September 28, 2008 – 2:55 pm

A comparison of various ways you can create your own online flash music video collection playlist to create your customized music television station.



Recently a new video playlist website came online called mixtube.org, after testing the interface and capabilities, I researched other methods of creating my own customized music video playlist using other video aggregation sites.

As a fan of the 80s, and more specifically the New Wave Genre, I decided to create the ultimate collection of all the best music videos from the birth of alternative emo.

Here is a review of the various websites/programs I tested in creating my own personal playlist:

Mixtube.org

This is the first website I tried creating my playlist. Mixtube uses the now defunct muxtape.com website technology. Creating the playlist is very manual, as you need to search for the youtube video first through youtube, grab the URL, then paste it in for each video into mixtube.

Mixtube’s main feature seems to be its open directory of playlists so you can view user created video playlist based on search keywords. Outside of that, the interface and management of your playlist is very limited.

Pros:

Simple to Use,

Accessible anywhere online

Able to Share Playlist

Cons:

Cannot Edit your own Playlist after saving

No Inline Search for videos,

Limited to Youtube

Limited Features,

When playing videos the small youtube video is placed hidden at the bottom of the screen, almost defeating the purpose of having a video playlist

Unable to export playlist

Unable to randomize Playlist

My Playlist (about 70 videos):

http://mixtube.org/playlist.php?id=695

Youtube Playlist

Intuitively, one would think using Youtube’s own playlist generator would be best to create your customized music video playlist, but it does have some shortcomings.

One shortcoming is that its limited to its own library, so you cant search Google’s Video archive. Additionally, the video playing screen is crowded with tons of peripheral advertisements and related videos, so the interface is a bit crowded when viewing the video.

Pros:

Native Youtube Playlist

Does not ‘lock out’ third party embedding of youtube websites

Able to share playlist

Accessible anywhere online

Cons:

Limited to Youtube

Unable to export Playlist

Unable to randomize Playlist

My Youtube Playlist: (About 140 artists/videos)

http://www.youtube.com/view_play_list?p=B187A3D3969B9951

You can also view the playlist embedded into this post above.

Youplayer

Youplayer is a firefox plugin that allows you to manage your playlist within your browser. This can be used if you have no interest in sharing your music list or accessing it online.

Youplayer has a embedded search bar which you can type in a keyword and it will display the youtube search results in your browser. You can add videos into your playlist by dragging the link of the video into the playlist, or you can add the youtube URL and name of the song manually (tedious!)

You can either view the playlist inline, or you can export the playlist and play within your Windows Media or Winamp with the appropriate plugins.

Pros:

Private Playlist for your own use

Cons:

Unable to share your playlist online

Limited to the local computer you have the plug in installed

Songza

Songza had the best interface of all the playlist generators. Very web 2.0ish, the entire interface was flashbased. The search was very comprehensive and searched for videos and music alike. Creating the playlist was a snap, and it pulls from google video and youtube.

The play interface is very clean, and lets you cycle and shuffle through all the videos in your browser.

I created my master list of 270 best New Wave vidoes of the 80s through this website.

Pros:

Very cool intuitive flash interface.

Clean uncluttered interface

Accesses both Google Video and Youtube

Cons:

Unable to export the playlist

Gets ‘stuck’ if the video is unavailable.

My Master Playlist:

http://www.songza.com/psurf/

RSS Feed:

http://api.songza.com/1.0/feed/psurf.rss

Overall

Overall, I like Songza’s interface in creating, managing and playing my ultimate music video playlist. The interface is very clean, uncluttered and fast. It has the capability to interface with facebook, and even provide an RSS feed.

As for accessing the playlist, there isnt a built in interface, but through html source backdoor scripting, I was able to get all the urls for the videos.

Coming Soon, how I batch downloaded all 270 videos from Songza locally to your computer and converted for desktop access, ipod, and into 3gp format for my non-iphone.