Music site Favtape claims it’s “Muxtape on steroids”, referring to the recently shut-down online mixtape service. So what’s it all about? Well, it’s the same idea, except two steps removed from any copyright infringement that’s taking place, and with a few more features.You can use the site without registering. For example, you can have a mixtape whipped up for you based on an individual artist search – we entered ‘black crowes’ and got a list of songs back, complete with links to buy CDs and MP3s on Amazon, as well as iTunes, ringtones from Thumbplay, and links to eBay searches.That’s on the left. There are also links to LyricWiki lyrics, YouTube videos, and the artist and track pages on Favtape, as well as links to email track URLs to friends and share them on a host of social networking and Web 2.0 sites. It’s certainly comprehensive, in other words.From the homepage, you can also auto-generate mixtapes based on the top 100 songs on iTunes, top songs by year (from 1901 to 2008), as well as typing in your Pandora or Last.fm login details to create a mixtape from those tracks.However, if you want to create your own completely customised mixtape, you have to sign up – a simple process involving entering your email, desired username and a password. Then, it’s just a case of typing in search terms into a box at the top of the screen, then adding tracks to your newly-created mix.The site pulls them in from the Seeqpod music search engine, which itself only indexes tracks hosted elsewhere on the web. Favtape is clearly hoping this approach will leave it less open to legal problems than Muxtape, which encouraged users to upload songs and hosted them itself.Once created, you get a URL that you can publicise to get your mixtape heard – here’s ours – although there’s no obvious way of then embedding the playlist on a separate website or social networking profile.Like all these Music 2.0 sites, Favtape is simple to use, and removes all barriers to users making and promoting their own mixes of songs. Naturally, nobody’s getting paid for it, which if Favtape takes off, could see the site eliciting more attention from music industry bodies.Oh, one more interesting thing: Favtape uses Yahoo’s FoxyTunes web player to actually playback the songs – it pops up at the bottom of the screen when you start listening to a playlist.
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