Curated by: Luigi Canali De Rossi
 


Friday, March 28, 2008

MixTape Nirvana: Create Your Own Music Compilations, Playlists or Audio Collections And Publish Them Online - MixWit Is Here!

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A mixtape is a compilation of music tracks recorded in a specific order on a compact audio cassette. With Mixwit now you can create your own mixtape, with any music or artist you like, on the type of tape you like best and with revolutionary newly added ability to share your mixtape with as many people you want simultaneously.



One of my very first mixwit mixtapes - Highway Cruiser - hover your mouse on the tape and start playing.

Possibly because of my past DJ life and so many memories still connected to mixtapes, I find Mixwit a supercompelling, irresistible tool I would just recommend to any friend I have. I truly love it.

In essence what Mixwit (which is still in its very early beta phase) allows you to do, is to:

a) search and select any song you can think of and add it to a simple and easy to manage list - you can easily remove, add, delete or shuffle around any track

b) personalize your virtual audio cassette tape by selecting its look and feel, and the title and notes that will go on its cover

c) publish your virtual mixtape audio cassette tape anywhere you want on the web either as an embeddable widget or as a simple link to your "original" stored on Mixwit.

It's very easy, super-intuitive to use, it costs nothing, and, for now, it carries no ads.





"A mixtape, which usually reflects the musical tastes of its compiler, can range from a casually selected list of favorite songs, to a conceptual mix of songs linked by a theme or mood, to a highly personal statement tailored to the tape's intended recipient."

"Essayist Geoffrey O'Brien has called the personal mixtape "the most widely practiced American art form," and many mixtape enthusiasts believe that by carefully selecting and ordering the tracks in a mix, an artistic statement can be created that is greater than the sum of its individual songs, much as an album of pop music in the post-Beatles era can be considered as something more than a collection of singles."

(Source: Wikipedia)




Overview

Mixwit is an online music exchange and communication tool, which allows anyone to easily create their own mixtapes and to share them publicly on the Web.



Interface and Ease of Use

The interface is very straightforward. No complicated menus to learn or a hundred different options to deal with. Your controls are always in front of you and the choices are limited and very straightforward to use. Nothing could be easier.



How It Works

mixwit-mixtape-1-add-music.jpg

mixwit-mixtape-2-add-style.jpg

mixwit-mixtape-3-save-and-share.jpg

Here is how you create a mixtape with Mixwit:



1) Search and Select Your Favorite Music Tracks

Search and select any song or artists you can think of. I have found most anything I tried searching and though not all results were available, there were a great deal of good ones. When you can make a search Mixwit instantly displays a list of immediately available results, while it keeps searching in the background.

mixwit-music-search.gif

You can easily "pre-listen" to any of the found tracks by just double-clicking on any track title. Once you find a track you like you simply drag it in your playlist basket in which you can then easily sort, add, delete or move any track as you like.




2) Personalize Your Cassette Look and Feel

mixwit-add-style-tab.gif

Upload any image or artwork you already have to fully customize the look and feel of your audio cassette.

Choose even among a whole set of classic cassette tapes jackets to emulate even more that cool 70s-80s look.

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Personalize colors, skins, glossiness, text label including its size and position on the tape.



3) Publish and Share Online

mixwit-publish-button.jpg

Post a link to your mixtape, syndicate and publish it inside any blog, web site and promote it to all major social networks directly from within Mixwit. Very cool.

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Where Is the Music Coming From

You may wonder how it is possible that Mixwit allows you to find and aggregate together commercial tracks of all kinds that you would normally have to pay for. The answer lies in Mixwit unique music distribution approach. For its dynamic music inventory Mixwit leverages in fact two so-called playable music search engines: Seeqpod and Skreemr.

Both services are specialized search engines continuosly crawling the web for existing links to playable content. Once found, both simply report the direct links to this content and allow you to use such links to play the music bits already published and existing out there. SkreemR is a search engine for locating audio files on the web. Neither of the two services actually hosts any music files - both simply index what exists on the publicly accessible Internet.

Officially their goal is to make this often hard to find multimedia content as searchable and useable to the internet community as possible. We'll have to see how this approach plays out and whether record labels are going to let this fantastic social approach to music sharing become an opportunity or are going to fight head-on like they like to do normally.

Keep in mind therefore that all your audio tapes are nothing else but link collections that will actually call up the original file from wherever it has been published. This is important to remember because you may find yourself in situations where the original source will not respond, it is slow, or has such a big file to serve you that you will have to wait a bit until it has buffered enough of it to start playing it.




Business Model

For now Mixwit is completely free to use, requiring registration only when you want to create and publish your own mixtapes.

In the future it is very likely that Mixwit will introduce both advertising as well as the opportunity to buy directly any song collected via its web-based service.

On the website Terms of Use it is written: "Mixwit is to provide exposure for music artists and facilitate legal purchase of the artist's music while allowing fans to enjoy the music, you are required to display the song title and artist...".



Editor's Opinion

As a passionate music lover, I find Mixwit to be one of the the best tools I know to share my best compilations and playlists with both my own social network and the online public at large.

Mixwit makes it easy, fun and effective to create memorable mixtapes and playlists of whatever you want. It doesn't have to be music. You can even add your own workshop tracks or the best nighttime stories you know for your grandchildren.

I doubt that a sustainable business model can be built around adding ads and direct commissions on song sales, but similar services like Musicovery seem to have taken a similar road.

I myself would like a model in which I can have a prestigious sponsor (which I can select among a group) appear on my mixtape cartridge.

I would also consider paying a yearly flat fee to make premium mixtapes, in which I will have more possibilities to customize the look and feel and maybe other options too (limitless tracks, possibility to add images or my own ads/ sponsors to it, etc.).

This is the most viral, fun and exciting way to share and promote music online that I have seen so far.

Try it while it is fully ad-free. Highly recommended.




More Information

Mixwit official site

Mixwit Blog

See other mixtapes.

Old school tape skins

Silk icons found

 
 
 
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posted by Robin Good on Friday, March 28 2008, updated on Tuesday, May 5 2015


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