Hey look, another post that was vaguely pre teased by the MS Paint post. Mixtapes! Sure, I had CDs when I was making mix tapes, but my old Isuzu Trooper only had a cassette deck. Come to think of it, the Mustang I had after only had a cassette deck too. I had a silly tape adapter to play CDs from a portable player, but still didn’t have a CD burner until much later.
So tapes it was.
I still have some of mine. I even have a tape player to play them on. But I don’t have a proper receiver to plug the tape deck into. I also have all of these great old custom labels that I made up for them, scattered throughout this post.
Most of them are Gunsmith Cats themed, which was an anime I forgot to bring up in the 90s Anime post. Its too bad I am not secretly writing these in the past and could just go back and edit/add GSC to the other post before actually publishing it. No Sailor Moon based covers though, for that you might try searching for a Sailor Moon Fansite. (Side note, I made this stupid meme joke to include it, but also in the folder for these tape covers, was a bunch of vertical Sailor Moon art, presumable the idea 25 years ago, was to use these images for Mixtape covers.)
One kind of funny thing now looking back on these mixtape covers are reoccurring songs. Its like, you can tell which tracks I really liked because I would always try to squeeze them into the rotation.
The source for music here was essentially two places. The radio, and CDs.
Sometimes you would stick a tape in, and just record 60-90 minutes of whatever came on the radio. Then, with a dual cassette deck, like I had at the time, you would record the songs you actually wanted to one unified cassette.
Then there were CDs. During High School, basically, the mid 90s, we had moved to a pretty nice area in Indiana near Indianapolis. The library there was quite large and I could get there by biking across the neighborhood. I went there a lot because they had a ton of CDs you could borrow. I would go and load up and then sometimes record songs to tapes like I would the radio.
They also had movies I think, but I honestly don’t remember getting a lot of movies from the library.
Mix tapes of course eventually turned into MixCDs once I got a CD burner. And now I have thousands, probably tens of thousands of MP3s. I had Spotify for a bit and even made playlists for all these old Mix Tapes, but I have so much music I have bought over the years, I don’t really need or want a music service subscription. I can just, stick it all in VLC on my phone for the ultimate endless MixTape.
