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Sunday, June 22, 2008

Muxtape.com : phun music thingy

20080622muxtape01 Okay....since the service's USP is its simplistic minimalism, this post too will be a quickie - the broom closet kind ;).

Remember the days of yore when you painstakingly created tapes containing all your favorite songs in a single tape. Those tapes, to create which, you raided, scrounged all around to find that one song which transported you to a magical world every time you heard it and had to have in your collection. The tapes which you guarded more zealously than a Bedouin guarding his water. Well tapes are no more and so is the need to hunt heaven and earth to find the songs, what with Google becoming a verb and a given part of our lives.

But the sheer joy and fun of creating mixtapes can now be re-created on the Internet with the help of Muxtapes. Muxtape.com is a free online service that was launched a few months back to do just that - create digital mixtapes.

Simplicity is its USP and it starts right from registration - a quickie signup procedure and you are on your way to creating mixtapes muxtapes. You are allowed to upload 12 songs in each muxtape, around the number of songs that would fit in a tape and can create only 1 muxtape per account, though you can edit your compilation to include other songs. A sore point - I was unable to remove a song I had accidentally added till I had added all the 12 allowable songs. Once done, you can shared the URL with everyone to hear your compilation. The page listing your play list is a plain, uncomplicated white page, where you click on the name of the song to play it [flash needed]. It has also been RSS-ified so that anybody who liked your mux can subscribe to it for any future changes you make to the muxtape. The homepage randomly lists out muxes created by other members which you can listen to and if you like it, add them to your favorite. You can add up to 12 muxes in your favorite list. Each song in the muxtape has a Buy this MP3 link by its side, clicking on which will take you to the corresponding page on Amazon.

Though other online playlist services are available, which can be used for uploading larger number of songs and offers more features, think of Muxtapes as that One mixtape containing your all-time favorite collection of songs, or as someone pointed out, your favoritest songs - it has to be kept separate from your general collection of tapes.

It is a great service for all upcoming, unsigned bands to upload their demos and pass the word around about it. The plain, stark interface of this site might actually help them more instead of the garish, ugly pages they've set up on that Social Networking site.

On a side note, I realized that Muxtape is one among the new wave of micro* services being launched - services where you provide quick, sharp, focused content in miniscule quantity - an attribute that fits this site perfectly. In keeping with the spirit of micro, their blog too is hosted on Tumblr, as opposed to your traditional blogging platforms. Besides the mandatory announcements, it also lists out interesting muxes uploaded by members and interesting things that people are doing with their service.

I am currently in the process of compiling my muxtape - pretty much none of my songs have either been tagged or properly renamed in a long long time and so hunting for that song is turning out to be a b1tch.

Here is Mike Shinoda's muxtape - if you are a fan of hip-hop, then you would enjoy it. If you created a muxtape of your own, do share it here; would love to hear it :-)

Do drop in a comment with your views, suggestions and criticisms; would love to hear from you.

Godspeed

Sheeshh!! will I never be able to write a small post