The mixtape has had a rocky relationship with the internet. Crowd favorites such as Muxtape and Mixwit have both been covered here but are also no longer in existence due to copyright concerns and lawsuits from the recording industries.

There is currently a slew of hosted sites available for creating your own playlist or mixtape. But what if you don’t trust uploading your music to a 3rd party service of questionable legality? I wanted to introduce a self-hosted version which allows you to upload your music to your own private space eliminating this concern. The software we can use to do this is called Opentape.

You can install Opentape into web hosting space you have purchased or even onto a self-built web server in your house. As long as the web server has PHP running on it, you are good to go. Let’s go over Opentape and how to get up and running.

Upload Opentape Files

Download Opentape and unzip the files. Copy to them to your web space in a directory such as http://yourwebsite.com/opentape/ or whatever you choose. Permissions must be set so that the web server can write into the /songs/ and the /settings/ directory, or you will see an error message like the one below:

You can either do this by changing the ownership of the files to the web server’s user, or changing permissions to “777″ to allow anyone to write to that folder (chmod 777 on the command line, or use your FTP client to set the permissions). Once permissions are set correctly, Opentape will have you enter an admin password that will let you manage your mixtape.

Add Music and Edit Description

Then you can name your mixtape and add a description; you can also allow the ability to link directly to the MP3 for download. You have 2 options for adding music. You can uploaded it individually directly in the admin interface. The second and faster option is to upload the songs directly to the server. Once the songs are uploaded, you can use the administrator interface to rearrange their order.

To send songs to your friends, you have 2 main options. The first is to simply send them a link to the site. The second is to embed a player in any other webpage.

Opentape is a very simple way to share your music online with friends. I’ve created this sample playlist using the creative-commons licensed Wired CD and includes such artists as Beastie Boys, Cee Lo and Le Tigre. This would also be a great way for bands to share their music.

You can listen to my demo Opentape site here.

As I had mentioned previously, there are other options if you do not have your own space to host the files or do not want to have to mess with personal web hosting. Grooveshark and Maestro.fm are two options in that space and have been recommended by MakeUseOf before. Due to the varying laws on the books depending on which country you are from – there are still open questions as to the legality of uploading your own private copyrighted music to a website where that music may, or may not, be available to others for listening to. I think that is where Opentape comes into play – if you want to maintain control over your collection it is better to be sure that your upload is actually private instead of leaving it in the hands of others.

If you have the need for a limited playlist, or if you are in a band, Opentape is a great solution for sharing music with your friends or even a broader audience. There are some more customized solutions which allow you to tightly integrate a playlist with a website, but I haven’t found an “easier” way to share music than Opentape. Let us know how you find it or if you have alternatives you would recommend to our readers!

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