#5 of 30. This series is a bit like a mixtape. What goes before and after what is of utter importance. Each mixtape I made was like a story, a soundtrack to my bus journey. I had to get it just right. I still have some of my favourite mixes, and they are perfect to this day. I still half expect some songs, when listening to them on CD or wherever, to cut off just at that point in the riff, just like they do on the tape. Getting the song to begin on the right part of the cassette too, that was a trick. Don’t start recording when it’s that little plastic strip before the tape starts. I used to record from old vinyl at first, big headphones on, the scratchy sound really coming through. From time to time it would be tape to tape, with one of those twin tape decks nobody has any more (I never owned albums on cassette, though – how uncool and against the point! – but I would often tape songs from mixtapes people gave me, oh such quality). Then of course my mixtapes were recorded from CD, sat around a little portable CD player, piles of CD cases around me, notebook in hand, calculating song run-times and moods. On a mixtape, I tended to listen to it all, not just skip through to the songs I knew (like on a mix-CD), so it would have to be done right. Even the decoration of the cassette itself, right down to the writing on the case, had to be just so. Sometimes I would make sure there were just as many songs on each side as would fit on those little lined covers, so you wouldn’t have to look inside the case for the last song. I was a perfectionist.
It seems incredible that the mixtape is now a nostalgia item.
petescully 
I still have a dual tape deck on my stereo. But then my stereo is now about 17 years old. It also has a tape stuck in each deck (a head cleaner in the left, Tranvision Vamp’s Velveteen in the right).
Compilation CDs just don’t feel the same. There are three that I’m currently not getting round to doing for people. They feel like a lot of effort in comparison to a mix tape, despite being far, far more straightforward. But I feel estranged from the procedure, trying to sequence songs without having listened to them all the way through, just skipping to the last 15 seconds of the track and getting impatient when I should be listening to them all the way through to get a real feel for what I’m doing.
I love what you’ve done with the meme, just five entries in and this already looks like something that deserves to be published one day.
i agree, you really miss out not listening to the songs all the way though as you’re making the compilation, you not only miss out on the ‘journey’ but the compilation often doesn’t sound as good. There’s something rewarding about devoting a chunk of time to something like that.