While Keller is correct that, strictly speaking, few mix tapes are made anymore, that mere technicality is the only point he gets right. (Doesn't Salon have editors?)

Let's start at the beginning: It's all well and good to invoke the hallowed name of Hornby when talking about the mix, but we need to be clear. Nick Hornby, in "High Fidelity," described a small and obsessive subculture with the same love and attention that David Halberstam gave to amateur rowing in "The Amateurs" or Jon Krakauer gave to hard-core mountain climbers in ""Into Thin Air." He never meant to universalize the experience or to claim that everyone must and should care that, for example, Stevie Ray Vaughn's "Crossfire" can't sit next to Funkadelic's "Maggot Brain" in a mix because the keys the songs are in clash harmonically. It's all voluntary.

That's not to say the old days weren't great. I too have fond memories of sitting in a sea of recordings in front of a tape deck, working and reworking the running order and tweaking levels. However, doey eyed nostalgia for those days comes off the same as pining for the days before good software when you had to laboriously program your own very data-sorting functions on the Apple II ("In my day, a bubble sort took hours! And we liked it!). But we don't have to do it that way anymore unless we choose to.

Why conflate cds with just dumping music wherever it lands? Has Joel Keller never heard of Toast? Roxio Easy CD Platinum? Please! Life is better now that I can change and preview running orders on the fly. What took hours now takes... fewer hours.

Moreover, the CD is a much better avenue for a mix than the tape ever was. Despite the demise of the "side" as a concept (a damned shame), the 4 1/2'' square on the front of the cd case is a blank canvas, begging for original cover art. 80-minute cd's are easier to program than a 90-minute tape, and are not as prone to breakage under normal conditions as long tapes used to be. Hiss is reduced. Tape players are relatively rare nowadays. Finally, and I can't stress this enough, the ability of audio software to crossfade has revolutionized the art of the personal compilation.

The culture is still alive and well, and unkillable. If Joel Keller can't be bothered to crossfade, set levels, do a demo test-run to check the running order, edit for length, or even make sure that he hasn't put the Cure next to Joy Division (unless it's part of a whole series of mopey UK postpunk!), it's his fault. My wife hates it when I retreat into the office with an armful of cd's and an idea: it means I'll be in there for days, ordering and reordering my mix, dropping songs in and out, cutting one down to just the chorus, doing ad-hoc remixes, and trying my best to fill up 80 minutes with a mix that not only flows from one song to another but also has episodes (sides!), a thesis, and an overarching theme.