Only we didn’t call it that here in India. You could go to the neighbourhood cassette store, give them a list of songs and a blank tape, and they would record your selection for a small fee that was no patch on the cost of the original. Often your list would be a curation that drew from multiple albums. No problem.
Lovely, evocative reflection on the mixtape, Usha. I like your musical taste too - my era! As for cassettes, I have mixed feelings: bad memories of tapes unspooling and becoming tangled and useless, or perhaps salvaged by frantic rotating of the cassette head with a biro. Seems strange now, in a digital world of 'perfect' sound, but in the '80s and '90s I used TDK cassettes professionally at ABC Radio National in Australia to record interviews and oral histories as the basis for radio documentaries. Years later, we discovered that those interviews, archived at the National Library of Australia and intended for posterity, were often damaged by 'print through' - a kind of leaking of the magnetic tape. Some, happily, were digitised in time. But yes, cassettes were certainly more portable than the old reel-to-reels and the back-breaking Nagra!
Enjoyed reading these reflections very much !!
Lovely, evocative reflection on the mixtape, Usha. I like your musical taste too - my era! As for cassettes, I have mixed feelings: bad memories of tapes unspooling and becoming tangled and useless, or perhaps salvaged by frantic rotating of the cassette head with a biro. Seems strange now, in a digital world of 'perfect' sound, but in the '80s and '90s I used TDK cassettes professionally at ABC Radio National in Australia to record interviews and oral histories as the basis for radio documentaries. Years later, we discovered that those interviews, archived at the National Library of Australia and intended for posterity, were often damaged by 'print through' - a kind of leaking of the magnetic tape. Some, happily, were digitised in time. But yes, cassettes were certainly more portable than the old reel-to-reels and the back-breaking Nagra!