Back in high school I had a job, I was the attendant at a little gas station, the only times we were really ever busy was on holiday weekends, during the summer, and during the winter. I lived in a little small mountain town that people would only come up to go to the lake, or to go to the ski resorts. In the little booth I sat in there wasn't much to do other than
A.) Homework
B.) Read
C.) Listen To Music
D.) Play Gameboy
and all four of these things would be what I would use to pass the time.
Now when it came to music for the first few years working there we only had a beat up stereo which could play cassettes, play the few radio stations it could pick up, and sometimes it would play cds. So basically my normal choice was to play cassette tapes, mostly mixtapes that I had made for my moms car. A little ways down we get a new stereo that can play cds, my boss ended up getting a wire to hook up his ipod to the stereo and a few months later I bought myself an ipod too.
As time went on Mixtapes began to die out for me. There would be an occasional tape or two that I would make for a friend, but I was mostly making cds or listening to my ipod. It wasn't until I graduated high school and moved out of my parents house that I got more interested in making Mixtapes again. There were different factors about making tapes that I liked more that making a cd, such as it seeming more personal because of all the work that you have to put into it, and the fact that a tape being two sides it can be more like making two separate mixes at times.
Recently, after four years of hard work, the harddrive on my ipod decided to take its eternal nap. Instead of shelling out a couple hundred for a new one I found myself in Target spending 10 bucks on a portable cassette player. Since then I have been making more mixes on cassettes for my walkman but have found some things that bother me.
Cassettes typically come in three different lengths: 60 minutes (30 minutes on each side) 90 minutes (45 minutes on each side) and 120 minutes (60 minutes on each side.) While after making mixes on an ipod or a cd you would think that 90 or 120 minute tapes would work best but I find that its much easier for me to make a mix that I am happy with on a 60 minute tape. At times I feel like 45 minutes per side is just adding filler onto the tape. Now this wouldn't be too much of a problem for me if it wasn't so hard to find 60 minute tapes. I don't know if its just me but I seem to have more trouble finding them than I do any other length of cassette tapes. Its a small annoyance that I have learned to live with, all for the sake of enjoying another form of outdated media, because that just seems to be what I do sometimes.
