When muxtape closed up shop due to pressure from the RIAA, they left behind a great open source software package called OpenTape… This beautiful piece of software lets you to create your own muxtape clone instantly. Some think this is muxtape’s way of sticking it to the RIAA, since its virtually impossible to police the thousands of individual sites that will pop up because of this.

However, besides the obvious usage scenario… are there actually some legitimate and potentially profitable ways that people can use this software? Let’s take a look at 5 ideas:

1. Podcast Sharing Site

Imagine a web app where you can upload (or simply subscribe to) your favorite podcasts and listen to them from anywhere. Assuming these podcasts are freely distributable, there should be no legal issues here. Throw in some social networking aspects to this site, and you have a full fledged social podcast sharing site. Not only can you listen to your own subscriptions from any computer at any time… but you can also listen in on what your friends are interested in at any time as well. OpenTape should be able to handle the core functionality easily… just add your own web 2.0 code and you are done!

2. Youtube for Music

Muxtape is working on a way to help bands introduce their music to the world… but it would be cool if someone created a full-fledged Youtube-like service for music and audio files. Sure, video is more interesting… but with the OpenTape code you can stream user-uploaded music to anyone easily. This would be useful for individual bands and artists just starting out, people who want to show off their mixing talents, or just random audio clips that people find interesting. It will be hard to monitor all the uploads and look for questionable content (as it was on Youtube), but it could be a cool concept if done right.

3. Children’s Music / Public Domain Music Site

I recently had a baby boy… and have spent lots of time looking for random children’s music to play for him (think, “twinkle twinkle little star”, “itsy bitsy spider”, etc.). I did end up picking up a couple CDs from the store, but I also found tons of public domain music online. They are scattered all over the place, and it would be great if someone created a searchable site with all this music in one spot. This could extend to different niches, besides just children’s music… but that’s the first thing that came to mind. I could then leave a browser open and play music while watching the baby, allowing me to work peacefully.

4. Voice Over and Sound Byte Marketplace

Someone could use OpenTape to create a marketplace for voice over talents and sound byte creators to sell their products and advertise their services. It could be similar to getty images, where you can easily buy stock images and photos within the self-serve marketplace… however, this site would be even better since anyone could upload and promote their own voice samples or stock sound bytes.The database would then be easily searchable for streaming audio samples, and the actual ful quality audio files could be downloaded instantly after payment is received.

5. Personal Playlist Sharing

Imagine listening to your home music collection from any computer (like at work or traveling with your laptop)… or better yet, sharing your music with just your family and buddies. All you need to do is install OpenTape on your personal computer instead of a public web server and use software like Remobo to give yourself and your friends direct access from any other computer. Remobo will bypass your firewall and NAT settings, so there’s no need for a static IP or special network configurations, making it even easier. But more importantly, it will also encrypt all the data coming to and from your computer (so not even your ISP can see what you are doing). In fact, the network traffic will ust look like you are working from home via a corporate VPN! Here’s a full tutorial on setting this all up easily.

Resources:

Muxtape

OpenTape

Remobo

Setting Up OpenTape over Remobo

The best thing about this method is that Remobo is actually a platform, leaving you free to use any BT client you prefer. Of course, like any other app that runs on top of this platform, it requires no configuration nor networking knowledge to get up and running. This method below works on both Windows and Mac OS X.

Getting Started

Say you want to share the latest and greatest movie trailer, tv show, music video or whatever else you can imagine, with all your buddies. These media files might not contain anything copyrighted or even questionable, but you value your privacy and freedom and want to make sure not even your ISP can see that you are sharing this file. This is where Remobo’s instant private BT sharing comes in.

Step 1: Login to Remobo and Add Your Buddies

If you don’t already have Remobo installed, you can grab it here. After that just create a new account instantly or login with your existing one. Then, have your buddies do the same and add them to your buddy list. At its core, this app will create an instant VPN between you and your buddies so everything you send and receive from each other over Remobo is encrypted and secure. This is what keeps everything “private”.

Step 2: Choose the Files and/or Folders to Share

This is where the magic happens. From the Remobo app, you can slick on “My Shared Files” and start adding a bunch of files and folders that you want to share. Its best to add each bundle of files separately, though it is also OK to add just one huge parent folder and let your buddies decide what they want exactly. The choice depends on how many files you have and how easy you want your buddies to be able to find stuff.

After choosing the files and folders, Remobo will automatically create torrent files for these in the background and even start seeding them up via a built-in BT process that is used for seeding and tracker purposes only. Its important to note that only people in your Remobo buddy list can connect and download these torrent files from you, so its not as if you are seeding or tracking these files publicly.

Step 3: Your Buddies can Now Browse, Search and Download Your Shared Files Privately

After that initial setup, your buddies will be able to see all your shared files by clicking on you in their buddy list and selecting “View Shared Files”. This will bring up a familiar web interface listing all the torrent files that have been created for you. Remember, Remobo created these files when you decided to share them and is also seeding them for you… so there’s no extra work or BitTorrent knowledge required on your end.

Your buddies can click on any of these torrent files to launch their preferred BT client. It works like any of the public torrent tracker sites out there, except that all data between you and your buddy is securely encrypted by Remobo and no one besides your own buddies can ever see this list of shared files.

Wrapping Up

Now that you know how to create a private BitTorrent file sharing network… go round up a bunch of your trusted buddies and start sharing those files with each other privately and securely! In fact, ISPs can’t even throttle your bandwidth because it doesn’t look like BT traffic at all… just a bunch of encrypted data packets… kinda like what it would look like if you were working from home via your corporate VPN

via Remobo.com

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The Old Way

Sure, you can upload them all to flickr, but if you have family like mine, then it isn’t quite that easy. They all seem to want the photos in their original format (ie, at 10mp, thats hundreds of megabytes or even gigabytes of data).

My old solution was to burn everyone a CD or zip everything up and try to upload it somewhere for them to grab. This soon becomes very tedious and I stopped brining my camera out just to avoid this!

A Better Way

My friends over at Remobo have given me a much better solution to this problem… and once it’s set up, all you do is offload the photos to your computer as usual and they are automatically “shared” with all your friends and family. Much easier for sharing bulk, raw image files.

Step 1 - Create a Folder to Share Your Photos

Pick any location on your PC, and create a new folder (or use an existing one). Name it something descriptive like “Shared Photos”. Now anytime you want to share photos with your friends or family, just drop them into this folder (they can be in sub-folders too). I choose to keep this separate from the folder where I actually store all my digital photos, since I do not want to share ALL of them

Step 2 - Share This Folder

The next step is to “share” this folder. Just right-click the folder and select “Sharing and Security…”, then choose “Share this folder on the network”. You can give it a different name here if you like, but I just keep it the same. Also remember to only allow “read” access if you don’t want anyone deleting or modifying your files by accident.

The folder is now shared on your local network, but unless all your friends and family live with you, they still cannot access your files. So its on to the mext step…

Step 3 - Download and Install Remobo

Remobo is a small app that creates an Instant Private Network between your computer and any other computers that you add to your buddy list. You can get it here. It effectively extends your LAN over the Internet and will enable your friends and family to view your shared photos folder over the Internet. Incidentally, this program is also very useful for remote controlling your PC, playing LAN games over the Internet, and general VPN functionality…

Anyone who wants access to your folder will also need to get Remobo. Just tell them its a small price to pay to get instant access to your digital camera pictures after an event

Step 4 - Use Remobo to View Shared Files

Once you have dumped your newly-taken photos into your shared folder, add some buddies to your Remobo buddy list. As you add buddies, remember to only add people you would feel comfortable with accessing your shared folder.

Now when your buddies see you online, they can simply click on your computer name, select “Browse Shared Files”, and instantly be able to browse and copy over any photos and files that they see, as if it were a local folder. You can also browse any files that they are sharing as well, so next time just tell them your camera is broken and have them be the photographer.. this Remobo method works both ways

For advanced users, you can also mount their shared folder as a drive. For the computer name, just use:

[remobo_username].remobo.com

So, if I shared my photos and my Remobo username is bob, you can access or mount my shared drive in Windows using:

\\bob.remobo.com