The ultimate mix tape generation service

Last night, at a dinner party, my dear friend Leah handed me something I realized I hadn't been a recipient of in a while: a mix tape. More accurately, a mix CD. The last mix-recording-delivery-instrument I recall getting was a tape from a girl in high school back in 1995, which, if I recall correctly, featured James Brown and Seven Year Bitch back to back. I had nearly forgotten the art of the mixtape.

At any rate, all of this reminded me of Tiny Mix Tapes' automatic mix tape generator, which has provided some entertaining mixes, such as "Songs for the guy who has the worst gas in the world, but you love him anyway" and "Songs for sleeping in a hammock".

And thanks, Leah, for the tunes; it's a lovely, laid back mix. Were I the Tiny Mix Tapes generator, I might produce it in response to "Songs to soothe me whilst on a long-distance car trip at 6 AM, driving bleary-eyed and perhaps a bit hungover and waiting for the caffeine to kick in." But I had no titles for the tracks; who was responsible for that cover of "Good Morning, Good Morning"?

Pop producers are now sampling C64 MOD files

for their hits. Example: Timbaland blatantly ripped off a Finnish MOD writer for a Nelly Furtado song, and failed to give credit where it was due. (Link contains MP3s for comparison.) It wasn't just a minor sampling; pretty much the entire melody line was borrowed. How easy would it be for an average hobbyist like this guy to defend his copyright? Since copyright owners have gotten vigilant about sampling royalties, and court decisions have changed things to the point where famous albums couldn't have been produced today, perhaps they'll be opting to borrow from artists who aren't in nearly as good a position to defend their copyright claims. (Via Waxy.)

"The dynamic programming matrix (Peterson, 2003), for example, was M.C.A."

Amusing: The Universal Text Imitator, which attempts to imitate the style of any arbitrary corpus of text by mere analysis of sentence structure, without any additional provided information about the documents.

More amusing: The Universal Text Imitator's output when applied to Beastie Boys lyrics.