Have you tried turning it off and then on again?
Cute.
Thanks!
That was sarcasm.
Oh. Well, here are some slightly more useful tips then:
Download one of the mix .zip files.
Unzip it.
Drag the files in the resulting folder into your mp3 player of choice. As this choice these days is mostly iTunes:
In iTunes, I recommend creating a new Playlist for the mix, and dragging the files into that. This should "just work".
Because iTunes is terrible software, this may mysteriously not actually work, in which case they may upload, but not appear in the playlist. Check your "Songs" list. You may need to pull them in from your "Songs" list again and then fix the ordering.
Alternatively, you can just drag them directly into Songs (or leave them there). You should get a new album each time, and can just play the mixes that way.
Occasionally iTunes treats them as multiple albums. I think I've fixed this for all the mixes, but ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
I actually use Evermusic while drafting mixes, because it works great with random music files, and is super easy to use with iCloud. If you want to try it and it's not obvious how, drop me a note.
If anyone has a suggestion for something similar on Android, let me know.
So how do I play these in Spotify?
If you figure it out, let me know! (As far as I know, Spotify does not allow you to upload your own stuff.)
Anything else I need to know?
Lots of things, I'm sure! I recommend starting here: https://what-if.xkcd.com/
Oh, you mean about the mixen? Well, - in some (one) weird case, I have mixes that have the same songs on them. iTunes does not like this, particularly if you try to upload them at the same time. See below.
<sigh> Sound Check.
I spend a fair amount of time trying to adjust the quote sound files to be as close in volume as I can to the songs on either side. However, Apple Music has a (usually useful) feature called "Sound Check" that tries to adjust all the songs to the same approximate volume. Since quotes seem quieter to it, it sometimes decides to blast them at you.
Unfortunately, there's not a great solution to this other than turning Sound Check off in settings. YMMV.
One thing that does help is listening to HARDCORE versions of the mixes all as one single sound file. But no one would be silly enough to spend time creating something like that.
From: Mixen IT Staff
To: Anyone who wants to listen to all variants of the 2021 Mixen
Subject: Important technical note re: iTunes
tl;dr: be careful, and read this if uploading all three mixes to iTunes
These mixes are unusual, as they share some common songs across all three mixes. Unfortunately one of the easiest ways to make iTunes freak out is to try to upload identical songs, particularly at the same time. I have tried to “tweak” these so that iTunes treats them as different songs, but ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
My suggestion for how to get these into iTunes:
Upload the first mix you want to listen to.
Wait some indeterminate period of time until iTunes has decided it has finished uploading it (usually once it is available on another device, or ~1 hour).
Try uploading the next one, using the same process.
That “worked on my machine” for uploading all three mixes (after a couple of messy first attempts). YMMV.