How-to Make A Mix-Tape

A mix-tape is (or was) more than just a portable vessel to transport and play your favorite music-- a properly done mix-tape is a work of art. I still think John Cusack explained it best in the movie, High Fidelity:

"To me, making a tape is like writing a letter - there's a lot of erasing and rethinking and starting again. A good compilation tape, like breaking up, is hard to do. You've got to kick off with a corker, to hold the attention (I started with "Got to Get You Off My Mind", but then realized that she might not get any further than track one, side one if I delivered what she wanted straightaway, so I buried it in the middle of side two), and then you've got to up it a notch, or cool it a notch, and you can't have white music and black music together, unless the white music sounds like black music, and you can't have two tracks by the same artist side by side, unless you've done the whole thing in pairs and...oh, there are loads of rules."
-from Nick Hornsby's, High Fidelity