As Stan noted last week, Muxtape has been voluntarily brought down due to concerns over the RIAA, but you shouldn't let that stop you from traipsing down that same harrowing path yourself, particularly since there's now an open source Web package you can run yourself to completely duplicate the functionality of MuxTape.
Josh Catone over at SitePoint just found it, it's aptly called OpenTape. It's exactly a one-for-one translation of the original MuxTape with one significant difference - a faceless startup won't be fronting the legal liability for you to post up a virtual mixtape of your favorite artists. If the RIAA doesn't like what they hear, it's all on you, bub.
Josh sees some possible stumbling blocks in the future for OpenTape:
The obvious one is legal: how many people will be willing to risk the RIAA’s wrath to publish a mixtape on their server? The second is content. What made Muxtape great was the ability to browse other mixtapes and find great new music. Without a way to aggregate and discover the mixtapes people are making and publishing with Opentape, it will be less attractive as a distributed service.
Here's where I see OpenTape succeeding where so many others have failed: the ability to put the server offshore. I've actually had a chance to talk to some lawyers on this topic to see if it'd fly like I imagine it would, and I'm told I'm spot on. During the last time licensing issues came to play in the blogosphere, we were talking about Pandora and their inability to sustain their business while paying 70% of revenue in licensing fees.
