When I was in high school I bought 10-pack of blank tapes and gave them to people whose musical tastes I liked. I asked them to make a mixtape for me whenever they could. What I got back is still some of my favorite music. I stumbled on a shoebox of tapes about a year ago and played them in my car's tape player. Most of them were about a decade old.

I think it would be fun to do something like that for us, here. While I no longer own a tape player or recorder I can still make a CD. I know there's more high-tech ways to do it now with your iPods and internet tube google-sharing but I figured we could give this a try.

The objective: To introduce everyone (or re-introduce everyone) to your favorite music.

Guidelines I'd humbly suggest (flexible):
1. Try to make it as personal as possible. I figure this will lead to song choices based on your own preferences and mood, not a random scattering of songs.
2. Don't pre-discuss the playlists here in detail if you're the creator/sender. Maybe the genre, or mood, but keep the artists and songs a surprise.
3. I'm going to go on trust and know that people are going to make the right choices as to what to put. Our goal here is not to out-obscure each other with bad music.
4. Mail the CD out. Include a playlist if you want. Make a cover for it you want. The music is the important part.

I'll leave it at that because I honestly think you guys can do a great job, and if only a few that participated in the album draft get into this, I'm going to enjoy myself immensely.

Once you've got a mix done, announce it here (without giving away its contents) and let people contact you.

All of this is flexible. Anyone have anything to add or feedback?

I'm game

Sounds cool.

I'm in.

Me too.

I'm in.....sounds great.

I put together a few songs already but I'm at like 5 hours, so I think it's time to edit down.

I'm game to, what the hell.

So, once we've got our CD picked out, then what? Do we mail them to everyone else? Is there a deadline for compilation?

I didn't understand that either:

Maybe we restrict this to the first 20 people (or whatever - pick a number) who come up with "the goods". IMO, and this is mainly because I don't like dealing with mail, we could "make" our CDs by creating a zip file containing all the songs and (possibly) cover art, liner notes, etc. Someone not affiliated with DVD Talk could host these files, either by http or ftp. We could have a team of three to four people who would verify the zip files, making sure they aren't corrupted, and that the songs will all fit on one CD. Once verified, they could be uploaded and hosted until a pre-determined date, say, 31 January 2007.

Thoughts?

I am in. How do we choose who sends/receives?

I was also thinking that using zipped files or rars would be much easier than trying to ship a bunch of CDs. And why not go by the sign-up order in this thread for who sends the next mix, and give each person a week to come up with their mix (or pick your time limit)? Limiting to a certain number sounds like a good idea also, at least to start.

Is this legal?

*growl* I will MAKE IT legal *growl*

I don't know. If the Powers That Be here decide this is an inappropriate discussion topic for this forum, we could always move to Last.fm, where many of us are members anyway. I believe our group there has its own discussion forum, although I don't think we use it.

I like the idea, and also like the idea of a .rar or .zip file. Worse comes to worse, we could just post playlists (if the legality isn't there...).

= J

Well, the idea was not to post playlists but if that's what we want to do, that's fine. To me, posting a playlist takes the fun out of it because it takes 30 minutes to find/buy the songs. The zip file idea I have no problem with but figured it would get into a grey area that Geoff & Co. would rather avoid. Certainly, if you email someone with your home address, you could email them with an internet address where this could be picked up. Without playlists, there's no way to tell if the music is not OK to share or is OK to share (live shows from Archive.com, band promos, etc.)

I personally plan to mail the CDs and only make a few (like someone else said, maybe 20 or so). If someone would rather do a ZIP, that's fine.

I don't like the idea of playlists because we've had "post a playlist" threads before and I wanted to make this different while keeping the element of surprise.

I certainly suggest no one post links to any files on YouSendIt or similar files unless they can 100% prove that it is OK to do so (because the MP3s are free / etc.).

I think we should make the CDs and mail them the old fashioned way. It feels more in the spirit of what I think The Bus is trying to do.

I don't making and sending out 20 CDs as long as I can be reasonably sure that I will be getting 20 CDs in the mail at some point after that.

Let's definitely not turn this into a "post the playlist" thread. It should require more of a commitment than that.

I am completely opposed to just posting playlists. Each person should actually collect and distribute the music. I just hate going to the post office, that's all.

I'd like to pariticipate in this!

I'm in for this. Maybe it'd be best if everyone emailed their address to the same person. That person could slap them together into a Word doc or Excel spreadsheet and send it out to the rest.

I think 20 is a good number of participants. So far, it looks like we've got 11 for sure participants (The Bus, Giles, DJLinus, wendersfan, Shiv Shankly, auto, Rypro 525, Cusm, Tarantino, Cosmic Bus and me) and 2 that look like maybe/probably (The Cow & digitalfreaknyc).

I'm down.

So is this where we try to make 20 or so random songs together that I like, or more songs that connect with you/me in some way, and to try to make them flow.

I'm in.