Muxtape

Muxtape's new developer's muxtape

Fri, 04 Jul 2008 00:09:57 -0400

New color picker, now with Actually Works™ technology. You can...

Thu, 03 Jul 2008 23:33:00 -0400

New color picker, now with Actually Works™ technology. You can also now change your name, delete your account, or wipe your playlist.

Muxtape Update

Mon, 30 Jun 2008 10:53:46 -0400

Last night we released a major revision to Muxtape’s underlying software. It’s the product of three weeks of intensive development and represents an almost complete rewrite of the user interface, playback functionality, and backend song organization. Hopefully this morning you didn’t notice the difference, but the changes are significant. The site had been running on older code that wasn’t intended to evolve (dating back to its days as a simple UI experiment), but now we’re in a position to start expanding the functionality of Muxtape in a way we couldn’t before.

So while this is largely a release to set the stage for coming features, there’s still some immediate changes you might be interested in:

* favorites have been doubled to 24
* upload limit raised to 24 MB
* muxtapes now show who their creator has favorited
* links to individual songs in RSS will autoplay
* much better error recovery for broken streams
* support for Linux, Solaris and any Unix that runs Flash
* much increased reliability on all platforms
* many bug fixes as most the frontend code is brand new
* iPhone support temporarily halted (native app in the works ;)

Muxtape’s first full time developer starts tomorrow; July should be an exciting month!

New York Magazine's Summer Muxtapes

Fri, 27 Jun 2008 09:26:00 -0400

New York Magazine's Summer Muxtapes:

“What jams are rocking RZA’s iTunes these days? And what beats are bumping in Albert Hammond Jr.’s ride? In this week’s magazine, we asked members of five New York bands (also including Free Kitten’s Kim Gordon, the Jealous Girlfriends’ Alex Lipsen, and Pistolera’s Sandra Lilia Velasquez) to make playlists for classic New York summer activities. “

Liner notes here. RZA is the central four chambers of the Wu-Tang Clan, Mr. Hammond plays guitar in The Strokes.

clublonely.muxtape.com

Wed, 25 Jun 2008 10:28:00 -0400

clublonely.muxtape.com: Summer raps.

Transparent House

Fri, 20 Jun 2008 10:20:49 -0400

Transparent House

Alternative Tentacles' muxtape

Mon, 16 Jun 2008 15:55:18 -0400

Alternative Tentacles' muxtape: From their site: “Alternative Tentacles Records was established in June of 1979 and is most likely the longest lasting (and still active) underground record labels around. Although it is perceived by many as a “punk” label, having released records by Dead Kennedys and others, it is actually best known for its impact on the world of underground culture.”

Photo

Fri, 13 Jun 2008 22:29:31 -0400

Account creation down

Fri, 13 Jun 2008 17:51:00 -0400

Thanks to those who’ve emailed about account creation being down over the last hour; we’re fixing it right now. Update: fixed.

Briefly: "State of Muxtape"

Tue, 10 Jun 2008 19:58:00 -0400

There’s heavy development happening behind the scenes. We recently hired an ace programmer who will start by addressing some nagging bugs, and we’ve also been developing new features that traverse Muxtape in elegant ways to discover new music. I haven’t been more excited about the site since launch. There are thousands of people signing up every day and some brilliant, fresh minds involved with the project and you’ll start to see this energy reflected in the site itself very soon. Muxtape is focused on becoming the best place to discover new music and to share your discoveries, and we’re very excited to have the resources now to start really pushing things forward. Let summer commence under the cool glow of an LCD in a dark, air-conditioned programming cocoon.

Mike Shinoda's muxtape

Sat, 07 Jun 2008 11:56:24 -0400

Mike Shinoda's muxtape: Nice selection of hip hop. Mike Shinoda’s band is Linkin Park.

Menomena's muxtape

Thu, 05 Jun 2008 22:42:00 -0400

Menomena's muxtape: Menomena is one of my favorite Portland bands and I’m very excited that they’ve posted some of their B-sides and rarities on Muxtape. They’re playing the Capitol Hill Block Party on July 26th alongside Vampire Weekend, Les Savy Fav, and others.

Online

Sun, 01 Jun 2008 15:54:00 -0400

We’re back, although The Planet is still without power and might be for a while. Peter just moved the entire site to EC2, no big deal ;) Thanks for your patience.

Still down

Sun, 01 Jun 2008 11:42:00 -0400

According to The Planet (our hosting company), “[Yesterday] evening at 4:55pm CDT in our H1 data center, electrical gear shorted, creating an explosion and fire that knocked down three walls surrounding our electrical equipment room. Thankfully, no one was injured. In addition, no customer servers were damaged or lost. We have just been allowed into the building to physically inspect the damage. Early indications are that the short was in a high-volume wire conduit. We were not allowed to activate our backup generator plan based on instructions from the fire department. This is a significant outage, impacting approximately 9,000 servers and 7,500 customers. All members of our support team are in, and all vendors who supply us with data center equipment are on site.” No ETA so far, it’s about noon right now.

Muxtape is down as of 3:01 am because of a problem at our host. They lost power to a data center,...

Sun, 01 Jun 2008 03:06:17 -0400

Muxtape is down as of 3:01 am because of a problem at our host. They lost power to a data center, and that’s pretty much all I know right now. I don’t anticipate any data loss, but I have a backup of everything as of 2:07 this afternoon just in case. We’ll be back as soon as the power comes back on.

Back Online / Debriefing

Thu, 22 May 2008 19:24:49 -0400

On May 21st, Muxtape experienced an error that caused every song in the database to be overwritten with the wrong artist & title. I initially reported this as a malicious act, but after taking the site down and investigating further it was clear that it was a fault of the software, for which I am wholly responsible. The last available complete backup of the songs database was three weeks old; so while the site is now repaired and back online, most songs uploaded in the last three weeks have disappeared.

I’m truly sorry for this massive inconvenience. Data integrity is something I take seriously, and to prevent this from happening again we’ve started creating complete backups of the database twice a day. In addition, Muxtape will soon be joined by two more developers (as opposed to one developer who’s constantly distracted by everything else it takes to start and run a business/web site).

Thanks for your patience and understanding through this, and please contact us if you have any questions or concerns.

Update #3

Thu, 22 May 2008 13:31:00 -0400

We’ve narrowed down the issue, but we’re triple-checking everything to make sure it doesn’t happen again before we bring the site back up. I’m very sorry to report that, contrary to what I said earlier, there’s going to be some lost data. I won’t drag out all the details, but Muxtape has two backup methods and they both failed in a particular way that screwed the other out of being useful. A perfect storm, if you will. I take full responsibility; there was a typo in the code a few weeks ago that I swore up and down had been fixed and it would’ve rendered this whole thing moot, but it somehow didn’t get saved and went unnoticed until now. Extremely frustrating.

What it boils down to is that only 15% or so of songs uploaded in the last three weeks (and 100% of songs before that point) are going to be restored. I’m very sorry about this, and I’m working with some brilliant minds to make sure it never happens again. Muxtape will be back online this afternoon.

Update #2

Wed, 21 May 2008 21:13:08 -0400

We’re hard at work restoring the database, which is a little more involved than it would be otherwise thanks to various mitigating circumstances. Once the site comes back up, every single muxtape should be restored with all their songs in the right order. However, some songs uploaded in the last three weeks that have a custom title may need to be relabeled. We’re very sorry for the inconvenience, thanks for being patient during our downtime.

Update

Wed, 21 May 2008 17:11:41 -0400

I don’t want to bring the site up again until I’m sure what happened this afternoon won’t get repeated, but there are backups of the overwritten data and I anticipate most of it being restored successfully.

Muxtape temporarily down

Wed, 21 May 2008 16:11:00 -0400

Update: what initially appeared as someone gaining access to our server could have possibly been an accident. We are still investigating the cause of the problem. I’ve taken the site down temporarily as a precaution. Thanks for your understanding and patience.