A thousand guitars of cassette music

Yet another reason that muxtape is one of the coolest inventions ever is that the mixes are playable on iPhone and iTouch. The regular playback mechanism uses an embedded flash player, so I've never tried to play a mix on my iPod Touch, but this blog entry said that it worked, so I tried it today.


And muxtape plays pretty well. When you click on a song on an iPhone or (iPod touch), Mobile Safari plays it like a normal mp3 file. Each song is loaded individually, so you can't play a whole mix from start to finish, just each track one at a time, but it's still pretty cool. And the simple interface and big font makes everything fairly straightforward.

Another feature that works on my iPod touch now is scrobbling tracks via last.fm. After I bought my new Touch a couple of months ago, it wasn't able to scrobble the plays to last.fm, so there's a drop in my total tracks played that should be picking up now that iPod plays are being scrobbled again.

I've been trying to update the tracks on my muxtape every Friday, and this week is brought to you by the letter N. Two weeks ago it was the letter M, so maybe I'll be able to work through the second half of the alphabet over the rest of 2008. I'm using iTunes default alphabetization, with individual artists by first name.

Today's mix is called "I Hear the Cassette Music" after a line in Nick Lowe's "Heart Of The City". According to various HOTC lyrics listed on the internet, the line might be "I hear the crash of music", but there isn't any cr sound so I'm standing by my version.


I Hear The Cassette Music of a thousand guitars

1. Nada Surf - I Like What You Say
2. Neil Innes - What Noise Annoys A Noisy Oyster
3. Neil Young - Cinnamon Girl
4. The Nerk Twins - What Does It Take?
5. Neutral Milk Hotel - King Of Carrot Flowers (Pt.1)
6. The Nerves - Hanging On The Telephone
7. Niagara - On This Side Of The River
8. Nick Lowe - Heart Of The City
9. The Nightcrawlers - Little Black Egg
10. Nothing Painted Blue - Rock And Roll Friend
11. NRBQ - Ridin' In My Car

odd notes:
1. The Nada Surf song is from their latest album Lucky and was included as a token recent song.
3. "Cinnamon Girl" is a holdover from last week's three minute tape. The Bye Bye Blackbirds have been covering it recently as well as others from Everybody Knows This Is Nowhere.
7. The Niagara song was included because I've been spending the last few weeks singing its refrain "I'm so messed up over you" without remembering what song it was from (don't you hate when that happens!) until yesterday.
8. Speaking of Nick Lowe cassettes, I'm not sure what Nick Lowe cassette Clean Steve could have played on the road. If it was three years after 1974 (when the narrator lent Clean Steve a pound) it would have been 1977, when Nick didn't have any material released on cassette. Maybe it was demos for The Jesus Of Cool that weren't released until 1978?
9. When people ask what the best song about a little black egg with little white specks found in a tree just the other day containing the word "goldurn", there's really only one possible answer!
10. "Rock and Roll Friend" is a cover of a Go-Betweens song (b-side of "Streets of Your Town") written by their "lesser half" Robert Forster.