Get your burners warmed up and ready for August's mixmania! with a Driving theme

Listening to: Ella Fitzgerald, The Best of the Song Books

Time to start collecting names for August's mixmania! - the rules are posted below.

The votes are in and "Driving" won by a landslide. This is a pretty flexible theme, I think. Now, the songs don't have to be "about driving" although I think that would be fun and if that's the way you want to go, Godspeed. You can also make it a disk of song's you'd drive to, a disk you'd mix to sustain you on a roadtrip. It can be a disk that evokes a particular stretch of road (i.e., California's Highway One, the most spectacular drive in the US if not the planet) or destination (i.e. "To Grandma's" or "Get pumped up for a Dead show").

My own disk will attempt to evoke the atmosphere of a drive. Although I won't include it on my mix, Kraftwerk's Autobahn is a perfect (if not ridiculously quintessential) example of a song that paints a mental picture. When my mix is done, there probably won't be a single cut that's remotely about driving but every cut capturing the essence of a drive (and a particular moment) for me.

So have fun with being creative and caressing your inner-DJ.

The Rules: if you intend to participate this month, please pay attention to the following:

1. Deadline for joining in is August 26, You need to email me your postal address in order to participate. If I don't get an email from you, you'll be left out. You can email your info to:
   
   patriside *at* gmail dot com
   
   By all means, leave a comment to show you want to participate and give everyone else a sense that they might be the lucky recipient of your mix.
   
   
2. Your mix needs to be burned and mailed by September 1 - or at least, by the end of the first week of September. Ratting myself out, I'll admit that I mailed my mix a few days after the deadline (yeah, yeah), so I understand that sometimes we can't get to the PO right away. A few days late I can understand; a few weeks late is mindboggling.
   
   I don't know why I need to emphasize this again but if you agree to participate, your mix will be in the mail around September 1, got it? It's just not fair to the people who are mixing and mailing in good faith when they to have to wait and wonder for weeks to see if their honest efforts have been reciprocated.
   
   
3. You'll get the postal address of the recipient of your mix by August 27 along with my postal address (to use as a return address).
   
   
4. Post your songlist September 15 - yeah, I know this is different from last time, I think it will be fun to sustain the suspense of "who sent this?" and "I'm dying to know what this song is!" I'll email everybody September 14 with a reminder to post lists. Sept. 15 will be designated "songlist day".
   
   
5. DO NOT include your songlist with the disk you mail, the idea is to get your recipient to surf around to figure out what the cuts are, who sent the disk. If you're stymied on how to erase ID3 information from the music files, I recommend you go download Musicmatch Jukebox to convert your files and then go here for a tutorial on how to erase the ID3 info (Mac users are on your own!).
   
   
6. Burn a CD with wav files, not MP3s; if you can't fit all your lovelies on a single disk, burn 2 disks, burn 6 disks, I don't care. Just burn it with files that can be played on any old skool CD player.

That's it. If those rules are too much, don't play. It doesn't bother me to mail disks to the unfortunate folks who got burned - I *love* sharing music - but it's infuriating having to answer desperate emails sent from folks who've been left out in the cold because somebody couldn't be bothered to do what they promised to do.

And if you played last time and have STILL not received a disk, email me and I'll mail a disk to you.

Burn, baby, burn!!!