Simple solutions for a private micro-mix sharing site?
March 28, 2013 7:46 AM   Subscribe

As my friends and colleagues continue to move and diversify, I'd like to make a small, private site where we can share three- to five-song "mix tapes" of what we really love these days; ideally super easy from an interface perspective to create these mix tapes. What's my shortest path to goal?

I'm comfortable with basic HTML (pre-5), simple CSS, and WordPress. I'm not at all a Tumblr user. Privacy is super important. My ideal would be something like the original iteration of designers.mx, before it got kind of bloated.

I just need the site to let users do two things:

1. Upload a mix. Three to five MP3 tracks, a name, and a "cover image".
2. View and download current mixes (by cover image), sorted by most recent first.

With a straightforward login/privacy barrier that prohibits random browsers from accessing the site.

I'm dealing with people who for the most part are fairly Web-savvy. I'm confident that they *could* handle doing this in a pretty standard WP framework where they make "posts" as a "contributor" to a "blog", but I think the success of this project will lie in making this as fast, seamless and painless for the users as possible.

I'm not super keen on spending money on a WP theme, but if $20 could save me eight hours of fiddling, I'd consider that a sound investment.
posted by Shepherd to Computers & Internet (9 answers total) 1 user marked this as a favorite
 
Are the songs on YouTube? MixTube is a pretty nice solution. Of course they're not immediately downloadable as a group, but that's not stopping anyone from grabbing the audio mp4 from YouTube.
posted by dobi at 7:51 AM on March 28, 2013


There's also 8tracks, which is basically the same thing you're describing aside from the access control.
posted by Jairus at 8:00 AM on March 28, 2013


Other than browsing by cover image, a shared Dropbox folder is probably the easiest easiest. (Though you can put the cover image in the folder.) On the downside, it eats a little bit of everyone's free DB space.
posted by supercres at 8:27 AM on March 28, 2013 [2 favorites]


Private blog on Blogger with everyone able to post, and uploading to Dropbox or Adrive.
posted by OmieWise at 8:51 AM on March 28, 2013


agree with dropbox, or you could use google drive or ms skydrive
posted by askmehow at 8:53 AM on March 28, 2013


Private blog on Blogger with everyone able to post, and uploading to Dropbox or Adrive.

To flesh this out a bit: I've actually seen this work really well for a private sharing blog of the type you are mentioning. You can use those Ajax(?) plug ins along the side that allow people to chat with each other (or leave messages) as needed, with no real overhead. The sharing can occur with whatever method people feel comfortable; i.e., it still works to share even if one person uses Adrive and another uses Dropbox. The archive is in a familiar format and managed by Blogger. I actually think it works great.
posted by OmieWise at 9:01 AM on March 28, 2013


Private shared playlists on Spotify?
posted by 3491again at 11:03 AM on March 28, 2013


Response by poster: I'm not 100% sure I'm clear on how the Blogger/Dropbox_Adrive solution would work: as I understand it, each contributor would

1. Upload files to their shared folder on Dropbox/Adrive etc.
2. Copy the addresses of said files
3. Post on the private blog, with the post containing the URLs of the files

and then users would open the post, download the files, and listen to them?

If that's the path, it seems functional, but not as... direct as I'd like. I'm angling (and this may be an impossible request) around something more like a single-serving site where you can upload three to five files, a post image, and then the site would handle playing the files directly on the site.

It may be too tall an order, or maybe I'm not grasping a subtlety in the Blogger/Dropbox solution that turns the Blogger end into the sole interface.
posted by Shepherd at 11:17 AM on March 28, 2013


Oh, I see. Yeah, the Blogger/Dropbox solution works like a regular old music blog in that one downloads the content to play it. I have no experience with streaming anything, so I don't know how to figure that.
posted by OmieWise at 11:50 AM on March 28, 2013


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