Ha I do miss the whole "mix tapes" thing but my god the excitement and anticipation I had when CDs and CD players came along, to be able to play Track 6 by just... pressing the "6" button. Or a tap or two with the remote: "next"!
No more rewinding/forwarding, remember counter numbers for tracks (0 -> 999).
Just an amazing step up in UI but looking back "you had to be there" :-)
Now though I just have about 600 CDs gathering dust on shelves, each one with memories from a time and place through the 80s, 90s and 00s, it's quite sad.
You did get adept at looking at a record to figure out where the songs were based on the record track "texture". (our high school had a radio station, and records being the music mode at the time). To cue up the next song, we'd play the record into the song, take the payer "out of gear" and manually spin the record backwards while listening till we hit blank. We did this part off the air (most of the time..)
We had this wierd cassette player boombox. It had 2 ff and rewinds, one of which would disable the pinch rollers, pull the tape head back a bit and fast forward the tape listening for blank areas, where upon it would stop. It worked but I'm guessing the wear and tear on the tapes must have been bad. Though we didn't notice.
Why quite sad ? There's nothing like crawling a collection of physical records or books and remind "Oh, I remember when I used to listen to this like crazy" and being able to simply put the record in a player and listen it"
That kind of serendipity is just not possible with digital collections, especially when records get deletted from services without notices, or you have to browse deep in a .mp3 collection you afforded not to lose by not backing it up.
It's nice to have those memories, for sure, but my CDs themselves get completely neglected nowadays - between mp3 rips, and streaming services conveniently tying in with my main hifi setup, the CDs just don't see active service any more. And my kids sure aren't interested :-D
I used to love exploring friends' music collections, seeing where tastes overlap. "Everyone has everything via Spotify" completely eliminates this. And I don't see us going back in any substantially wider sense, the genie's out of the bottle. Ah the march of progress, eh...
No more rewinding/forwarding, remember counter numbers for tracks (0 -> 999).
Just an amazing step up in UI but looking back "you had to be there" :-)
Now though I just have about 600 CDs gathering dust on shelves, each one with memories from a time and place through the 80s, 90s and 00s, it's quite sad.