Do you remember making mix tapes?

wesimmo

wesimmo

wesimmo

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We're (my 2 elder siblings / partners born in the 70s) educating our younger sister and her girlfriend (born in the late 80s) about music from 'our youth's.

We realised that they never really made mix tapes, the angst of trying to get a perfect 90/120 (if you risked tape stretch) minutes of music right because it was an effort to do it.

Even fitting the track list on the inlay card so it could be read was a challenge.

And then trying to find the lyrics for a favourite song and putting them on there if the card folded out.

But I did dig out a few of mine and replicated one on Spotify.

I was a Doc Marten, floppy haired, tie dye T-shirt wearing type in the early 90s.

https://open.spotify.com/playlist/0G2iYzPdiIUobSjkhkSXSv?si=QDy5WnYNTpK-T00jfw49vA

Anybody else still have mixtapes around and fancy sharing them?
 
Tapes??? Pah, mix-minidiscs is where it's at baby! :D

Although there's now generations of kids who will never know the sheer terror of a tape getting caught in the player and having to try and reel it back in with a pencil without stretching or snapping it, or being able to ruin your 10yo sisters Xmas present of a new Kylie album by taping over the corners so you could re-record over a section of her favourite song with just insane maniacal laughter then removing the tape and playing the innocent "hmmm, must be a production issue" when she hears it for the first time. Ok maybe that last ones just me then :D
 
I used to manage an electrical department within a large department store. Next to ours was a Dorothy Perkins and they used to get these great tapes to play filled with the latest chart music and they would lend me the tapes to copy. They were pretty good quality too. This was back when you could buy a decent tape mechanism. Today there is only one type player manufacturer on the market and it's complete crap. No-one makes them any more other than this one company.
 
Loved my minidisc for this, you could record to it then even edit the tracks. I wish I'd had longer with minidisc but MP3 put a stop to that. Hi-md just wasn't the same either like a stepping stone to MP3.
 
Started with tapes then minidisc still have them all including a tonne of brand new unwrapped discs & cassettes, the cassettes are actually still useful for sound recording, minidiscs not so much
 
I was making them way before they were call Mix Tapes, we used to call them cassettes with our favourite songs on.

I never used a Mini Disc for normal music, it was used for backing tracks on stage -

https://www.dmpoole.co.uk/pics/SonyMiniDisk-medium.jpg
SonyMiniDisk-medium.jpg


and then I had two of these for stage use

https://www.dmpoole.co.uk/pics/sonymini.jpg
sonymini.jpg


I still have them all.
 
Sorry for diverting this into a minidisc appreciation thread :D

SexyGreyFox said:
SonyMiniDisk-medium.jpg


and then I had two of these for stage use

sonymini.jpg


I still have them all.
Click to expand...

Somewhere in my loft back in the UK I'm 99% certain I've still got a Sharp 702 and Sharp 722 personal minidisc players, which looked like they had a G-Shock watch strapped to the front, and then an unknown model mid-range separates Sony minidisc player. Absolutely loved minidisc to bits as an upgrade to the previous era of cassettes.

fUpbZOr.jpg


jHL45iP.jpg
 
used to do mix tapes and swap w/ a guy i used to work w/, i got him into Metallica and stuff, he got me into Danzig and Zevon and others. The annoying thing was, he'd do a tape full of assorted metal/rock and i'd settle down to listen through it, only to find he'd secretly slipped in something like Alvin and the chipmunks doing Achey Breaky Heart inbetween some Black Flag and The Misfits >:-|
 
I loved making mix tapes back in the 90’s all my mates had at least one of my tapes in the car. I even bought a posh pioneer twin cassette that could automatically put a gap the right length that the song skip functions of the day worked. I moved to minidisc but more as a replacement for my portable CD player. I don’t know why but nobody ever made mixed cd’s even when we had burners and then MP3 spoiled everything I guess people still make playlists but it’s not the same as a carefully crafted cassette with the track listing squeezed in!
 
my personal mixtapes were for when i was going on holidays to the US. would have a 14hr trip or whatever due to flight connections and the like, so i'd end up going through my albums and making "best of"s so i'd have something to listen to on the plane. Funny to look back on, i'd have the walkman, a spare set of batteries [don't think you can take them on board now] and pockets stuffed w/ cassettes that had taken hours to compile. now i have an MPEG player about the size of a matchbox and a couple hundred full albums on it and a battery life that easily lasts the whole journey.
 
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