The Mixtape Dilemma

Let’s face it, mixtapes are just plain cool, and you know it. I haven’t made one in a hell of a long time, but a couple of times over the last couple of months I have had a desire to create one.

There are a number of dramas with trying to do a physical mixtape these days – mainly the availability of audio tapes and the fact that I no longer own a stereo with a tapedeck on it. I’ve contemplated a few times how I could do it without using tapes, and I’ve come up with a couple of possible solutions. I could make mix CDs, iTunes playlists, or a last.fm playlist.

Mix CDs suck. I’m just gonna put that out there right now. There really isn’t a whole lot you can do with a mix CD other than a bit of a cover, and maybe a label. It’s all too easy to make more than one copy, you just stick it in your burner and copy it again. Boring as batshit, and about as personal as a bouquet of grocery shop flowers.

iTunes playlists are probably the worst of the options I could seriously consider. There is absolutely no sense of permanence in an iTunes playlist. At best it’s a physical file on your hard drive, at worst it’s a virtual file in your iTunes library. There is absolutely nothing you can do to personalize it other than give it a funky name, and then to share it with someone is a pain, unless I’m just stupid.

The thought of a last.fm playlist, or Spotify for those who live in Europe or the USA, was never a real option, but it did get me thinking. If there was a way I could create a playlist, and control every detail of how it’s presented, what it’s called, and include a story about the mixtape with it, then that just might be the best modern solution yet. Enter: Opentape.

I became aware of Opentape originally after reading about the death of the original version of Muxtape, where people who enjoyed using Muxtape decided to recreate that experience in their own, self-hosted versions. I promptly forgot about it entirely until this tweet from @hicksdesign about a mixtape by a guy called Doug March.

This inspired me to investigate Opentape with some renewed interest. I will be playing around with it in the next few weeks to try and get a working understanding of it to be able to implement a cool mixtape site of my own.

UPDATE: I can’t be stuffed looking into Opentape for the time being, as you can only have a single mixtape at any given point, and it doesn’t do a good enough job of hiding the MP3 files needed to create the mixtape. I guess I will have to continue looking for the time being.