I may only be young (20 for stat fans) but I used to delight in making mixtapes. Sure tapes were a bit past it by then, but that didn’t stop me from trying to make excellent mixes. As I grew older I became much more interested in track transitions, to this day I still wonder about possible permutations. I very rarely get the chance to make proper mixtapes these days though, I’ve made playlists for parties but nothing more really. The last big attempts were for the two mix-minidiscs (ouch that sounds cackhanded) I created for Krystal before I met her. Even these were created on computer however, it has to be said the ability to create quick playlists and instantly try lots of tracks when you’re trying to get the right sort of transition is a real boon to the mixtape creation process. It does take away some of the romantic aspect of it though.

Muxtape offered the chance to take time to create a mixtape again and even for that I’m happy. That it might give me the chance to stumble upon some new bands is merely a bonus for me. It has to be said though, to stumble upon new bands you pretty much do have to make use of this excellent Yahoo! pipe. Even then, you need a Last.FM profile to be able to take advantage of it. Muxtape imposes some interesting restrictions on the process though. You get 12 tracks and no track can be bigger than 10MB, the latter condition did pose some problems for me. Originally my muxtape, which was created at first in iTunes, contained songs of more than nine minutes from both Youthmovies and Cats And Cats And Cats, however they both clocked in at over 10MB and necessitated substitute tracks.

I had a theme in mind when I was creating my Muxtape, that theme is summed up in the caption: confusion. As a whole the tracks convery a feeling of confusion, to me at least. That’s not necesarilly a flow thing either, the muxtape was designed with a sensible flow; a natural beginning, middle and end. Indeed I started with my favourite opening track ever (it’s stereoscopic heaven) and ended with soemthing I can only describe as dance-tastic. It’s not just a collection of songs by my favourite bands either, indeed there are some notable omissions when you glance at my Last.FM charts and compare it to the tracklisting of the Muxtape. Indeed one track in particular, This Town Need Guns – 26 is dancier than 4, was included purely because I’d recently seen this awesomely cute video for it.

One last note on Muxtape though is that it doesn’t seem to work particularly well on Firefox, so I suggest you try it in an alternative browser if you have issues with it. It seems to work intermittently, but if it doesn’t work, really do try it in another browser. I’d love to hear your comments on my Muxtape as well, all are welcome.