Mixing it up online

Allow Metro to be your Internet music ‘tape’ measurer

You want to listen before buying, your roommate needs a pick-me-up, or you have summer job-induced boredom — just a few of the reasons why we use online music players. Their sheer number may seem too vast to navigate, and each boasts a variety of features, so let us be your music-loving guinea pig.

Seeqpod (www.seeqpod.com) could be the new Pandora, which was last year’s YouTube, which was the year before that’s MySpace, all the way back to Napster. Its scientists developed a flash player to work with over 11 million indexed results for audio and video on the Web, where others host it. It can also find videos, interviews, artists’ info and, if they’re touring, a jovial green button appears with a red “On Tour!” banner. It redirects you to www.songkick.com for tour dates. Seeq-pod sidesteps the illegal downloading conundrum by not actually enabling you to download songs. It’s more like a lending library.

If Seeqpod seems too corporate — the site recently added advertisements — then perhaps Muxtape (www.muxtape.tumblr.com) is more your tape speed. It’s a unique, albeit disorganized, method for hearing what everyone else is listening to. Its simple design — a grid of boxes  representing the “tapes” of other users, will warm the heart of anyone who’s ever pressed “record” when a certain song came on the radio. Besides browsing this crisscross of compilations, you can upload your own MP3s to share. If you’re just in it for discovery, though, it can be difficult to find the playlist you want, since most go by esoteric names like “mailing a bear.” But with patience and nostalgia, Muxtape works.

Patience, shmatience, right? Some of us don’t have time to devote to searching. Instead, head to Fuzz. At www.fuzz.com/mixtapes, prepare to save time with its better organization, or waste it away with an opportunity to be tediously creative. We discovered Fuzz as an application on that other free-time-destroying site, Facebook. Fuzz’s service stems from an already valuable site for music lovers, and lets you create your own mixtape by either uploading songs or browsing through an extensive library. The coolest part is that you can decorate the intangible cassette tape before sharing it with friends — or at least the ones who won’t be weirded out receiving an online mixtape from you. Remember, if they’re sending it to all their friends on Facebook, it doesn’t mean they LIKE you like you.