CHAT PERMITTED but I don't want to know about Spotify playlists or anything like that. I'll tolerate chat about CDs, but really this is all about the cassette mixtape.

I used to bloody love making a mixtape:

FORMAT: C90. Always C90. You could usually fit about 46m30s on each side of a C90.
TECHNIQUE: My best mixtapes were made by pre-recording a side's worth of music onto a Minidisc and then copying the lot across from playback. That way, you could chop around with the order, take out unnecessary silences and so on. You could even make little cut-and-paste intros from snippets of other music
RULES: Never more than one song per artist per C90. No other rules
WOOING: I made "A Tape For [mrs ccb]" a couple of months before we started going out. Made the cover out of a little collage of lettering / images from a copy of The Face; painted the tape silver. It went down a treat.