Dying companies should take note of Mixwit's strategy to preserve user data. The now-dead mix tape-sharing service, which closed its doors in late December, is now offering users a way to save their mixes and tape designs for reuse elsewhere.
Former Mixwit users received an e-mail early Wednesday detailing how to download a permanent archive of their mix tape data which includes both a track list and the design of their virtual cassette tape. This data will continue to be hosted on Mixwit-is-dead.com through April, giving users about a month to make a back up.
While Mixwit is no longer hosting the tools that let you build these tapes, or the players that can be embedded in social-networking profiles and blogs, the good news is that the idea behind the site is still very much alive. The project has moved on to Mixwidget.org, which lets you accomplish a similar feat by hosting everything on your own server. This isn't as user friendly, or mass market as Mixwit was, but should be a healthy alternative to the Opentape.fm project.
Users still looking to get their hosted mix tape jones can always use services like GrooveShark, 8Tracks, and Blip.fm.
Former Mixwit users now have the option to download the contents of their old mix tapes--except for the music tracks that is.
(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.
ThisIsMyJam uses the Musical Brain API to generate music mixes based on melody, tempo, timbre, and other attributes.
(Credit: ThisIsMyJam)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 mixes that take into account song attributes such as tempo, key, timbre, genre, and more. There are plenty of drawbacks, such as a limited selection of music, no direct song uploads, and a maximum song playback duration of 20 seconds, but despite these limitations, ThisIsMyJam illustrates a novel approach.
Surprisingly, we found the appeal of ThisIsMyJam to be its degree of difficulty. It's one thing to throw together an iTunes playlist, but creating an overlapping mix of music requires some trial and error. It took us more than a few tries to come up with a mix that didn't make us cringe during discordant song transitions, but the process of reexamining the mix, removing duds, and adding new songs made the final result feel more creative than simply throwing a playlist together and hitting enter.
At the end of the two-step ThisIsMyJam process, the resulting mix comes with its own static URL, a dynamic "Latest Mix" URL, and code for embedding the mix into your own Web site (illustrated above).
Via CreateDigitalMusic.
Muxtape allows any user to upload songs in order to create a sharable, online digital 'mix tape.' The question is, is it legal?
(Credit: Muxtape)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 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
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