Well I guess there is one thing I miss...the look of fear and horror on clients' faces when I spliced the 24 track or did window splices.

No , I can't say that I miss anything about tape ...
 
I was very glad to have come up in that era ...
it certainly makes me appreciate  what I have today as far as what can be done at home with the tools I currently have now ...
 
 
Kenny
 

bitflipper
It felt like more of an exclusive club when you had to lay out serious money and then actually learn stuff in order to make a record. It wasn't easy. You had to have confidence to hold a razor blade in your hand, ready to perform surgery on your hard work and knowing that you could be about to destroy many hours of effort. No un-do key. There was a certain satisfaction in holding your work in your hands, gently threading the deck, cleaning the capstan, calibrating the bias oscillator, rocking the reels to find the punch-in point. Coming home with a fresh new 10-inch reel of tape and imagining what wonderful things you were going to do with it.
 
Then again, I used to repair my own appliances and work on my own car and drove a VW bus with no heat. If I wanted to learn something I had to go to a library or a bookstore. When I was away from home/office nobody could get hold of me until I returned. I could only pack around a music collection in the trunk of my car, not my shirt pocket. 
 
So yeah, I am nostalgic about many things, but would not voluntarily return to most of them.

Great reply......made me laugh out loud. Nice one!
 
And no, don't miss tape in the least!

I'm looking ahead to when I can simply plug a small wire, or wireless xmitter into the back of my head and relay a finished song, as heard in my head, directly to a computer or the cloud. Not in real time either.
 
Making music will no longer take any effort, or be much fun, I s'pect.
 
But to be honest, I miss the old wax drums. You got one chance to get everything right and it still sounded like.... well.... a wax drum. Apparently there ARE people who miss it. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WVTMPbMrU_0
 

bitflipper
 
 When I was away from home/office nobody could get hold of me until I returned.
 
 
So yeah, I am nostalgic about many things, but would not voluntarily return to most of them.

I'd take that one right now !
 
As for the OP - Sonar is beyond my wildest dreams of what I thought I could one day have at my disposal, so a big NO.

I can't think of a single thing I preferred about working with tape. Although I can, at times, wax nostalgic about that era in general, comparatively, working with tape was a right PITA.
 
Regards, 

The only thing I do miss is commitment.  We all the options do forever be able to EDIT and TWEAK, I find that every project that isn't perfect, I now have the ability to FIX when I notice something.  With tape is was always too late to re-record... this becomes worse with VSTi's where you can easily change the snare or the velocity of ONE tom hit, etc.
 
So, I don't miss tape but need to learn to move on with decisions made on a DAW.
 
Jim

While I don't miss the age of tape, I do bless the years I spent amassing the knowledge and experience of that time. I still use some of the old school tricks to this day. I try to stay in the school of thought that even though the capturing process has changed the end result should be the same. At the end of the day, how good was the song and was that really the best take we could get.
I know the older crowd of which I am one often thinks, " If I had these tools when I was 14,..................".

I think that those of us who came of age in the world of tape have a deep appreciation for the incredible horsepower we have these days, whereas my son has NO CONCEPT of what a 'cassette' is.
 
I would say that the ONE thing about that whole era I TRULY miss with all my heart and soul is 'Album Art'.  I spent MANY evenings lost under the headphones while quite stoned, staring deeply into the beautiful imagery of Roger Dean and listening to Yes or Jon Anderson's Olias of Sunhillow.
 
Now, all you get is a mug shot of a snarky, smirking, Justin Doodoo.
 
Bob Bone
 

I miss making tape delays....Thats about it really.