The downside to an MP3 culture is that its pretty solitary. If I want to make a mix for the wife, I have to buy an .mp3 player and just give it to her - or I have to go retro and burn a CD. It's better than the 1990s, when people made cassette mix tapes - but they certainly showed you care. It was no trivial thing.  You can bet if I told my wife today I made a mix tape for another woman, she would be going to get her pistol.

Makerbot has brought them back - but with a modern twist.  You can make it in your house on a 3-D printer.  But it won't work in a cassette player, it is still basically a USB drive.



Obviously not everyone has a 3-D printer.  For those people, they can ship the mix tape drive to you unassembled. It even includes a USB cable to put the music on it. How is that better than just buying an old Creative Labs MP3 player?  It isn't, the 3-D printing is the cool part.