What is this place?

The Mixtape Collective is an outlet for users to create and share hypothetical mixtapes. One part game and one part social network, the Mixtape Collective strives to spread the concept of mixtaping and disseminate musical knowledge among the community.

The focus lies in mixtapes, but the emphasis is on the community. Our database is 100% user-driven and moderated -- majority rules. We encourage participation by offering users a way to earn points, which amount to 'overall power' on the site as well as fun 'badges' that users can find, earn, win and show off.

In the end, it's all about music. Just like Nietzsche said: "Without music, life would be a mistake."

What is a mixtape?

A mixtape is a home-made compilation of songs arranged in a specific order, usually reflecting the musical tastes and mood of the compiler. Mixtapes can range from a conceptual mix of songs linked by a theme or mood, to a highly personal statement tailored to the tape's intended recipient. Find out more about mixtapes by heading over to the wikipedia entry on mixtapes.

More specifically: a mixtape as a whole is far greater than the sum of it's individual tracks.

Why would I want to make a mixtape?

Crafting a mixtape, regardless of it's purpose, can be amazingly fun and empowering. Essentially you are using the art of others to convey some message, thought or idea. Plus, any excuse to sit down and peruse our respective music collections is a-okay in our books

Who are you?

We are Corey Sprague and Eric Feigner, the two parts of the Eighth Nerve design faction. We are both graduating seniors in Computer Science at Oregon State University and this is our senior project; we've spent many a sleepless night SSH'd into our host, typing like madmen on a blank Notepad++ (big props!) window. We hope you enjoy it.

Rules & Etiquette

The Mixtape Collective promotes expression and free speech. However, we do have some rules that must be followed.

1. Please do not upload copyrighted material. Although difficult to enforce, we would greatly appreciate if you avoid this potential issue.
2. Please do not include links to illegal activity. Primarily links involving piracy of any shape or form.
3. Please do not upload pornography. Sex is great, but this is a website about music. Use your best judgement.
4. Finally, we have no interest in censoring your speech. However, we will not tolerate hate speech. Severe use will be grounds for immediate dismissal regardless of who you are.

Our rules are pretty simple. If you don't create a fuss and just enjoy the site, then you have nothing to worry about. We reserve the right to terminate user accounts if we feel it is necessary for ensuring an enjoyable mixtape experience for others.

Where are my pants?

Always in the last place you look. At least that's been our experience.

Navigating the jungle?

The front page can be a little bit daunting until you are familiar with the Mixtape Collective layout. Once you know where things are, however, the website becomes a twitch-click experience, allowing users to quickly traverse the website in 5 clicks or less.

So, explore a little bit (you might even find a badge or two!). If you still can't find what you are looking for, we have more detailed descriptions below.

Lists

We're not going to lie -- we love lists. We have tons and tons of data clogging our database, so this is where we show it off...

Contests

To keep things fresh, fun and competitive, we hold contests. Winners are rewarded with badges, points and praise from the community. Think you have what it takes?

Music

Think of the music page as your gateway to every artist, album and track page on the Mixtape Collective. By searching for specific words, you can easily find whatever you are looking for, most of the time.

If what you are searching for isn't in the database, you'll notice a little button in the lower-right corner. By clicking this and using the form that appears, you will be able to add any artist / album / track to our database. Heck, you'll even get a point reward for it.

There is one catch, if you enter bogus data or are sloppy in your input (ie: punctuation, capitalization, spelling, etc), you will incur a point deduction.

Two great resources for verifying correctness are the Amazon Music Search and the MusicBrainz search. Use 'em!

Moderations

Details concerning moderations can be found here

Relationships

A quick way to keep up on your friends and enemies. View some of their recent activity and specify your relationships with them!

The Overview

Your profile *is* your identity on the Mixtape Collective. We've worked hard to keep things clean and simple, but still allow for your (awesome) personality to shine through. Below is a basic rundown of what you can do.

Avatars & Images

Avatars are key to making your profile unique. We've created a simple interface for uploading and resizing images for avatar creation. We also allow you to keep up to 8 avatars in your library, allowing you to keep things fresh without having to reupload. We've got your back.

Images are a little bit different. We still have an easy-to-use upload form, but instead of cropping your image, we allow you to create your own thumbnail image, which will be rotated through the 'random images' section of your profile. Clicking on these thumbnails will bring up the full-sized image.

The Essentials

We like you, but we don't really care if you are in a relationship, whether you smoke, how much money you make, what diety you praise, we just want the basic demographics. Forge it if you aren't comfortable giving up these details -- we aren't selling any user data.

Liner Notes

Aside from an avatar, your liner notes are the second most important aspect of your profile. This is a blank page for you to fill in with whatever you wish. Expand on your personal details, explain your mixtaping methodology or curse the creators of this site -- anything goes.

(a few of your) Favorite things

Besides fire and the internets, top-5 lists are the greatest thing man has invented to date. Use the header text fields to define a catergory and use the indented text fields below to fill in the details.

The first category has already been decided for you. This is a music site, after all. If you are looking for some inspiration, just peruse other user's profiles and see what they are doing. The possibilities are endless!

Equipping Badges

Whenever you recieve a badge, it gets placed in your badge repository. Using the badges in your repository, you can rearrange as you see fit. The top five badges of your choosing will be displayed prominently on your profile.

The first position of your top five badges is extra special. Whatever badge you have in this place will be used as your 'icon' when you leave a tag anywhere on the site. This is a great way to show off your super-exclusive badge.

Options

If you ever have to change your e-mail address or password, this is the place to come.

You can also opt-out of our mailings, if you so desire. We don't spam, we only send out messages when we have something big to say.

My Messages

This page is your own personal mixtape collective mailbox. Any messages you send and receive will be stored here. These include both personal messages and system messages notifying you of news that might be pertinent to your account.

You can use 'My Messages' to quickly reply to previous conversations, but new conversations must be started by clicking the 'Send Message' icon on a user's profile.

Tags

Tags are a quick way to leave a public message. Tag forms are strewn across the site, and can be a fun way to engage in public conversation or share your opinions with the world.

Feedback

The feedback form is a good way to share your thoughts with us, the developers. This is a great platform for making suggestions, criticisms, or pointing out bugs you have encountered. Constructive feedback will be rewarded!

Mixtape Creation

First off: Creating a proper mix is not a quick task. Thusly, we have broken the mixtape creation process into four easy-to-manage sections.

1. Define your mix -- Pick a title (we suggest clever titles, as they are fun to read) and three 'keywords' to describe your mix. These keywords are used to link mixes together, so pick good ones -- as they will increase your 'visibility' on the site. Finally, fill in your description. Use this to tell us a little about your mix. Remember: carefully crafted, well documented mixes will net you more votes and eventually, more points.



2. Pick your tracks -- The heart of the process, you start with an empty mix. Use the music search form to search for your track. You will have the option to add a track, should the song you want not be in the music database.
   
   Selecting your track will move it to your 'scratchpad' where you have a progress bar (remember, mixtapes have to fit on a standard 80-minute CD) and the option to add a track description. Use this to explain why this song recieves the honor of being included on your mix. At the top, you will find your current tracklist. You can grab a song by clicking and dragging to reposition it in the mix as well as make edits to your description.



3. Add some art -- No mix is complete without some bitchin' cover art. Use the upload form to crop the image to be used as your cover. You can preview the full-sized version by clicking on the thumbnailed image.



4. Preview -- Use this to see a preview of your 'finalized' mix and make tweaks, should you need to. When you are satisfied, 'activate' your mix. This will make your mix permanent, with no ability to edit them. Make 'em count.

Mixtape viewing & rating

When viewing mixtapes, be judicious, be brutal, be truthful. It's okay to admit that not every mix is a good one. If, perchance, a mix strikes your fancy, you will be given the option to rate it, just like a profile or artist/album/track. Reward well-crafted mixes with high scores. Well thought-out, carefully assembled mixes are easy to spot.

Badges?

Badges are just another way for us to reward active members. There are many badges available to be unlocked for your account. You are able to display up to five of your favorite badges on your profile. This can be especially rewarding if you have unlocked some of the more rare badges. They become a status symbol of sorts.

The badge placed in your #1 slot will serve as your avatar when posting tags on the site. Wear your first badge with pride!

Getting them

There are various scenarios that will reward you with a badge, some of these include:

• milestones: rewarded for progressing on the site
• uniques: custom-tailored for the deserving
• lucky badges: for being at the right place at the right time
• easter egg badges: often disguised and buried deep within the site
• mass-distribution: sometimes when we are feeling generous we will reward many with the same badge.
• and more...

Introduction

One of the most distinguishing features about the Mixtape Collective is our elaborate point system. It is part of what really shapes the community and keeps people coming back and enjoying the site. Therefore, we feel it is important to give a breakdown of how it works so that people can understand it.

Why Earn Points?: Rating & More

Why do you want to earn points? One word: Ratings. As you use the site, you have the ability to offer your opinion on the quality of another profile, mixtape, and even artists, albums and tracks. The ratings you give have a direct influence on points. At the fundamental level, what this does is provide a structure for us to provide detailed statistics on the most popular people, mixtapes, and music. Those with the most points will be assumed to be the favorites of the community. This way, you as the community, can define the 'quality' of nearly everything on the site. There is no arbitrary definitions of 'good' or 'bad', they will become what the users make them.

That explains why rating is important, but it still doesn't really satisfy the initial question, 'Why earn points?' Well the beauty of the system is that the amount of weight your ratings hold correlates directly with the number of points you have. This means as your points increase you have a larger say on the overall outcome of the community. Conversely, if you maintain a low level of points, your say won't really be worth much.

There are a number of reasons that we settled on this system. First and foremost, why should someone who barely participates have as much influence as someone who is on here two hours a day, every day? This is a great way to reward those who are active in the community. At the same time, if a new person joins the site and exhibits qualities valued by the community, they can quickly rise to a position of power due to the positive ratings of others. This means that users that discover the site late are in no way penalized.

Additionally, assigning weight to your ratings gives more of a reason to compete for the most points. A little competition makes everything more fun.

Finally, it brings a whole new dimension to the online community. It might benefit you to form alliances with like-minded mixtapers to secure a source of positive ratings, or possibly to sabotage a musical enemy (beware fans of michael bolton, you could have a hard time earning points...). Ultimately, we feel it should improve your experience on the site and provide something more than just making mixtapes.

How Does it Work?

Well, we've explained the fundamentals of the system, but it is hard to fully visualize without some frame of reference. So first of all, if you are a member and have browsed the site, I'm sure you have noticed one of these.

This, is the rating bar. You will be confronted with one of these for every profile, mixtape, artist, album or track that you look at. It is important to know that each block represents a numerical value starting with -5 on left and incrementing until you get +5 on the far right. Clicking on a rating block assigns that rating for that person, mix, etc.

So, how does this translate into points? It's simple, the value of the rating you gave is multiplied by your level. So if you are level 3, a rating of +5 will yield 15 points. The best part about the system is that as your level fluctuates throughout your use on the site, the point values for all of your ratings are automatically adjusted. This means you don't have to worry about going back and re-rating people every time you jump a level and the weight of your ratings increases.

The Leveling System

We're going to keep pretty tight lipped about the leveling system. The above explanations do a pretty good job of elucidating why you want to gain levels. However, we'll let the various perks awarded for leveling, and the level point ranges be a surprise for all of you to find out.

For the best MC experience...

We recommend that in order to receive the full mixtape experience, you use Mozilla Firefox version 1.5 or later. The site has also been confirmed to be fully operational (minus the known issues) in Internet Explorer 6, Safari, and Opera 8.5.

Also, in order to ensure normal page viewing, your privacy settings must allow for minimal cookies.

We recommend viewing the site in at least 1024x768 resolution and 24-bit color.

FAQ

We have no frequently asked questions yet...get on it people!

Known Issues

Fri, May 19th:

• Mixtape: Clicking on 'show more' when viewing mixtape will display scrollbars in versions of Firefox prior to 1.5
• My Relationships: the size of the textbox and the location of the save button are displaying incorrectly in some versions of Safari
• My Account: When deleting a photo or avatar, you will see an empty box where the image used to be. Do not worry, the image is in fact deleted, but it displays incorrectly. This will be resolved shortly.
• My Account: When editing a photo caption, the current caption will not display in the form. Do not be alarmed, the caption does still exist. This will be fixed shortly.
• Image Uploading: There is a bug in the image uploader that causes certain rectangular images with a width of 700 pixels or wider to behave incorrectly with the cropping script.