Mourning the lost art of making a mix tape

My boyfriend and I, like most couples, have songs that they claim are theirs in some way, that they have some emotional ownership of or that branded a moment like a time stamp, or at the very least they should rightly have shares in for volume of airplay.

I have a vague mental compilation of tunes from our 2 year relationship. We have very similar music loves (although he has a thing for Avril Lavigne and will not indulge my musical fetish) .

However there aren't many songs that we both unite in placing in the hallowed position of 'best song on the album' (him preferring intelligent and complicated drum beats, me hankering after poignant, beautiful lyrics or at least a catchy tune that I can attempt to sing along to, even if this involves me swapping octaves or bellowing at the depths of my range - I rarely opt for aiming for the high notes - but, as a rule, Eddie Vedder is usually a good all-rounder for my masculine vocal chords and I can get nearly all Dave Grohl's notes as well on a good day).

When we find such a beauty, we will play it to excess and grin through the entirety and, by default, gets added to the list.

So I toyed with the idea of making him a mix CD, turning over in my mind all the songs that might be granted the esteemed glory of featuring on such a compilation and, just as importantly, their playlist order.

I imagined him, in some romantic notion that seemed more like an uncomfortable seventh series of a tired American sitcom that really should have been axed (where the writers, frustrated with recycling poor jokes and awkward embarassing moments, have opted for emotional drama instead) rather than a poignant moment in a beautiful love story, taking to the skies listening to my well crafted emotional musical journey.

And it would make him think of what an idiot he was for leaving his wonderful girlfriend behind.

But, I realised sadly, it was not to be.

Because what did I get him for Christmas?

An ipod.

Genius forward planning for spacial conservation, completely idiotic in terms of emotional real estate.

I can't exactly make him a playlist out of his entire CD collection (which he spent months digitising while I fidgeted around him thinking how insane I had been to buy him a gift that would distract so intensely from my physical presence, even when I was talking to him) and entitle it something poignant and catchy like 'play on the flight when you're leaving Heathrow and think of me'. There's something painfully unromantic about that.

I mentioned this to him a few days ago. He said I could still persevere with my endeavours and he'd play the CD through his laptop once he was settled in his new home.

So I thought about that one. So I'd basically drag and drop the mp3s from various folders on my computer (intelligently titled 'mp3s', 'more mp3s' and 'final mp3s', a naming convention which is overwhelmingly useless and which I deftly apply to all my files and folders, which gives you an indication of the level of sophistication of my filing system and organisational skills), and burn them onto a CD.

So he'd have a CD that he'd have to fire up his laptop to use and play through tinny, piercing speakers rather than using his ipod where the same identical files were sat happily waiting to be played through his ibass, happily mocking their inferior cousins, showing off their beautifully equalized range through the well crafted speakers.

The romance exhudes out of that notion.

After scrapping this obviously doomed plan, I attempted to resurrect it this morning in the form of a mix CD for the car, final driving tunes on the way to the airport.

But then instead, after staring grumpily at a list of mp3s and creativity carefully avoiding me, I just dragged the entire Foo Fighters back catalogue onto a CD.

He seemed just as happy with that.

I remember when I was younger the joy of receiving a well crafted mix tape and then, as technology evolved, a mix CD (I am not alone in my whistful reminiscing - Nick Hornby goes to lengthy discourse on this in High Fidelity I seem to recall). I received such a gift on my 18th birthday, when, with CD burners being a rarety only the rich and geeky had, my friends spent the afternoon at a borrowed PC collating a beautiful collection of songs for me, and an equally lovely cover.

But it was the mix tape, that painstaking creation, sat at the tape player, timing stop-starts (and, for the more experienced of the 'Mixers', utilising the qualities of the pause button to ensure no nasty glitches), making sure no track ended abruptly as the tape snapped to a stop part way through the song (or if it did, sitting there recording silence over the error) that I remember truly fondly. The planning of the song order, the emotional journey that the Mixer would take their listener on.

I am not getting on with modern technology. My boyfriend's ipod frightens me. I'm only allowed to handle his digital camera under supervison and even then I handle it like a faberge egg, terrified that I will damage it just by looking at it.

But I must comply, I guess. I just wish technology liked me the way that I pretend to like it (being a web designer it pretty much goes with the territory that interacting with bytes on a daily basis is pretty essential).

I have 40 minutes left before we drive to the airport. I think I shall go and stand over my boyfriend and pester him asking if he's packed enough underwear.