The new version of the service, which does not allow users to upload music from their hard drives, instead relies on bands to submit their own tracks for listeners to play on Muxtape--and Muxtape only.
There are a dozen bands to start with, all of which have been hand-picked by the service's creators. Bands that are interested in getting their music onto the service will be able to sign up once the service relaunches in earnest. According to Wired, artists will then be able to sell their tracks from places like Amazon MP3 and iTunes by paying Muxtape a fee. There has been, however no mention of whether that fee will be per referral or on a subscription basis.
Until the official relaunch, users who were previously registered with the service will find that their log-in credentials no longer work. Likewise, you're unable to assemble any of the tracks into a custom playlist--one of the highlights of using the service.
(via Daring Fireball)
Muxtape has returned, although a shadow of its former self. No longer does it allow users to upload music from their hard drive, and instead it's relying on bands to license their content directly.
(Credit: CNET Networks)
Mixwit, one of my personal favorites for creating and sharing hosted mix tapes, is calling it quits next week.
Starting December 27, the site will no longer serve up streaming music tracks, with embedded mixes--like the one at the end of this post.
The company made the announcement last week, but just began to send out notices to registered users. Normally a week or so is cutting it close in the world of site closures, but in Mixwit's case there's very little in the way of user data besides playlists.
Mixwit is the latest Web mixtape service to shutter its doors. Muxtape, which allowed people to upload tracks, shut itself down after "bureaucracy" from the Recording Industry Association of America led founder Justin Ouelette to put the site on hold until a better solution could be found.
Michael Christoff and Radley Marx, the co-founders of Mixwit, say they're contemplating donating Mixwit's source code to the OpenTape project, which would let anyone host their own Mixwit-like mixtape despite the site no longer hosting the required resources.
Below I've put together a quick compilation of songs, which took just a few minutes. I'm definitely sad to see the site go, although I'm glad some of its features have the potential of ending up in future builds of the OpenTape project.
Free music mixtape service Muxtape has temporarily been shut down due to pressure from the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA). There's not much more information about downtime besides a small note on the front page of Muxtape.com saying that "Muxtape will be unavailable for a brief period while we sort out a problem with the RIAA."
Presumably the RIAA had gotten wise to the considerable amount of music that was being hosted and played on the service, bringing it into the same tier as some of the streaming radio services that have had to pay considerable licensing fees just to stream tracks to its users.
Back in April, my colleague Daniel Terdiman chatted with the Electronic Frontier Foundation's senior intellectual property attorney, Fred von Lohmann, who said that a site like Muxtape was only able to scrape by if it did not reach a critical mass, and if it had good legal ground both in principle and on paper. We may be only beginning to see if the latter holds true.
Update: Muxtape's blog has posted a tidbit of information about the downtime:
No artists or labels have complained. The site is not closed indefinitely. Stay tuned.
Beta users of Muxtape For Bands: you are unaffected by this outage.
Visitors looking to play some free mixtapes on Muxtape will have to look elsewhere. The site has voluntarily shut down while working out some legal kinks with the RIAA.
(Credit: CNET Networks)
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 moving spools to match how far you are through the mix and each song. You can tweak the look and feel of the tape, the font, and the playlist with a wonderfully simple Flex editor. If you feel like going back to make changes, you can also go in and add, reorder, or get rid of songs that don't make the cut.
The one bummer is that linking to playlists is not as simple as an affair as it is on Muxtape, which gives you your own personal URL. The upside is that you can create multiple mixes using a central account.
Mixwit tapes can be embedded in all the major social networks, along with any regular blog, which I've done below.
See also: Create viral mixtapes with Fuzz
The Pacemaker web site allows you to create and share DJ mixes of your music library, legally.
(Credit: Tonium)Tonium, makers of the as yet released Pacemaker portable DJ MP3 player, have unveiled their new online community DJ mix portal today, along with a free Mac/PC music editor.
The new site allows anyone to create DJ mixes of their own music collection using the Pacemaker music editor software, and then upload the mix to the Pacemaker online community, where the mix can be streamed by anyone. If the Legal section of the Pacemaker Web site is any indication, Tonium have taken great pains in making sure the music sharing service is airtight. Along with agreements Tonium has struck with international music publishing houses, the Pacemaker music editor has some built-in safety measures that prevent users from using too many tracks by any single artist. Mixes also require a minimum amount of songs before they can be uploaded.
The Pacemaker mix editor lets you cobble together a mix of music on your PC, then upload it to share on the Pacemaker community. By the looks of things, I'm making a Madlib mix.
(Credit: Tonium)At first glance, the free DJ music editor offered by Pacemaker is a pretty fun application on its own. Tacks can be dragged into an editing pane and then manipulated with DJ effects such as filters, delays, crossfades, and backspins. The Pacemaker audio editor supports MP3 (16Kbps to 320Kbps), AAC (8Kbps to 256Kbps), MP3 VBR, FLAC, WAV, and Ogg-Vorbis, and can calculate the song's beats per minute automatically, to make beat-matching less of a guessing game.
Once the Pacemaker hardware is realeased later this month, it'll be exciting to see how the hardware, software, and Web site all integrate.
Fuzz, a new online music service launched today, tries to recapture some of the teenage excitement of making a mixtape and update it for the online era.
Unfortunately, like some other new online music services, Fuzz suffers from an unclear mission. In this case, it's trying to serve two audiences at once: music fans and musicians.
From a fan's perspective, the biggest draw seems to be an easy way to share music with your friends. After signing up and signing in, you start by clicking the "Deckorator" on the right side of the home page. This launches a Flash application that lets you upload any MP3 from your computer and organize these uploads into a playlist. The playlists are posted in a public forum, but the real draw is the Mixtape Creator, which essentially packages your playlist as a virtual mixtape, complete with canned cover art (you can also create your own). The tape then appears on your profile page, and you can also embed it on any personal Web page or send e-mail to guide your friends to that mixtape.
As an artist, you can create a profile page with 1GB of storage on which you can advertise gigs, invite fans to sign up for your e-mail list, and upload your music to give away or sell. (Fuzz keeps $0.30 cents per transaction, and lets you set your price, although $0.99 per song is the default.) It's sort of like MySpace with digital distribution.
The trouble is, the two goals aren't in perfect alignment. In its effort to attract artists, Fuzz devotes quite a lot of real estate to its artists and their wares. But there aren't a lot of artists signed up yet, which makes it look like a fairly limited online music store. This buries the real draw for users: the ability to create and share custom playlists, including music that users have already bought. If I were in charge of Fuzz's business strategy, I'd start by weighing the site more heavily to users, try and draw a large userbase to create and exchange virtual mixtapes, and then use this large userbase to draw more artists in.
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