ArtLung Mixtapes

About these playlists

I've been making mixtapes for years. It was cassette tapes originally. For myself or friends or family. I taped from my own and others vinyl records. I would record the radio. I would tape the television audio.

I worked at Slacker Radio for 6 years. It was a great job. The mixes on this page before 2017 were originally on that service.

I scrobble my music to last.fm directly from Spotify now. I also use the Last.fm mobile app to Music.app plays from my iPhone. When I worked at Slacker I contributed to scrobblers for their properties: Slacker Radio & AOL Music. Web Scrobbler has only improved since then. They support not just Chrome, but also Firefox, Safari, and Edge now. To scrobble my YouTube listens I scrobble to libre.fm, an open source scrobbling service.

For the last decade I've started a new playlist at the beginning of the year. I name it something with the word pho in it. When I hear a song that grabs me, or makes me happy, or makes me think of something else, I'll add it. I do this rather than accept algorithmic suggested playlists. I like it better when things come from weird places, like very old movies or a line in a movie that reminds me of a lyric.

All playlists may be downloaded as CSV files, which have made it straightforward to convert the lists of songs into, for example YouTube video playlists using Tune My Music.

I have a cassette tape illustration I'm pretty proud of. At one time it graced this page. I mentioned it in a blog post in February 2024. You can examine the code or even fork your own version on CodePen.

I did some work using CSS to turn scans of cassette tape printed covers into a faux-paper effect. See Mixtape Covers (1996), adapted for the web and More Mixtape Covers.

My ThisIsMyJam archive from 2012-2014 is here: artlung.com/archive/thisismyjam.com/. My Metafilter mixes—MeFi Swaps— (Metafilter users swapped mix CDs, MP3 discs or USB drives) from 2010 and 2011 are at smorgasborg.artlung.com/mefiswap/. smorgasborg.artlung.com/mefiswap2/.

If you liked this, or you adapt any of these playlists for another service, feel free to contact me. If you blog, and I think everyone is a blogger, rerally, you could post about them and send a webmention and I'll get them.

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