It has been just over a month since Muxtape, a popular music site that let users share the online equivalent of cassette mixtapes, was shut down by the RIAA for copyright infringement issues. Since then we’ve seen the site reborn in a few incarnations, including an Open Sourced version called OpenTape. Now Favtape, a basic music site that launched last July, is releasing an overhauled new version that has led developer Ryan Sit to appropriately call it “Muxtape on steroids”.
Favtape originally launched as an enhanced frontend to Seeqpod that let users import and listen to full versions of songs from their Last.FM and Pandora playlists. The site’s interface is similar to Muxtape, sporting a very basic layout and a sparse feature set. At the time I commented that the site was too simple – there was no easy way to rearrange a playlist, and there were few features other than audio playback.
The new version of the site addresses these issues, and introduces a host of new features that make the site a worthwhile replacement to Muxtape. Users are now free to rearrange songs on their playlists, and can easily share their Favtapes using a static URL (You can see the one I made here). Other new features include links to music videos for each song, album art, an embeddable player, and playlists of top songs from Billboard charts and iTunes. The new site also supports a mobile interface for the iPhone, so you can listen to your playlists on the go.
One of Favtape’s biggest advantages over Muxtape (but also its main weakness) is its heavy reliance on Seeqpod, a music site that indexes music files across the web but never hosts them. Unlike Muxtape, which asked users to upload their favorite music files to generate a playlist, Favtape is only including links to these files, so it should theoretically be harder to target with lawsuits. That said, if a lawsuit ever brings Seeqpod down (and they have already tried), Favtape will be left an empty shell.
Other sites in this space include Songza, Snuzu, and Streamzy.
i give it 90 days. other than that i like it.
where do they pull the album art from?
They will be in a trouble very soon
From the looks of their crappy website design they are already in trouble.
You are very wrong about that one. Great design. Its the simple craisglist approach for music sites. Easy, intuitive, clean.
About the only thing it has in common with craigslist is that it’s a website.
140+ songs updated daily:
http://www.favt...cialsoundsystem
I’ve bee using for two or three months now. Site controls, features, and accuracy has greatly improved. I have a terrabyte of albums that I never listen to. Between pandora and favtape, it merely reinforces the fact that mp3s will go the way of the dinos.
If this type of thing can survive heavy attack then maybe you are right. For the next WHILE, I we will keep our MP3s as a failsafe….Even once ubiquitous access to the cloud is upon us.
DOA
http://8tracks.com/ is muxtape but legal.
I just wanted to let people know as far as I have found, Favtape is legal.
We get our album art from Amazon.
Thanks for checking out Favtape!
Congrats to Ryan on building an incredible app
Months ago they were already better than muxtape
I guess music recommendation is the key for any music service and I would give 5 star to Cruxle (www.cruxle.com) that recommends in all sectors of entertainment. The best part I like is the cross-category recommendation. They know what movies I would like to watch when I say I like Eric Clapton, quite an amazing service.
Very impressive Favtape…
Great design and great architecture.
Straight up. Love it.
I user Favtape almost daily. It has great design like zach said. simple and smart.
Great job!
Isn’t this more like songza?
And to create Mixtape from MySpace artists, It is here http://www.musi...c.net/myartists, the name is MyArtists, it is simple, easy and with the same mixtape interface (coming from Opentape)
Another similar site is FruiTunes.com – just a really nice frontend to seeqpod that lets you essentially bookmark the songs you search for and then create a custom playlist to share. neither the site nor the user is responsible for the content
I just don’t like the pink, allow us to change the colors like muxtape?
be sure to checkout http://www.lastvid.com, it’s a similar idea but displays youtube videos instead of seeqpod music.