[saltcured]

I did record a lot of my vinyl and CDs to cassette tape for portable and car use. I remember many public transit rides with my walkman and a zipper case of 10 tapes or so. I made some mix tapes but mostly just ran albums straight through on 90 minute metal tapes, repeating or cutting a track as needed to fill the 45 minute side and make auto-reverse pleasant without any winding.

But, ignoring mix tapes, I didn't really get into track-level shuffling until the MP3 era where I could shuffle a much bigger pile of tracks. I do remember that a Sony 5-disc carousel could shuffle tracks reasonably quickly. But when I used players with a 6 or 10 disc cassette, track shuffle would mean spending a lot of time listening to servo motors and occasionally disturbing clunks that evoked visions of shattered or gouged discs.

I never had one of those massive jukebox style carousels that was sort of a hybrid of the two and could quickly switch among scores or hundreds of discs. By the time I saw those as affordable, they already seemed obsolete. Instead, I was ripping my CDs to MP3 (eventually repeated to FLAC), and had a USB to S/PDIF soundcard to send audio back to my A/V receiver over optical fiber.