i got into making mixtapes VERY recently and the process is pretty straightforward but it confused me a lot. i'm young so the idea of making tapes was fun and all, but i never really understood the logistics of recording music onto a tape, and the guides i found online seemed to assume you knew on some level how tapes work. i still don't really know how tapes work but here's how i stumbled my way into having five mixtapes at the time of writing that i made in like a couple days.

• blank tape: you can get deadstock blank tapes pretty easily online, especially if you go secondhand like on facebook marketplace or mercari and find people offloading blank tapes in bulk for real cheap because no one cares about tapes. or you can get them off amazon like i did but it'll cost more and i regret it since seeing the secondhand prices lol. the kind of tape matters only with regards to how much music you're putting on i guess, i mean there's probably more to it but for most purposes you just have to think about how much you're putting on a tape and swing for 60 minutes or 90 minutes. my tapes are all on the short side but i went with 90 minute tapes because it wasn't much more and it's just nicer to have the option.
• some device to play your music from: you can use like a computer or your phone or something for this but personally i had a lot of issues trying to get it to record from my computer, so i just throw my playlists on my music player/dap (a fiio x1 ii) and then play from there. more details on how to get the music and what to use to connect the details is coming up just keep reading!
• 3.5mm to 3.5mm cord: i somehow had one already laying around that's like several feet long but you can probably get a decent sized one for cheap off amazon or something. you need this to connect your two devices, the source of the music and the tape recorder.
• cassette recorder: my player doubles as a recorder so i don't have to worry about getting a separate device. it's a jensen MCR-75 that i got for $30 off amazon. most cassette nerds would scoff at this and say to get a better quality player but i don't have $150 to throw at a refurbished walkman, and even if i did, it's not like i use tapes often enough to have a reason to throw that kind of money at an old player/recorder. you CAN get a recorder that doesn't also work as a player but like if you wanna save money then something like the jensen i have will do the job.

so before we get into the actual recording, even after you have all the supplies, there's some shit we gotta get out of the way. first is explaining how the recording shit works. this is a little convoluted so i'll try to summarize in bullet points and keep it short:

1. that cord from before? connect it to the “mic” or “line in” port of your cassette recorder. it's either mic or line in. my player has it as mic. this is how it records onto the tape: the mic port essentially functions as the “listening” part of the recorder, and without a cord, it'll either record nothing, or if the recorder has a built in mic, it'll pick up on sounds around it.
2. next, connect the other side of the cord to the headphone jack of your computer, phone, music player, whatever device you're using. if you have a PC, you can connect it directly to the back where the sound card ports are, just make sure you connect it to the proper headphones port - if not labeled, it's traditionally colored green.

i don't really know how this all works tech-wise, nor do i fully understand it - all i know is that this shit works the way i do it so that's how i'm writing about it. it gets a lot more confusing and stupid if you look it up and i don't even know the difference between line in and headphones or whatever the fuck but does it matter? kind of yeah but i got this to work without fully understanding so whatever

next: your music! your playlist/mixtape/whatever! you gotta predetermine the songs you want and how to organize them to fit on the tape. there's a couple things to worry about here: the length of the tape, and the two different sides. the sides will split the duration of the tape: in other words, on a 60 minute tape, side A and B are 30 minutes each. on a 90 minute tape, side A and B are about 45 minutes each. you have to organize your playlist into two sides, and make sure that the songs for each side do not exceed the duration limits of the tape. this is generally not something i worry about because my mixes are usually small (the way of 8tracks dot com baby, 8-10 tracks total is how i do it!), but if you're putting long playlists to tape, you definitely have to do some math to make sure the tracks will fit.

when it comes to the music itself, since essentially all you're doing is recording from the sound output of your device, you can get it from anywhere. you can record from a streaming service, youtube, whatever, if you want. i personally collect digital music (piracy and buying but mostly piracy) and am deeply, abnormally committed to keeping my library organized, so typically, i will write down and organize my planned playlist, take the music files and copy them from their albums into a new folder, order the tracks, then split them into two folders for both sides. after that, i'll transfer the playlist folder to my music player, and begin recording.