaying and will continue to decay. Anything you don’t convert to digital you risk losing forever.

3

Or, at the very least, rerecord on new media.

IME, Radio Shack tapes haven’t been too bad in the past ten years but if you’ve got stuff you really want to keep and play at the best possible quaility, you’re better off with a higher-end major brand tape like Maxell or Memorex.

4

I googled "‘Brand Name’ cassette blank ‘Type II’ and found tapeworld.com to have the easiest interface for choosing which brand name you want.