6/20/08

Muxtape On The Desktop And Other Cool Stuff

MuxmasterSo, does anyone read blogs in the summer? I know I don't. I suppose that's why I haven't posted in some time. The summer heat + a packed travel schedule have kept me away from the computer. But in the brief time I've spent on here, I discovered something wonderful: Doug McCune's Muxmaster. It's an open-source Flex application built for the Adobe Air platform which lets you browse and listen to Muxtape mixes on your desktop. You can read much more about it at Doug's blog.

I thought Muxmaster was so cool, I finally got inspired to post my own Muxtape here: http://tfish77.muxtape.com/ Stay tuned for updates to it over time. Let me know in the comments if you want to hear my thoughts on each song.

I've been toying with the idea of putting back the bits of code Doug removed (well, not putting back, exactly, but writing my own) that allow you to download songs via Muxmaster, but so far I've decided against it due to laziness and the fact that I hate downloading single songs without the rest of the album (what can I say, I'm a completist). If you're absolutely dying to download tracks from Muxtape, thus violating the spirit, if not the letter, of their TOS (while violating various copyright laws), go install this Greasemonkey script - but be warned, Justin has been rumored to ban IPs of users using that script.

Muxmaster has another feature I really like, which is that when you load up a playlist by name (for example, Menomena's playlist of their B-sides and rare tracks), it loads up the playlists of users who have marked that playlist as a favorite, assuming that there must be some relation between the musical tastes involved here. I think that's neat - almost as neat as Jan Oberst's Muxfind, which lets you type in a band or a song (or a Muxtape playlist) and then searches its own index of Muxtape playlists to help you find music that Jan thinks is related to the music you typed in. Pretty cool. If I was a less lazy programmer, I would integrate this with Muxmaster. Anyone want to do it for me?

PS For reasons unknown, I still can't use Muxtape in Firefox (I'm still on FF 2). I always get this Javascript error: this.player.sendEvent is not a function. I've tried disabling Greasemonkey, Firebug, and AdBlock, but to no avail. Anyone else have this problem?

1 comment:

Unknown said...

http://cafeconleche7.muxtape.com/