What did you do with your bank holiday weekend? Some decorating? Shopping? Crystal meth-ing? Me, I spent a frankly ridiculous amount of time playing about with a website called Mixwit.com.
Now, Mixwit comes hot on the heels of the slightly vulnerable but much-loved Muxtape. The vital difference with Mixwit is that you don’t need to upload any tracks, because it uses a couple of search engines (Skreemr and Seeqpod) to source songs already out there on the web.
So it basically takes The Hype Machine’s aggregating functionality and adds the ability to create as many playlists as you like, for free. You simply search for a song and, from the list of results, drag it to the adjacent field to add it. Marvellous.
Check out one of my mixes after the click…

The cherry on top of this dishlicious audio cake is how the the playlists are presented. They look like old-fashioned tapes, complete with moving tape reels and handwritten fonts for labelling tracks and playlist titles. Plus, in addition to loads of retro C-90-style “skins”, you can also upload images of your own to decorate your tape.
You can add up to a hundred songs to your playlist, which is pretty impressive compared to Muxtape’s limit of a dozen or so. And if, like me, you’ve wrested control of an office stereo and have to provide sounds for the whole day, every day, quantity is important.
The downsides? Well, if you’re one of those people who worries about breaking the law, you could raise the point that not all of the MP3s posted out there on the internet are strictly legal.
Also, the fact that the search engines Mixwit is using don’t discriminate between working and expired links means that it can take a few goes to get a working version of the song you’re searching for. Similarly, since the searches basically encompass the whole internet, the quality of the tracks varies hugely. So if you want consistent quality or sound levels throughout your mix you might be out of luck unless you want to spend a lot of time on it.
But these negatives haven’t put me off, and I think the ease with which you can create mixes is a huge plus. Unlike the site I’ve used a lot up until now, Finetune, there are no limits on the number of times you can add a particular artist to a playlist. I’ve found Finetune abruptly stops working mid-play after a while as well, which has thus far not happened with Mixwit.
A pretty impressed thumbs-up for Mixwit from this corner, then. Check out one of my playlists below:

[source: Mixwit.com]
For more tech-related stories, check out Tech Digest and Shiny Shiny

Possibly related:

1. Muxtape: because we still refuse to believe mixtapes are dead

2. Mixwit to shut down before end of 2008

3. Muxtape hacked by Babybird?!

4. Top 5 Ways of discovering new music online (that aren’t iTunes, MySpace, Pandora or Last.fm)

5. My Chemical Toilet’s Halloween Playlist

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Posted by Stuart Waterman on Wednesday May 28th, 2008 at 10:48 am