Favtape Relaunches As Muxtape On Steroids

It has been just over a month since Muxtape, a popular music site that let users share the online equivalent of cassette mixtapes, was shut down by the RIAA for copyright infringement issues. Since then we’ve seen the site reborn in a few incarnations, including an Open Sourced version called OpenTape. Now Favtape, a basic music site that launched last July, is releasing an overhauled new version that has led developer Ryan Sit to appropriately call it “Muxtape on steroids”.

Favtape originally launched as an enhanced frontend to Seeqpod that let users import and listen to full versions of songs from their Last.FM and Pandora playlists. The site’s interface is similar to Muxtape, sporting a very basic layout and a sparse feature set. At the time I commented that the site was too simple – there was no easy way to rearrange a playlist, and there were few features other than audio playback.

The new version of the site addresses these issues, and introduces a host of new features that make the site a worthwhile replacement to Muxtape. Users are now free to rearrange songs on their playlists, and can easily share their Favtapes using a static URL (You can see the one I made here). Other new features include links to music videos for each song, album art, an embeddable player, and playlists of top songs from Billboard charts and iTunes. The new site also supports a mobile interface for the iPhone, so you can listen to your playlists on the go.

One of Favtape’s biggest advantages over Muxtape (but also its main weakness) is its heavy reliance on Seeqpod, a music site that indexes music files across the web but never hosts them. Unlike Muxtape, which asked users to upload their favorite music files to generate a playlist, Favtape is only including links to these files, so it should theoretically be harder to target with lawsuits. That said, if a lawsuit ever brings Seeqpod down (and they have already tried), Favtape will be left an empty shell.

Other sites in this space include Songza, Snuzu, and Streamzy.

http://favtape.com/player.swf?playlist_url=http://favtape.com/jasonk/IHaveAmazingTasteInMusic/xspf