muxtape

I like long songs, but As Eliot Van Buskirk over on Listening Post reports, at least two separate writers have come to the conclusion that the perfect song is short. Two minutes and 42 seconds, to be exact--the length of "There She Goes" by The La's.

Personally, I think "La La Love You" by the Pixies (2:43) is closer to the ideal song, but my own collection does reveal a remarkable number of good songs at 2:42. Without further ado, my 2:42 Muxtape.

The Beatles--"Back in the U.S.S.… Read more

Got a Mac and a Muxtape account? You've got to check out this mashup that uses the free Mac application Fluid to let you browse an entire group of people's Muxtapes without having to click on each one. Once you've linked up Fluid to Muxtape.com's front page, you'll see the track listings of each album in the Cover Flow area below the site. Clicking the thumbnail will take you right to the mix, which is far easier than simply clicking on people's mixes from Muxtape's front page and directory.

Setting up Fluid … Read more

Most of us remember mix tapes as those carefully curated cassettes that collected our favorite music together into one 90-minute playlist. Ask a DJ about mix tapes, however, and you'll hear about a whole other side to the art, involving matched beats, seamless crossfades, and other nuances of literally mixing music together. If you're looking for an alternative to mix tape sites such as Muxtape and Mixwit, ThisIsMyJam offers people a way to create mix tapes that emphasize the science of blending songs together.

Based off of the Musical Brain API, ThisIsMyJam allows you to create interwoven music … Read more

If you're an aficionado of Twitter or the short-form blogging platform, Tumblr, over the last couple of weeks, you've no doubt become aware of the make-your-own-mix tape service, Muxtape.

A seemingly home-spun operation with no obvious profit motive, Muxtape allows anyone to upload a series of songs to its servers to create, and then distribute online, a digital "mix tape" along the lines of the ones you made for your unrequited paramours back in college.

And even as Muxtape has caught fire in the Twittersphere, another service, Mixwit, has come along, also giving users the ability to create a custom digital mix tape, but this time without uploading your own songs. Instead, you choose available songs from two existing music search services, SeeqPod and Skreemr, albeit on a much more polished site that seems primed for seeking to bring in revenue.

As my colleagues Rafe Needleman and Josh Lowensohn have noted, Muxtape appears to be a legal time bomb, merely awaiting the wrath of the Recording Industry Association of America, while Mixwit seems to exist on firmer legal footing.

But are those impressions accurate? I decided to check in with some legal scholars to find out.

… Read more

Rafe and I enjoyed playing around with Muxtape yesterday (review), but were turned off by the uploader and potential limited life span of the service due to its lenient position on copyrights. If you're looking for a slightly more flashy experience, and one that works without having to upload 50MB of music from your hard drive, check out Mixwit. It lets you create gorgeous-looking Web mix tapes to share with others and pulls in media from various streaming services such as Seeqpod and SkreemR.

Maybe its greatest asset is that the players look like real compact cassette tapes, with … Read more

Tech/culture connector Scott Beale turned me on to Muxtape, a super-simple site that streams a list of MP3s via the browser. Playlists you create get their own simple URLs and the interface for controlling the stream is plain and intuitive: Click a track to play it. Click again to pause.

You have to upload MP3s to the site to create your playlists, though, and while the interface for doing so is simple, it's rather a drag. There's no bulk uploader. You have to select each file from your disk and upload it individually.

Unfortunately, the site is … Read more