neuralgraffiti

A long while back, I had this idea. The idea was to get exposure to more new music by getting people to help me create a themed “mixtape” on some sort of regular basis. A couple months ago, I asked a few friends if they were interested, and decided on the first theme. Then my computer blew up, setting the project back a little bit.

Tonight, it’s finally ready to go.

The theme of the first mixtape is “My Current Obsession” and it’s simply whatever song is lingering, stuck in the collective heads of my panel of official song suggesters. There’s a great mix of stuff in there, from a hip-hop track that may be “the most sociopathic thing” one submitter has ever heard to “sweet, sweet accordion melodies”, from “good clean power pop fun” to “moody, soaring vocals.”

Originally, I was planning on distributing it as a podcast, but I didn’t like the way iTunes/my iPod deals with them. (Specifically, I hate they manner in which it always restarts a given song from where you stopped instead of starting over.)

So, I decided I needed a different distribution method, and whipped up a neat little software tool to import the a downloaded zip file of the music into iTunes. Unfortunately, it only works on Windows, and with iTunes. If someone wants to loan me a Mac for a while, I’m willing to try to write a Mac version.

For those commentators that supplied the reasons for their selection, I put those in the “Lyrics” metadata of each song. I was going to use “Comments”, but that actually doesn’t hold as much data as you’d think.

Anyway, to get the mixtape, just go here (you’ll have to be a registered user of Neuralgraffiti.com to download). Big thanks to everyone who sent me songs; I’m really excited about this little project, and (as clichéd as it sounds) I quite literally wouldn’t have been able to do it without them.

And stay tuned for the next mixtape.