Ancient
I had an AM radio I listened to while delivering papers

A Magnevox tv/radio/record player, with glowing tubes. You could stack up a few records

8 track tapes were an infinite loop abomination. 4 loops of 2 channels = 8 tracks. I had a friend with a quad 8 track, 2 loops of 4 channels. the tapes started to drag after some plays, requiring various gymnastics to keep them playing. Recording at home was rare. Cost more than vinyl, lower sound quality. Let the enshittification of music begin

Cassettes Had their own weirdness, pre recorded cassettes had crap tape, crap shells & higher costs. Pre recorded tapes shed the magnetic coating & dirtied up the player which would eat your tapes.
Quality blank tapes cost about 1/4 of what an LP cost.

Moving into the cd age I stuck with cassettes, as that’s what worked in my car/trucks. cd’s got recorded. my favorite technique was 3 albums on a 90 minute tape, cutting out the annoying songs.

I got a computer in 2005 started making LP’s & cassettes into mp3’s. I pretty much try to keep the files under 5 minutes
I still have a bunch of files without proper song titles as I got bored after artist, album, year. Itunes was my go to importing cd’s. Later I found out any of the metadata I changed was in a changlog or some shyt, not the actual files, there was very little rejoicing…