I too used to make selection tapes, hundreds of 'em. In fact, once I got into an artist I'd make a best of or even series of best of their music. Used to use different coloured pens, make up little covers and everything. Very therapeutic.
However...
LOTS of cons. If you ****ed up a tape you were either going to have to do it all over again, or hope that the original mix didn't peek out at the end once you'd recorded over it. Who remembers hearing the last few milliseconds of a guitar fadeout or a drumroll, or a snatch of fading vocal when the tape was supposed to be over?
Plus, you had that little bit at the beginning, the leader tape, that you had to spool on with your finger to get past, and if you didn't then your carefully-planned opening track just jumped into life, like a record when you dropped the needle in the wrong place? Man that was annoying, though you got used to it.
Then of course there were dropouts (for anyone not understanding any of these terms, or born after 1980, here's a guide
http://www.musicbanter.com/members-j...ml#post1087614), tape tangling, tapes getting stood on, accidental erasure, the many blank and caseless tapes which we all had and wondered what was on them but were too lazy to find out, having to turn the tape over at the end of side A, and if you didn't have an auto-reverse deck, having to spool forward or back to get to the music on the second side, and the eternal ritual of "holding down the play and record key with the pause key ready to let the pause key up as SOON as the music starts OH **** I MISSED IT TRY AGAIN!"
Other than that, cassettes were fine. Oh yeah, and the crappy sound reproduction, no matter how good your deck was. Unless you used metal tapes, and man were they expensive!
Never used an eight-track though, I have to say...