Help my far-flung friends and I share and discovery new music with each other.

August 29, 2006 2:54 PM

Help my far-flung friends and I share and discovery new music with each other.

So we're very into discovering new music via old school mix-tapes (CDs nowadays).

What we've been doing:
Each person is assigned a month.
On your month, you burn copies of your favorite mix CD
You manually send each person on the mailing list a copy.
Repeat

Unfortunately, this method doesn't work as well as it used to, seeing as our group of friends is now up to 20 people and we're dispersed across about 5 different states.

Any one have any ideas on how we can improve this process? I would think there would have to be some online (Web 2.0?) app out there that can help this process.

Oh, and everyone on the list does have access to CD burners, but not are not exactly techno-savvy (so FTP is not really a good option).

posted by MaverickX to media & arts (10 comments total)

Use last.fm to show each other what you've been listening to? Or I guess if you are distributing things anyway, so aren't bothered by copyright infringment, what about using private BitTorrent trackers?
posted by Orange Goblin at 3:15 PM on August 29, 2006

You could use something like WebJay to share playlists online.
posted by andrewraff at 3:22 PM on August 29, 2006

You could use Hamachi to set up a private netwrok to post files to each other. Which doesn't really require much tech savvy, as long as they're all willing to install the program.
posted by cathodeheart at 3:23 PM on August 29, 2006

Just saw what looked like a potential solution for this problem on Download Squad: AllPeers
posted by fishfucker at 3:41 PM on August 29, 2006

How about a Private blog that you can all edit.

Then use sendspace to host the files?
posted by gergtreble at 3:51 PM on August 29, 2006

Some use an ftp server for that kind of thing.
posted by Hildago at 5:12 PM on August 29, 2006

I'd either use an FTP server, or just find some free webhosting and share the ftp login... though you may need to get rid of mp3 extensions for a free webhost... maybe zip the files with a password.
posted by pompomtom at 6:10 PM on August 29, 2006

I was going to say AllPeers, but FF beat me to it. :)

You could also try Pando or make a sharing folder on Rapidshare.
posted by LuckySeven~ at 6:38 PM on August 29, 2006

A wiki service like this one might fill the bill. You could create a wiki everyone could access and upload files to. I've used the free version of this service but you would probably need the bigger space of one of the pay versions.
posted by pasici at 9:04 PM on August 29, 2006

I tried something similar, what we did was all create Gmail accounts, and I created a mailing list that would forward an email to all of those Gmail accounts.

So you send music to the mailing list address, and it would be distributed to all the Gmail accounts.

Probably violates some sort of EULA, and I remembered some problem I had about it not working if you sent the original email from a Gmail account.
posted by mutantdisco! at 10:13 AM on August 30, 2006