Do you want to create music playlists that you can embed on your web site or blog? There are quite a number of services that allow you to combine your favorite tracks into compilations and embeddable music mixtapes, without spending a dime. Did you think you were out of luck because Spotify was not yet available in your country? Then check out all the music playlist creators listed in this MasterNewMedia guide.
Photo credit: Robin Good
Music playlist creators are built around search engines that index music tracks which are publicly accessible on the web. You can search for any song you want, listen to it and then add it up to a music playlist, just like people used to do with cassette tapes back in the '70s.
What makes these services very cool is that you can tap into an enormous collection of music and can create a playlist widget that you can publicly share on any website or blog for free.
Creating a music playlist is not only a nice way to take some time off your daily schedule and chill out a bit, but an embeddable music compilation widget may also be either a nice gift for your readers and a nice soundtrack for those that come for your site to read your latest post.
No matter which music playlist creator you choose, the approach to creating a playlist is pretty straightforward:
- Search for the songs you want to combine into a playlist by author, name or title.
- Add found tracks to your music playlist.
- Order the sequence of your music tracks (if permitted).
- Personalize the look and feel of the embeddable playlist widget. In most cases you can change the color, size and theme of the player and also fine-tune other options like auto-play or auto-shuffle.
- Grab the HTML code of your playlist widget and paste it onto any web page. You can also share your music playlist through social media sites like Facebook or Twitter.
For obvious reasons, recording labels are not very happy with services like music playlist creators who mediate the access to their copyrighted songs. That is why such services are alive one day and perish the day after because some big music label has filed a lawsuit against them.
I myself experienced this uncertainty when two services I used to create my own mixtapes, Mixwit and Muxtape, disappeared some time ago to avoid pressures from recording labels.
To overcome copyright limitations, some of these music playlist creators provide access to 30-second long previews of the songs you request. Unfortunately, it is really difficult to imagine how anybody could create a decent compilation by using only 30 second chunks of songs.
Anyway, bear in mind that by using these music playlist creation services you are not hosting any of the tracks you stream, but you are only pointing back to a music file hosted on someone else online server.
That said, here are the key differentiating features that I have used to put these services through their paces:
- Collaborative editing: Edit a music playlist in a collaborative fashion with other users.
- Look and feel personalization: Customize the appearance of your embeddable music playlist.
- Track uploading: Contribute your own songs to create a music playlist.
- Sequence control: Choose the order of tracks inside your music compilation.
- Registration-free: Avoid any registration process to start creating your music playlist.
***Guide updated with new tools added on April, 26th 2010.