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)
Last week GrooveShark released a really cool new widget-based playlist creation tool to take your GrooveShark and GrooveShark lite created playlists off-site. The new designer which lets you put together a playlist with tracks from both the GrooveShark's online catalog and your hard drive.
If you've been looking for a proper replacement for the currently-defunct Muxtape, this is even better. While I've been fairly impressed with solutions like Mixwit, a hybrid system like this lets you search for music you don't have, while letting you upload tracks that might not be available for streaming. GrooveShark's marketing rep Steve Spalding tells me this system is entirely sustainable since the company's got streaming deals in place with SESAC, ASCAP, and BMI, meaning the copyright-protected tracks you've uploaded won't result in a take-down of your music.
I've embedded an example widget below with a mix of tracks both from my laptop's music collection and a few tracks from GrooveShark's catalog. Worth noting is that the current system only accepts MP3s, meaning AAC or WMA tracks you've ripped in iTunes of Windows Media Player won't play. I'm told support for FLAC and other lossless formats is on the way. In any case, if it's a big name band or a popular track you're likely to find it with GrooveShark's built-in search tool.
Another thing worth noting is that the widget editor seems to be duplicating songs for no reason. After publishing a playlist I've had songs duplicate and triplicate with no explanation whatsoever, which you can see in action below. It's an annoying bug (especially with larger playlists), and hopefully it's fixed soon.
Update: GrooveShark developer Skyler Slade wrote in to let us know the duplicate bug's been fixed (see the comments), which you'll now see in the playlist below.
The Muxtape logo.
(Credit: Muxtape)Muxtape founder Justin Ouelette says the bureaucracy of the music industry was just too much for him to deal with. That's why he took down the playlist creation Web site, which became a hipster craze earlier this year, after spreading largely via word of mouth. It'll be relaunching soon, he says, but strictly as a service for independent bands to share their own music.
"I walked away from the licensing deals," Ouelette wrote in a transparent, albeit navel-gazing letter on Muxtape's home page. He'd hired a lawyer and tried negotiating, with varied reactions from the major labels.
In August, the Recording Industry Association of America finally complained to Ouelette's host, Amazon Web Services, and Muxtape was shut down. Frustrated with negotiations that were going to take months, he decided to give up.
"They had become too complex for a site founded on simplicity, too restrictive and hostile to continue to innovate the way I wanted to. They'd already taken so much attention away from development that I started to question my own motivations. I didn't get into this to build a big company as fast as I could, no matter what the cost; I got into this to make something simple and beautiful for people who love music."
Ouelette, a former employee of InterActiveCorp's Vimeo, created Muxtape this spring. Legal questions were instantly raised--though downloads were not permitted, Muxtape had not negotiated with record labels. A minor riff of scandal also came into view when gossip blog Valleywag deduced that Vimeo founder Jakob Lodwick, who had departed the company months ago, had funded Muxtape, creating a potential conflict of interest because Ouelette had quit his job at IAC to run the start-up.
The site was also allegedly burning through cash because of server demands, and it needed a revenue stream--but that would've put it on even shakier legal ground.
Soon, Ouelette said, Muxtape will return as "an extremely powerful platform with unheard-of simplicity for artists to thrive on the Internet."
He spelled out his vision: "The new Muxtape will allow bands to upload their own music and offer an embeddable player that works anywhere on the web, in addition to the original Muxtape format. Bands will be able to assemble an attractive profile with simple modules that enable optional functionality such as a calendar, photos, comments, downloads and sales, or anything else they need."
The Muxtape format has gained serious hipster cred from the site's initial burst of popularity, but there's a problem: bands already have MySpace profiles, as well as iLike concert listings, and they can upload their music to Imeem.
The idea of a cleaner, more unified site for bands is attractive; the idea of competing with News Corp., which just launched the MySpace Music service for its social site, is less so. It echoes of what happened with Napster founder Shawn Fanning when he tried to legitimize the service--it lost steam as a subscription music service and was finally sold to Best Buy earlier this month for $121 million.
Ouelette's indie spirit is admirable, but the fate of his restructured venture doesn't look good.
Placefav is a social-bookmarking service for places. It was pitched to me as a cross between the currently defunct Muxtape and Delicious. A better thing to compare it to is the list-making feature on reviews service Yelp.
The ultimate aim is to pass your list along to someone else as a self-contained city guide. Things like this are useful when somebody asks you for a list of places or things to do if they're visiting your hometown, or a vacation spot you might have a little extra local knowledge of. The site also offers the option to favorite other users and explore the lists of people nearby.
Like Muxtape, Placefav limits you to just a dozen spots for your favorite places. You can customize the colors, and if you've put in the addresses there are quick links for pop-out Google Maps. If you don't know the address it will do its best to guess the address of a place based on the name and city it's in. The entire list is self contained with its own vanity URL and can be accessed fairly quickly on mobile phones. Creator Kyle Bragger tells me he's hoping to build an iPhone application that makes use of the device's GPS to make entry and browsing a little faster.
Coming in later versions will be the option to make even larger lists and simply e-mail your places and have the service add it to a new or existing list. Bragger also hopes to include SMS support once he's got the e-mail squared away. You can check out the list I made by clicking the screenshot below.
Compiled here is a list of food joints I put together in a few minutes. Each one has a map and any related photos pulled from the Web. Like Muxtape you can only put together a dozen places and each list you make has its own vanity URL.
(Credit: CNET Networks)
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)
Muzicons has to be one of the simplest music-sharing tools I've ever seen, and also the one with the most personality.
Unlike current Web 2.0 darling Muxtape, which lets you create a nice mix of music uploaded from your hard drive, Muzicons is a single-song affair. You still upload the music from your machine for it to host; the only difference is that there's no track list, no song title, and just a single button to play and pause the music. In fact, whoever creates the mix can tweak the buttons the listener will have access to, determining whether they can skip around the track and what song information is listed.
What makes Muzicons an especially memorable Web app is the care and attention that's been built in to the simple ways you can customize its look and feel. There are just two tweaks: one for color and another for the icon. If you've ever played the popular puzzle game Lumines, the icons feel very similar, and you've got a pick of more than 50 to choose from that will sit on the left side of the player.
When it comes time to share your creation you've only got two options: one set of code for blogs and Web sites, and another for BB code enabled forums or blog comments. If you're looking for some of the simple sharing options seen on other mixtape sites you're out of luck--for now at least.
I've embedded a Muzicon above with the song "She Sells Sanctuary" by The Cult. To make your own, go here.
Making a Muzicon is a simple three-step process. Pick the icon, upload your music, and drop in the code.
(Credit: CNET Networks)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 to do this isn't hard, but you should definitely watch the great tutorial put together by one of my new favorite blogs Internet Jogging:
[via ReadWriteWeb and Digg]
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
