Mix Tapes Go Online

Perhaps its because I'm a father now, but I find myself at times becoming nostalgic for the trappings of my youth - things of days gone by that I have come to realize my son will never experience. Like this weekend when I was watching my gorgeous new Sony Bravia LCD TV in all of its 1080 glory and I looked at my kid and realized "holy crap, he's going to think this is how TV ALWAYS looked!" (and lets not even get started on the fact that 200+ channels will, to him, be the norm)

Another, more despairing, revelation came a few weeks back when I had my 14 year old nephew over for a night. We went to see Cloverfield (great flick) but on the way I thought it'd be fun to regress to my youth and stop by the only arcade I know of in the Framingham area (Fun n Games). How sad. It was understocked with crap games, mostly second and third tier fighting games, and overall it just sucked. It was then that it really hit home that kids just don't head out to the arcade to play their video games anymore...

Along those lines, another of my favorite hobbies as a kid - making mix tapes - has made the jump into the 21st century. Sure, we've been able to mix and burn CD's and copy mp3's for each other for quite some time - but even that smacked of the late 20th century. Enter two players that look to put mixtapes on line, both offering slightly different methods and neither seeming, to me at least, to be completely legal - but that's never really been an issue for me, so lets take a look at both.

Muxtape: This was the first I discovered. Sign up for a free account and you can start uploading mp3's from your computer. You get to upload 12 and though it says you are limited to 10mb in size per song, in my limited testing that didn't seem to apply. Afterwards you are presented with a unique URL that you can then send out to friends. They can't download the songs, only stream them, and I'm thinking this is how they hope to stay "legal." There are also some written limitations on uploading multiple songs from the same artist or album and you have to agree not to upload any songs that you are "not allowed to" (whatever that means), but again, in limited testing, I blatantly ignored all of their rules. The interface is slick and simple and the main benefit here is you have access to your entire library - it would appear to me to be a great way to introduce people to music you like.

Mixwit: I haven't tried this one yet, but the features look to be about the same of Muxtape with the major exception of how you add music. Rather than uploading your own mp3's, Mixwit utilizes specific Google search strings, through web interfaces such as Skreemr and Seeqpod, to search open directories around the web for songs matching your search parameters. Pretty slick, though I'm guessing if your taste tends to the obscure or lesser known you won't have much luck.

So there you go. Mixtapes for the new millennium. Go, mix, and share. Got something good? I want to hear it, unless its another Beatles clone (Bernardo).