I've made hundreds of mix tapes myself, about 50 that were played at Magnolia Cafe South many, many times during the five years I worked there (I started numbering at #11, I think #67 was the last one). I had a lot of fun making them, rewinding the cassette spindle a half-turn by hand at the end of every song to ensure a smoother transition, playing around with 5-10 second sound-bites in primitive sound collages, etc.
Getting my first cd burner a few years later was fun too, but now with multiple iPods, creating mix cds is an increasingly rare occurence.
The Best 90 Minutes of My Life:
Sonic Youth's Thurston Moore expounds on the power of the mix tape, from cassettes blasting through boomboxes to celebrity iTunes playlists. From Wired magazine.
