Mixtapes

[Cobra!]

I've recently started a hobby of making mixtapes out of things I enjoy from the internet. Been recording my favourite internet remixes onto cassette tapes for a while. Got a Sony CFD-S70 from a store last year, since I had heard good things about the unit, and have been using it pretty much daily. Every night, I'm always listening to the tapes I made with it on bed while browsing through Gemini, reading things on this forum, or reading magazines! Also use it while I work on my game and other projects.

Also very recently got a Sony SLV-E730 VCR, which has a scart-in, so I started to get blank VHS tapes and been making tapes of my all-time favourite Youtube videos.

Honestly, it feels like a craft, you need to think about what you're going to fit on the tapes, and figuring out when to stop recording and how much blank space to put between songs and videos. Of course, it would be easier to just put them on a CD or DVD, but there's no fun in that for me!

I wasn't around for when gifting each-other mixtapes was a regular thing, but I wish I was!

Anyone else have experience with making audio or video mixtapes? What did you make of it?

[m15o]

That's super interesting, Cobra! What triggered your interest to create your own mixtapes?

There's a gemini capsule I love with great mixtapes:
gemini://konpeito.media/

[Cobra!]

That's super interesting, Cobra! What triggered your interest to create your own mixtapes?

I dunno, I just one day realised I had all of the equipment I needed to make one, so I did!

There's a gemini capsule I love with great mixtapes:
gemini://konpeito.media/

Huh, never seen this before, thanks for introducing it!

[Melooon]

~Moved to music as it seems to fit here more~

I wanted to share a story about mixtapes that might hopefully encourage people to get into mixtapes and physical media more.

In 2017 my grandad passed away and my granny was getting rid of a lot of his stuff, I grabbed a handful of old cassets of his so I could record over them with my own stuff. I did check them before wiping them and most were BBC radio shows from the late 80s, not very interesting. Then during 2020 lockdown I was thinking of making a mixtape of 70s music, so I looked at the cassettes I had and picked one that looked like it had a kind 70s mixtape vibe.

When I check it though, it was not a radio recording, it was a mixtape of songs from around 1972, a great if kinda weird selection, but fun to listen too (70s pop and rock). I was able to copy it to my computer and send it out as an mp3 to family. My mum and uncle and aunt all remembered it being played constantly in the car when they were little kids and had not heard it since.
Now its become a kind of family playlist again, Iv seen it show up on my uncles phone, my mum has a CD version in her car, and who knows maybe Ill end up playing it for my kids someday.

I think its a really lovely way to remember my grandad and it could never have happened without the physical media surviving and me being into retro tech and making mixtapes of my own. So make your mixtapes and look after them! You never know what they will become to someone in the future!

[Cobra!]

Yeah, that's what I'd love one day, a descendant seeing the mixtapes I make after I go and enjoying them like I do now!

I think physical media is very important for that reason. If digital media doesn't get lost to time, it's going to get buried under thousands of similar stuff, and if it doesn't, people are more likely to disregard it or not appreciate it for what it is, but physical is more likely to be discovered well after the fact and appreciated.

[nsequeira119]

I agree 100% with everything you said, physical media is vital for preservation, and if properly mastered and maintained, VHS and compact cassette are the best formats out there for long-term video and audio storage, or just casual consumption. I've been singing the praises of tapes since forever, they're fantastic and if you know what you're doing when recording onto them you can get some awesome effects and spectacular sound quality.

I actually sell my mixtapes, which consist of original songs and compositions I've made. I think 90-minute tapes are especially good for recording my albums onto, plus maybe a little interview or extra snippet of something at the end. I also sell homemade VHS tapes with custom designs on the box and the like. designing a VHS case or a J-card can be a ton of fun. It's my belief that the more I record my media onto tape and spread it around, the more its chance of survival for decades or even centuries. It's kind of like a Cambrian explosion.

I think mixtape composition is an underrated field, to put together a commercially appealing mixtape you have to take into account things like the order of the songs, the length of the gap between songs, bonus features, and a ton of other factors. It can be hard work, but there's nothing more rewarding than holding that nice transparent little case in your hands and popping it into the slot for a listen.

Of course, composing and selling mixtapes requires a little more acumen and familiarity with cassette technology than casually listening, but even then cassettes are super accessible and they're really easy to understand and get the hang of. They're a very comfortable and affordable format, and I've been singing their praises since forever. I hope sometime to get ahold of some blank Type 2 Chrome cassettes, which have even higher sound quality than Type 1 Oxide cassettes. Any day now...

[Memory]

You convinced me to start this hobby now. I'll get my father's old cassette recorder soon and then I'm going to make it my own.

[Memory]

... I set up the deck and all but it ain't working. QwQ
Trying to rewind or play just makes a mechanical grinding noise for a few seconds and it stops.
Friend of mine services hifi and they said it's probably a snapped belt. Ugh.

[Memory]

It's funny seeing tapes and CDs become popular again like vinyl did. These were the obsolete, garbage technologies that were replaced in my lifetime as we went digital, and now they're held up as a classic medium. Not to say anyone is wrong for liking these formats. It's just fascinating watching new generations appreciate what we threw away. I was on one side when my generation appropriated vinyl, and now I get to be on the other side as the old guy wondering why the music store has cassettes on the shelf again.

I was a bit too young for the original mixtape fad, but I did make a couple of my own when I was really young by putting a tape recorder up to the radio and recording whatever songs I liked that came on. The quality was understandably garbage.

I actually made a lot of mix CDs though once I learned that you could use Windows Media Player to burn disks. We even had sticker labels that covered the whole disk and you could run them through a regular printer, so I would make my own album covers with whatever cool artwork I could find on Altavista.

The first CD I ever made had a combination of dance and rock songs from the 90s (like "Blue" by Eiffel 65, "Higher" by Creed and, of course, ":grin:arude - Sandstorm":wink:, as well as songs from the Star Trek Generations, Dragon Ball/Z/GT and Gundam Wing soundtracks. It was a really eclectic mix. I used to listen to it while falling asleep.

I made another CD where every five tracks I would include an audio clip from a Jim Carrey movie (I was a huge fan at the time). So track six was Edward Nigma from Batman Forever saying "Caffeine'll kill ya!", followed by "Around the World" by ATC. And the whole thing ended with his character from The Cable Guy saying "This concludes our broadcast day. Click."

The sappiest thing I ever did was burn a CD with only one song on it, "Talk Show Host" by Radiohead. I listened to it on repeat in my car with the girl I liked at the time because it was on the Romeo + Juliet soundtrack (the one with Leonardo DiCaprio) and earlier when we watched the movie together she told me she really liked that song.

Afterward she told me it was really sweet, but we never ended up going out. She's now married and lives on a ranch.

Nostalgia is weird.

[PurpleHello98]

Personally, I don't have a cassette recorder, so I can't make mixTAPES, per se, but I love making mix CDs out of my iTunes library!

[Cobra!]

Personally, I don't have a cassette recorder, so I can't make mixTAPES, per se, but I love making mix CDs out of my iTunes library!

That's definitely a start!
I feel making Mixtapes is a-whole-nother beast, though. making Mix CDs consist of dragging songs into a playlist and then burning them to CD.
Cassette on the other hand, is an analogue format, so putting a song onto it involved positioning the tape right, and timing the beginning and end of a song right, and making sure the heads are aligned correctly so the song comes out of both speakers as it should. It takes a lot more effort.

Don't get me wrong, though, if someone gave me a Mix CD for my birthday or something, I'd still be excited they went through that effort.

[lulu]

Also very recently got a Sony SLV-E730 VCR, which has a scart-in, so I started to get blank VHS tapes and been making tapes of my all-time favourite Youtube videos.

Honestly, it feels like a craft, you need to think about what you're going to fit on the tapes, and figuring out when to stop recording and how much blank space to put between songs and videos. Of course, it would be easier to just put them on a CD or DVD, but there's no fun in that for me!

About a year late to this, but I didn't know anybody else made VHS mixtapes!! Do you only use videos in 4:3? There are some newer youtube videos I'd like to have on VHS, but I'm worried the letterboxing would break the immersion.

I recently made one that was a (very condensed) parody of a weekend TV broadcast, back in the day when networks played kids content in the morning. I used a combo of youtube videos and old recorded content, like this pingu/analog horror short and some actual commercials... it was done on a whim, to see how far I could get with the tools I had, and.. well it was a nightmare! I definitely need to do some more research on efficiency, haha.

My long-term dream is to do this using completely original material. Create a fake TV talk show and interview my friends/local artists, make fake commercials, bumpers, etc. Like an alternate universe TV station! Then dump some copies in the wild just to confuse whoever picks them up

[Cobra!]

About a year late to this, but I didn't know anybody else made VHS mixtapes!! Do you only use videos in 4:3? There are some newer youtube videos I'd like to have on VHS, but I'm worried the letterboxing would break the immersion.

I don’t, though I tend to prefer it. I just make tapes consisting of videos I like that belong in a group, like YTPs, Gmod or Sonic videos, and the aspect ratio doesn’t matter.

One pet peeve I have are 4:3 videos with hard coded black pillars, but have some content in 16:9. I usually edit those to get rid of the black pillars and letterbox anything that appeared in those pillars.

I recently made one that was a (very condensed) parody of a weekend TV broadcast, back in the day when networks played kids content in the morning. I used a combo of youtube videos and old recorded content, like this pingu/analog horror short and some actual commercials... it was done on a whim, to see how far I could get with the tools I had, and.. well it was a nightmare! I definitely need to do some more research on efficiency, haha.

My long-term dream is to do this using completely original material. Create a fake TV talk show and interview my friends/local artists, make fake commercials, bumpers, etc. Like an alternate universe TV station! Then dump some copies in the wild just to confuse whoever picks them up

Oh that’s a brilliant idea! I have fictional universe I’m building where the UK never formed, and Scotland remained a selected country, I’ve made a game in this universe, but want to expand to other forms of media. I’ve wanted to do a fake broadcast from this universe in the 90s. I don’t think it would ever be financially feasible, even if I were to take existing shows and dubbing them into Scots or Gaelic, but it would be really cool to do.

I could try and do something low budget and record it onto VHS! Thanks for the idea!