Bringing Back the 8 Track
Fashions come and go, but a true classic is never forgotten. For those of us who can recall a time before digital music in the form of CD’s and DVD’s, you might recall analogue cassette tapes. Yes the old classics. 8 tracks otherwise known as Lear Jet Stereo 8’s was one of the first tape formats to really achieve great commercial success thanks largely to the automobile industry for example Ford Motors including 8 track players as an option in most vehicles in the mid 60’s. This bought music into our personal space and made music easily accessible to the man on the street. 8 tracks where immensely popular during the 70’s but alas finally faded away in the early 80’s to be replaced by compact cassette tapes.
This now obsolete but once hugely popular format was digitally rejuvenated last year by a web service called Muxtape. Many elements were keeping with 4 and 8 track traditions and conventions, nostalgically reminding us of a classical way to enjoy music. The site allowed users to create their own mixes of about 12 songs, upload the files, sequence and post. The site caused a stir populating the blogosphere with each new feature addition, quickly achieving over 100 000 hits per day. Sadly this site is no more.
8tracks has set the stage alight as the legal replacement to Muxtape. This simple site introduces many exciting new features carrying on from Muxtape such as search functionality and a dedicated song library. If you want to upload other tracks you can always use the simple drag and drop iTunes application. Perhaps most exciting is its full integration to Twitter, allowing one to post new mixes as well as to notify your friends and communities. Not a fan of Twitter, that’s okay 8tracks allows you to embed a simple player into other sites as well.
From registration to publishing my mix took me all of 2 minutes. Much to the disdain of the girls in the office I was in a grunge mood today. What do you think? (comment on and rate my mix.) If you think you can do better, then give it a go at www.8tracks.com
My Mix: http://8tracks.com/philraw/phils-grunge-mix
Image courtesy of: extrawack.blogspot.com
This is an awesome tool. Now everyone can be a dj, at as little cost as possible
Ok, this is nice, but It just took forever (27min) to download the music (8 songs) as required, and then finally when all the songs where loaded and you play them, they stop and start. It sounds like you still trying to download the songs. I will play some more with it.
sometimes it plays perfectallybut i must admitt I also sometimes have a similar problem with stop start play, the songs are meant to play streaming, so think the problem is most likely bandwidth related.