ccMixter

We’re big fans of Creative Commons over here at Mixwit. That’s why I’m stoked to announce today that we’ve  integrated ccMixter into our mixmaker. This means you can easily add any track you can find on ccMixter to any of your mixtapes. If you are not familiar with ccMixter, it is a great repository for tracks, remixes and samples, all licensed under Creative Commons. All you need to do is just select ccMixter in the drop down box in the mixmaker. Once your there, try an artist like the Rapture or the Beastie Boys or a genre like “funk”. Super bonus points if you try “bark”

Over the next few months, we’ll be working hard on improving search by continuing to add more services to help you find media around the web. Although, it does makes our life a whole lot easier when people like ccMixter, Seeqpod, and Skreemr have very nice APIs for us to work with. That’s why those are the three sources we have to date, but rest assured there will be more to come. Got a favorite source? Let us know, and you may just see it appear in the near future.

Lastly, in celebration of the upcoming 4th anniversary of the Wired Magazine CD, what more appropriate than a Wired mixtape? 2008 is the year of the mixtape, right? Enjoy!

[mixwit_mixtape wid="9ae4f9705f2985468a75dbed5e564042" pid="ec959431d59d90187b1abbe9a72adad1" un="mc" width="426" height="327" center="true"]

Alpha Rollouts: more bling for you

Hi all and welcome to the first post of the Mixwit blog.

Several major and minor features have been added to the Mixmaker and Mixtape so naturally the entire Mixwit team (both of us) are really excited to see what everyone does with them.

The Majors:

1) Share your mixtapes anywhere. On your blog. Myspace. Facebook. Anywhere online.

2) Add your own image to your mixtape: Make your mixtape your own.

3) Mixtape template PDF: We’ve posted a downloadable PDF template to enable you to accurately create your own skins.

4) Public alpha: No more alpha-user login box (i.e. no more “hamburger1″). The private testing is complete, but the project is still alpha quality (until a few more core features can be completed).

The Minors:

1) Image control: Your image is masked by the mixtape body, or can fill the whole tape. You can also scale the image and click & drag the image to make it look it’s best.

2) Text editing: You have options for editing and moving the text labels around, including click-and drag positioning. You can also double click on the text to enter your title and alias.

(quick note: the text editing & image dragging features will seem a bit quirky. We plan to expand these features pretty quickly, so the quirkiness will be resolved then.)

3) Glossiness: has been greatly increased to give users more bling contrast. This was rolled out last week, but we want to mention it for the early users, because old mixtapes are going to look extra-shiny.

4) New gears and spooled tape: We’ve replaced the schlocky gears with real-ish gears. Woot. The cool part is actually the spooled mag tape: It acts like real… uh… spooled tape. You’ll see.

5) Add your own track: Now you can add any track that you can find on the web.

6) Bug fixes: We still can’t claim to be bug free, but we squashed quite a few the past week. Most notably we worked out most of the kinks with Internet Explorer. Big thanks to everyone who reported bugs and an especially big thanks to Jake for lending us the windows box. Keep the reports coming!

There’s a ton of extra tweaks beyond these (like the addition of this blog), but why say more? Go play!