My Husband Gets Transported Back to Junior High (In a Good Way!)

(This is the second in a series of guest posts that I hope will become more frequent on sarahlacy.com-- despite the name of the site! Especially the next few days because I'm in New York absurdly pimping my book and shooting for Yahoo. This one is by my lovely husband Geoffrey Ellis, who couldn't stop gushing about this site, so I asked him to write about it.)

I was a total mixtape nerd back in the day.

Before the whole CD revolution, I was all about vinyl. I'd make at least one mixtape a week. It was a huge challenge to fit the exact amount of songs onto one side of a cassette. Not only was fitting the songs a challenge, but ordering them so they made sense was part of the fun.

Here is the ultra-geek part of it all: It was exhilarating. I lived for it - thinking about it all week, making little notes to myself. So the second I discovered muxtape.com and read the words-- "Muxtape is a service for creating mixtapes"-- I felt transported back to my days of skateboarding, working part-time in record stores and living the life of relatively low responsibility.

I signed up immediately and began thinking about what I would put on my comp. The interface is incredibly simple, almost Twitter-like. Unlike a MySpace profile where you have one song that 'defines' you (and annoyingly blares when you open the page), you can upload up to 12 mp3s (under 10mb each) to your page. That page shows the name of the band, the song and a timer, all underneath a customizable header and caption. It's better to me than internet radio and podcasts because you can see the next song (in huge, 100 point type) and click right to it. Searching through random pages is part of the fun. The site is not searchable and the only way to keep tabs on someone is to 'favorite' their page.

On the downside, I have found it somewhat buggy. Sometimes, it makes you reload a page when it can't find a song, and on three occasions I tried to upload a song and organize my playlist but the song wouldn't play on my page. So I had to delete and try again. You also can't scrub through songs, which may actually be a good thing. I realized that my TiVo, iPod, Web 2.0 lifestyle had made me so impatient, that the snags actually reminded me that everything isn't about instant gratification. You mean I actually have to wait until the song gets to the good part? Overall, the downsides are negligible and -- for the moment -- I am obsessed with the site.

Obviously the UI is different than that of a cassette and you don't have to deal with hiss and pop, what will fit timewise, and there's no flipping the tape when the songs are over. But none of that stopped me from being consumed with thoughts of what songs to upload. I found myself making notes, rating songs in my iTunes, making playlists and trying the songs in different orders. It was the first time I had been challenged to put together a cohesive mix of music since the days when I DJed indie rock tunes (over 12 years ago). And, have to admit, I am rusty. But it was fun. I was so carried away I even Twittered to Kevin Rose that my Muxtape beat up his and took its lunch money. (And I stand by the taunt.) More importantly, I'm already thinking of my next tape.

Let me know what you think of my mux and if you feel the same rush creating a tape as I do. Calling all nerds...