Mix Tapes

I've got about 100 cassette tapes that I have been hanging on to, not wanting to throw away. I still listen to them--I've got a cassette player in the car. Most of them are not store-bought albums, but mixes made by myself, friends, past boyfriends, etc. I have always loved the mix tape, ever since my sister and I first started taping things off the radio with our boom boxes back in the 1980s.

Each tape reminds me of a different time in my life. There's "Songs From the Vickster" that I taped from my friend Vickie at the end of high school. "Gobat: Stuff from Dave" from my college housemate's CD collection. The first tape I ever made for someone else, with the pretentious title "Premier Pour Quelq'un Autre" (supposed to be "First for someone else" but the French isn't even correct) for Jason. "Tape that proves Steve Winwood wasn't always a waste of DNA" from my college friend Lewis. "Mix Tape that Cathy Never Listens To" from Jamie.

Jason and I exchanged a lot of mixes and even kept it up when CDs came around. Our tradition was to exchange the tape with no song titles so each song would be a surprise. We still do it occasionally but in the day of iPods and MP3s, it doesn't have quite the same feeling as when you'd get a new tape in the mail and slide it into a tape deck, full of anticipation.

Lots of memories... and a lot of great songs. I certainly don't want to re-buy them all from iTunes. So, Chris bought me a great gift: a device you can hook up between a tape deck and your computer, plus software that records it and does a first pass at splitting them into individual songs.

I tried it out yesterday. It works quite well, but it's still a lot of work to go through each song, trim it, label it, convert it to MP3, etc. I could do one tape a day and it will still take me almost 4 months.

But I hope to do most of them if I can. I get a lot of pleasure for hearing all those old songs again. I'm very nostalgic, what can I say.