Host Your Own Muxtape Clone With OpenTape
Muxtape, the web service that let you create music mixes to share with your friends, is currently wrestling with the RIAA and has, at least for now, shut its doors. But if you’re fan of the service and you happen to have some web hosting space available there’s a new open source project that allows you to create your own hosted Muxtape.
OpenTape, as the project is known, is written in PHP and is no more difficult to set up than WordPress. Of course, being a self-hosted program, OpenTape isn’t going to work for everyone, but if you have a server running PHP5 and Apache all you need to do is upload the OpenTape package.
If you’re a band looking for a cheap, easy way to get your music on the web, OpenTape could be a great option. Thanks to an included embeddable music player, OpenTape would be an easy way for your fans to take your tracks to their own sites and help spread the word.
While it does require some technical chops, OpenTape has managed to reduce installation to a matter of drag-and-drop FTPing (or scp if you’re the command line type). I set up OpenTape on my local home server and was up and running in about five minutes.
The results are pretty much an exact feature clone of Muxtape — create a playlist, upload your tracks (or use SFTP, since it’s on your server) and create your mix.
There’s an embedded player available, so if you want, you can stream your OpenTape mixes to other sites — beware the bandwidth though.
As nice as it all sounds there are some potential legal issues. Hosting your own version of Muxtape might open you up to the same fees and legal concerns that brought down Muxtape and are threatening to bring down Pandora. There’s a fair use argument to make with Muxtape, but it hasn’t been tested in court and we’re no lawyers, so proceed at your own risk.
One possible way to avoid the RIAA would be to dive into OpenTape’s source code and modify it to stream music from Seeqpod or the like, which is what FavTape does to avoid the legal issues that come from hosting the actual files. Assuming you have some experience with PHP it shouldn’t be too hard to whip something up.
From a technical standpoint, while it’s true that OpenTape seriously tilts the RIAA’s whack-a-mole game in your favor — assuming it catches on — never under estimate the number of mole-whacking mallets the RIAA can wield.
[high five Factory Joe, Twitter]
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