Muxtape

Ah, the mixtapes. Kids these days with their iPods, their iTunes playlists, and their file-sharing don’t know what they’re missing.

As much as I like iTunes, it just doesn’t compare to sitting down in your bedroom, a 90 minute high-bias cassette in one hand and a stack of CDs and tapes in the other, and spending the next couple hours (or days) working your way through that stack and trying to put together the perfect tracklist. One that would not only contain nothing but awesome songs, but also one that would use up as much of those 90 minutes as possible.

And it wasn’t simply a matter of dragging, dropping, and burning, but rather, a laborious hours-long process of pushing buttons, manually rewinding and advancing the cassette, and ultimately, just sitting there with your stereo, hoping that the result sounded even half as good as it did in your head.

Ah, but enough of my curmudgeonly nostalgia. Muxtape is an extremely cool way to share music, the Web 2.0/37signals-esque equivalent of the analog mixtape. You can only create one mix per account consisting of up to twelve songs; you can only upload one song per artist or album; and you can only upload songs that you have permission to let Muxtape use (yeah right). It’s an extremely straightforward and easy-to-use system with no frills whatsoever, and it does one thing really, really well.