There’s something a little bit magical about putting together a mixtape, a carefully curated list of songs designed to impress your musical taste on others, to showcase some of the hidden gems you’ve uncovered, or perhaps just impress a girl you like. You don’t get the same kind of magic with a Spotify playlist, but you can find something of a compromise with Tape.ly.
It’s free to sign up and get started on the site, and once you’ve entered a few personal details you can begin picking tracks for your mixtape. All of the mixtapes you put together use a unique, public URL which enables you to share them with whomever you wish. Use the central dashboard to manage your existing tapes and create new ones.
Adding new tracks is as simple as typing out the name of the song you want to include: YouTube and SoundCloud are both integrated so you’re going to find most of what you’re after. If not, you can upload tracks too. Embedded edit functions let you clean up titles and artist names and change the order of the songs — a very important consideration when making a mixtape.
Tape.ly offers an impressive number of options for changing the fonts and colours of your mixtape page and you can drop in a background image too. If you don’t have a picture then Tape.ly can search Flickr, Wikipedia and Google for you. When you’re happy, preview the tracks using the mini-player at the top, and then publish your creation to the web.