For this Esoterik Blog post, I’m gonna borrow Mr. Peabody’s Wayback Machine and transport myself back to Hanover Park, Il. sometime around 1986. Around the time that I was finishing junior high and entering high school. This was also the time where my musical tastes were starting to transition from Top 40 Pop/Dance to Hard Rock/Metal. I wasn’t buying any albums yet, but I had a radio with a tape player/recorder and some spare recording cassettes laying around. What was a budding music appreciator to do but start recording his favorite songs and shows off of the radio. Those homebrewed mixtapes had some charm to them; little imperfections like the tail-ends to commercials, beginnings of songs accidentally cut off, station DJ blurbs and special show introductions lent the tapes a lot of personality! (Side note: the mixed-format Chicago station WVVX in Highland Park had this kick-ass metal show that aired during the weekends (or on most nights, at one point!). Not only did I tape that show when I had tapes to use, but that show’s intro is still memorable to this day!! I miss it soooo much!)

When I met friends who did their own tapes, we often traded and got exposed to other music that we may not have found on our own. You could say that was the social music revolution of the day, akin to how Last.fm and iLike.com work today (but without the personal touch of trading; you can only look at and sample what others are listening to!). When I started dating, I often made mixtapes of various lovey-dovey songs that were special to me, or that reminded me of the girl I was dating at the time, and of course gave those tapes to them. Some thought it either cool or silly, but… that’s besides the point! Also, when CD’s became the standard album format, that made it so much easier to make these tapes rather than holding the FF/REW buttons on the playback tape to find the right spot to start the music. (I’m 35, so I grew up around the time when tapes were king, the 8-track was all but dead and vinyl was dying a slow (kicking and screaming) death!)

For me, this continued until some things changed in my musical life. Along with getting a couple of portable CD players, I finally could afford a CD writer for Christine’s computer when we were engaged. So, tapes went into permanent storage and the almighty CD became completely standard for me. This also meant… mix-CDs! I mainly made these for myself and Christine. However, as my working relations grew around me, I did enjoy making mix-CDs for my friends and co-workers with whom I talked music with the most (which I still do; I just made one recently for my fellow work partner!)

Now, as of 3 years ago, the iPod and other portable media players have replaced the almighty CD, which has now been relegated to permanent hard-copy use (music) or rewrite-able recording and playback (video). Once Solid-State Memory (SSM, or flash memory) goes way up in capacity and way down in price, that will herald the death-knell of the CD format. I’m sure some who read this will be, like, “Well, DUH!”

So why am I writing all this? Because a new music site just took me back to those thrilling days of yesteryear, when I experienced the satisfaction of making and trading mixtapes. Muxtape.com is a free storage medium that is set up like your own personal “mixtape”. All you do is upload songs to it (a maximum of 12 files, each one with a 10MB limit) and it gives you your own account URL to share your virtual mixtape to others. This is a very simple, bare-bones interface (I think it’s AJAX), that is even RSS-enabled. It only allows for 12 songs on one account, so it’s not like having a bunch of blank tapes to work with, but I can understand this limitation, given the (albeit dropping) costs of online storage. Of course, another difference is that you can skip around to other songs at will, unlike riding the FF/REW buttons on a tape deck. You can pause songs, but not skip or jog to parts of songs, which is somewhat bad IMHO; I encounter lots of songs with lame beginnings that end up being great songs afterwards. However, this is a promising service with some room for growth.

Well, I will share my Muxtape URL with all my readers here: http://chrisw357.muxtape.com/. Not only did I try to use all my favorites, but I also included songs from diverse genres and sub-genres. When you do listen to it, I hope you will enjoy at least one or two selections. It even has a length of almost an hour, just like one of those beloved blank tapes!

Take care, all!

This entry was posted on Saturday, March 29th, 2008 at 3:55 pm and is filed under Around the Web, Music, Personal Thoughts, Reviews. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.