Today begins a series of posts I’ve been teasing and planning for a long, long time.

It’s strange that in 2022, vinyl records are actually pretty common, but the primary audio format of my youth – cassette tapes – are almost completely extinct. I’ve never been the music buff that many of my friends were, but I had a pile of mix tapes1 from over the years that were completely useless to me.

I had the chance, years ago, to borrow a cassette deck, hook it up to my Mac, and digitize these tapes. But it was hardly professional gear, and I’m definitely no audio engineer. I did my best to clean those recordings up, but they’re not really convenient (or legally sharable). So while I was compiling streaming playlists for myself, I decided it might also be fun to share those, and some of the stories behind the tapes.

One positive effect of how long it’s taken me to do this is that a bunch of stuff (like Tool!) is now streamable that wasn’t just a few years ago.

Here’s a list of the posts in this series (which I’ll update as more go up in the future):

  1. Remember when that’s literally what that meant? Kids, ask your parents. Or maybe go watch High Fidelity. ↩