Recording songs from the radio to cassette tape

Recording songs from the radio onto tape was an artform. Here were some of the tricks I remember employing:

• Visually inspect the tape to see how much tape was remaining on that side -- if you remembered which side went to which side of the tape, and if you remembered the formula to gauge tape fullness based on thickness; because the more full the tape, the less time an eighth of an inch of tape would give you.
• Make sure there was no interference. If this meant you had to grab the antenna in one hand and touch the window frame with the other, that's what you did. The second worst thing that can happen during a recording, after running out of tape, is losing the signal.
• Make sure you always rewind past the false starts. There's nothing worse than a tape with a half-dozen false starts. You could always edit out the junk by dubbing the songs to another tape, but you get a lot of hiss added to the song when you do that.
• Learn to deal with the fact that your favorite song is now inexorably linked in your memory with your least favorite song because of the DJ's arbitrary playlist order.
• Don't forget to use the little pieces of lined paper that came with the cassette to list what's on the tape.
• Avoid using the fast forward where you can hear the tape as it fast forwards. It severely shortens the lifespan of the tape, causing it to gather hiss like a magnet.
• The most obvious tip, don't forget to stop the tape once the song has ended. This prevents songs, appearing later on in the tape, that you wanted to dub to another tape from being recorded over..
• The number one most important tip.. don't subject your tape recorder to other people's filthy tapes. You know the kind. Tapes that appear as if they've been dropped in the dirt. You just know they'll somehow fuck up your tapedeck and curse it in such a way where your perfectly pristine tapes will no longer work properly. Kind of like how your Nintendo went bad the second you put someone else's game in it.