What is Mixtape?

Mixtape is a web page for making someone a mixtape. You build a cassette with a Side A and a Side B, write a short note for each song and a letter for the inside of the case, and then you send a link. The person opens it, sees the cassette with their name on the label, reads your notes and presses play.

The player: the cassette on the left, the J-card and the letter on the right.

What it does

You start with Make a mixtape. The top of the editor is the cassette, and as you type the title and the names they show up on its label in handwriting. You pick the color of the shell and the paper of the label, then add songs to each side. Every song has a title, an artist, a link and a note, and the note is the part that makes it a mixtape and not a playlist: "this was on when we got lost looking for the lake".

When it's ready you press Make a link and send that link however you like, in a message, an email or a card. When they open it, the cassette slides in with "for" and their name on it, and they press Open it. Songs with a YouTube link play right there in the page, and the reels on the cassette turn while it plays, with the tape moving from the left reel to the right one as the side goes on. Songs from anywhere else, like Spotify or Bandcamp, get an Open button that takes them to the song in a new tab.

There's also a print view that lays out a real J-card, the folded paper insert that goes in a cassette case, at real size with the track lists and the title on the spine. Basically, it's everything a mixtape used to be, in one link.

Where a mix lives

There's no server keeping mixes and no account. The mixes you make are kept in your own browser, under "Your mixes" on the start page. When you make a link, the whole mix (the label, the songs, the notes and the letter) is packed into the link itself, which means the link IS the mix. Nothing gets uploaded to make it, and the part of the link that holds the mix never even gets sent to the page's server when someone opens it.

That also means whoever has the link has the mix, so send it the way you'd send a letter: to the person, not to a public page. And since the mix lives in the link, changing it later doesn't change a link you already sent. You just make a new link.

Your mixes don't move between devices by themselves, and clearing the site's data in your browser deletes them. Export on the start page saves them all as one file, which you can bring back with Import, here or in another browser. In a private window, or anywhere the browser won't keep anything, Mixtape still works and says "Only in this window", and what you make lasts until you close it, so make a link before you do.

Where it works

Mixtape is one web page, so it's the same in any up-to-date browser on a phone, a tablet or a computer. On a phone everything is stacked in one column, and on a computer the editor and the player use the room side by side. You can drag songs with a finger or a mouse, and everything can also be done with the keyboard. On an iPhone or iPad, Share and then Add to Home Screen puts it on your Home Screen with its own icon.

It follows your device's light or dark setting, and the small sun or moon button at the top switches it by hand. If your device asks for less motion, the cassette doesn't slide in and the reels hold still, but the tape still moves to show where you are in the side.

The one thing it loads from outside

Everything Mixtape needs comes from the same place as the page, fonts included. The only exception is YouTube: the first time someone presses play on a YouTube song, the page loads YouTube's player, and the video plays from youtube-nocookie.com, which is YouTube's privacy-enhanced mode for players on other sites. Until someone presses play, nothing is loaded from YouTube at all. Links to other services are just links, and they only open when someone taps Open.

Next step

If you want to try it, go to stuffs.tiresia.xyz/mixtape and press Make a mixtape. Making a mix walks through the editor.