If you’re of a certain age—i.e. you were into music before the advent of MP3s and CD burners—you probably spent an unhealthy amount of time making mix tapes. This involved carefully selecting which songs from which records should go in what order so you could listen in the car and later, in your Walkman.
Making a mix tape was a labour of love because it everything had to be done in real time. There was none of this dragging-and-dropping stuff and instant syncing of devices. Making a 60 minute mix tape actually took MORE than 60 minutes because there was all that time spent cuing up records and then re-sleeving them.
One of the biggest debates mix tape aficionados had was which tape manufacture and which tape formulation was best. One of my buddies swore by Maxell’s Gold UDXL II, but I always found them to be muddy sounding. Me? Nothing but TDK’s SA series.
If any of this sounds remotely familiar, you MUST check out Tapedeck.org, a great photographic archive of blank cassette tapes. As someone who almost never taped over a mix tape once it was done—and I think I still have most of them in the basement somewhere—I got lost in this site for about an hour. Brilliant.