Master tapes are good... in fact they are very, very good, but they are also a royal pain in the ass.

You don't take any freedom with them... you rewind them, you play them from the very beginning to the very end, without stopping in the middle. And you simply can't randomly play the song #5 should you want to listen to just that one.

And what about when you friend visits you and you want to play something you really, truly like? Just searching for the beginning of a song can be frustrating.

So I decided to build a small collection of my favorite songs in singles format. I bought a bunch of 5" reels - big enough to store about 9 minutes of tape at 15ips - enough to most songs, and I let my trusty Ampexes do the trick. These tapes can be played on any of my many machines, including this tiny Stella.

Going from tape to tape I already made several nice singles, and here is one of them.