Looking for the perfect mix - Pt. 1

Is there such as thing as a perfect mix? Is it ever exactly right? Does it even matter now in the era of iPod playlists and the ability to instantly shuffle a group of songs? I've been making mixtapes for decades and this hobby has always been one of my favorite ways to relax. Sometimes I just throw things together but more often I am looking for that perfect mix. I've made hundreds of mixes over the years and I doubt there are very many, if any, perfect mixes scattered among the boxes of tapes stored up on the third floor. The method of creating mixes has drastically changed over the years. I would even venture to say that my very first mixes were really carefully selected stacks of 45 rpm singles playing on a record changer for parties in the 60s. Here is a link to an old 60s mix based on my stacks of 45s. The mixtape really began in the 70s with the coming of cassette tapes. They gave us the ability to pick songs from a vinyl album and record them out of context on a cassette tape. The cassette player in a car was a driving force to take your music on the road with you especially when commercial radio started fragmenting in the 70s. It was the late 70s that I really began mixing with a passion and really looking for that perfect mix. I would sit by the stereo with a stack of LPs carefully recording songs on that cassette tape. It was important to get those sound levels right and constructing the segues. I had many drawers full of tapes I made throughout the 80s and eventually added CDs to the mix. I worked in a bar playing records for about five years during the early to middle 80s and sometimes I recorded sets of music which made for interesting listening later on. I think the experience of spinning records for people in a public setting helped develop what works and what doesn't work in the selecting of songs for people. I was lucky in that the place I worked didn't require me to always be looking for ways to get people on the dance floor. Sometimes that was the case but most often I was just entertaining people with my selections. 

However, the primary reason for me to make mixes was to entertain myself both in the act of creating the mix and to play it back later. It was a hobby. I often also made mixes for other people whether for them personally or to play at parties and weddings. I've always hated playing the radio in the car and have always tried to have some mixtapes in the car. That has always been especially important for long trips. So for a long time I created mixes in one or two sittings. I'd grab a pile of source material and sit there arranging the songs in a way that made sense to me. The pile of records gradually turned into a pile of CDs through the 90s. I've had personal computers since about 1984 but my computer suddenly became an important tool in my mix making in the early 00s when I got a CD burner. Now I had the option of making mixes directly to CD. Wow. I quickly moved to that process but it did have pitfalls. It took up lots of space to have music on your hard drive back then. Hard drives were just not big enough. At the start of my computer use for mix making I could only make one mix at a time because of space restraints. I would copy the songs to the hard drive, make the mix, burn the CD and then delete the songs so I could do it again. Eventually I got larger and larger hard drives and I started keeping more and more music on my computer. I got an iTunes to organize the music and eventually got an iPod too. A big one. Throughout the 00's I put more music on my computer and if fact have been trying to put all my music on the computer. A daunting and time consuming job but most of it is there now. My latest upgrade included a multiple terabyte hard drive and multiple terabyte external drive for backup. That's a lot of space but only if I slow down my accumulation of music. That extra space and all those songs residing on my computer has meant that I can make more than one mix at a time. In fact my iTunes capability to create playlists means that I have an unlimited ability to make an infinite number of ongoing mixes. That overwhelming capacity has actually slowed me down considerably. I have too many mixes going and my time is often spent bouncing around between various mixes as I strive for that perfect mix. After all that... sometimes making a perfect mix is not what I'm trying to do. Sometimes I'm just throwing together a bunch of songs to fill up some space; to put on a disc for listening to in the car. So sometimes some sort of collection of songs evolve over time and I burn the disc several times before I get it right. I'm still searching for that perfect mix...