The Scope

Kerri Breen shows you how to make mixtapes directly from your computer.

Want to indulge in a little analog nostalgia? Make your lover a mixed tape? (That you didn’t have to waste a CD-R to make.)

Follow these easy steps to build my mildly anachronistic but totally fun mixtape-maker that allows you record to cassette from a computer.

Like stuff you see in infomercials, my “tape burner” is based on cutting edge, space age technology. Or conversely, ancient wisdom kept secret for years and not available in stores.

I’m bluffing—here’s how it actually came about.

Let’s just say I didn’t have the most technologically forward family. One of my first CDs was Dance Mix 95 and we never got a VCR until DVDs were ubiquitous. When we finally got a computer that could tolerate the Internet, I was old enough to get married in some parts of the world.

I was 17, and I wanted to do the kinds of things 17 year-old girls assume scientists made the Internet precisely for: ICQ and WINAMP. Of course, with a one-gigabyte hard drive I couldn’t really download, but I could stream.

With no CD burner, I couldn’t take all my totally awesome (read: not at all awesome) music outside of the confines of my parents’ dingy, unfinished basement—until, of course, I invented the tape burner.

By cleverly combining easily acquirable stuff— the tape burner is not actually a machine—I found a way to record music from my computer onto a cassette tape without recording it live off the floor.

What you’ll need
■ A computer (it doesn’t even have to be a shitty one)
■ A double tape deck with a record function
■ One of those MP3 player car hookup cassettes
■ A cassette
■ Nostalgia
■ Naysayers

Setting up the tape burner
Okay, so you’ve got everything around you—including those pesky naysayers who think this project is dumb. Perfect. You’re halfway there.

Step one: Make a playlist. Some of the music has to be schmaltzy crap you enjoyed as a frightened, pimply teenager or else the mystical tape burner technology just won’t work.

For extra cred, I recommend making it on Winamp. (iTunes doesn’t have a touching Wesley Willis-inspired tagline.)

Connect the car hookup tape to the headphone jack of your computer speakers. Set up your tape deck next to your computer. Then put your car tape in the ‘play’ tape slot, and your real cassette in the ‘play-record’ part of the deck.

Press play on your car tape and play-record on the real tape. Then, while trying to take yourself seriously, press play on WINAMP and listen your digital selections as they morph into the perfect mixed collection.

This might be the part where a naysayer interjects: Why are you even doing this? Does anyone even listen to tapes anymore?

She’s partially blocked you into a corner there, but don’t fret. Sheepishly mumble something about postmodernism.

Seriously though. The tape burner is cool because well, it’s a technology that builds on technology you probably already have. How often do you get to do-it-yourself in the world of electronics?

And though cassettes don’t compare to CDs when it comes to sound quality, there are circumstances where you’d die for a decent mixtape – like a road trip in an older car, for example.

Plus, the tape is fully functional—well, mostly.

I still have the first tape I made with it. Because my archaic computer couldn’t really handle Winamp at the time, the songs sort of… well… skipped like a CD sometimes, and that’s reflected in the tape. I guess you could call it character.

Illustration by Kira Sheppard.

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