First Thoughts: OpenTape
After the unfortunate and unexpected shut down of Muxtape, a small group of people came up with the idea of OpenTape. Now, to those of you who don’t know what Muxtape is/was - it was a service created by awesome Justin, which allows users to share their favourite songs, and a create an online mixtape. The idea was simple, it worked and people loved it. They loved it so much that the big boys got involved and destroyed it. Including the legendary RIAA who wants to destroy the dreams of developers, and idea’s that work.
Along comes, OpenTape which has something fascinating about it. It’s hard to tell the different between this web app and a muxtape. Both work exactly the same, with a flash app running in the background protecting the original track from being downloaded.
This idea has to be one of the smartest idea’s that i’ve seen, and that’s free and of, course Open Source. The worry to me is that if you share copyrighted content, e.g - a song from, Snow Patrol. The issue of legality comes into view. And if you’re sharing their tracks without permission… hmm.. This is awesome for a little & local band that want to share their music with their listeners with ease and without having someone develop an web app for them.
Overall: An excellent, open source idea that works.
2 Comments
James Bayliss on November 7th, 2008
Works fine for me, how are you encoding the tracks? - All my tracks are imported via iTunes, @ 320. Send them an email, or update - there could well be a bug fix. 
zzap on November 7th, 2008
Do you actually use it at all, though? I’ve noticed on mine that sometimes it randomly refuses to play tracks to people. They were all encoded at the same time, so it’s definitely not the tracks … it’s a bit weird.