Why You Want a Muxtape

I don’t usually bother posting links here. I’d prefer to use this space for my own writing than spam you with posts raving about the latest YouTube video doing the rounds of email inboxes. (My Facebook Posted Items feed is there for that.) Still, there’s something about the site Muxtape that requires a little more explanation than I can fit into the restrictive paragraph Facebook allows. Namely, why you’d want to use it in the first place.

Muxtape, for those of you that don’t obsessively follow every startup, is a new site that allows users to stream mp3s others have uploaded. If you create an account you can create a ‘muxtape’ of up to 12 songs at any one time. Want more than 12? Tough. You’re going to have to delete one of the ones already there.

At first, I couldn’t quite see what the point of this was. If you wanted to share your stuff with others why not just dump it somewhere like Box.net and give people the link? There are limits to the number of songs there, too, but they’re measured in the hundreds not in the dozens. Or dozen. You can’t download the songs from Muxtape either and if you’re outside of America you can’t even buy the songs through the ‘Buy this mp3′ link (since it leads to the US-only Amazon MP3 Store which for some reason doesn’t like the colour of my money).

So why even bother with it? One reason: RSS. By providing an individual RSS feed for every muxtape you can subscribe to a user whose musical taste you respect and have a semi-consistent stream of song recommendations come into your feed reader. For someone like me, who no longer has convenient access to good radio stations, this is a godsend. Instead of pestering friends about what songs they’re liking at the moment I can follow their muxtape and keep up to date with what I might be interested in. Why other streaming services like Last.fm haven’t got something similar is a mystery to me but their loss is Muxtape’s gain.

There is one limitation to the service I’m finding very frustrating: you’re only able to upload mp3 files. Recently, I’ve been ripping my CDs in AAC format and so as a result Muxtape won’t let me share them (’at the moment’, the dialog box tantalisingly teases). Fixing this would make me a lot happier. AAC is a popular codec and can be played back by numerous devices. It’s also the default encoding format in iTunes which means that less tech-savvy people might not understand why the songs on their computer won’t upload. (I should note an April blog post from the Muxtape people assures us it is coming.)

Still, if all you want to do is enjoy what’s out there that’s not really an issue. And you can of course convert AAC to mp3 if you really have to share that Leona Lewis song with everyone.

To sum it up: it’s fun, you can follow other’s music recommendations but there’s no AAC at the moment. Now, the important stuff: my Muxtape is here. Happy listening.