Revision 17: MixterVerse Radio

Edited by mwic on 2026-08-27 17:00:46

MixterVerse Radio is the always-on listening page for the shared music library of ccMixter and mixter.plus. Press play and it keeps going: a station of curated, human-made music, with a slow slideshow of artwork from the community drifting behind it. It is the front door for people who have never heard of either site — the thing you can hand someone without explaining anything first.

The design brief was short and unusually strict: very beautiful, but incredibly simple, with as little text as possible. The reference was the "LoFi Girl"-style always-on radio stream — a single page you leave open in a tab all afternoon.

What plays

A station is not a genre playlist someone assembled by hand. It is a live query against the MixterVerse API, and a track has to clear three bars to be on the air:

• it must carry the station's tag;
• it must not be tagged ai_generated;
• it must have earned real appreciation — at least 5 recommendations on ccMixter, or at least 2 thumbs-up on MixterPlus.

That last bar is the whole editorial policy, and it is deliberately the community's judgement rather than an editor's. Nobody picks the tracks; the people who were already listening did.

Each station draws the 200 most recently uploaded qualifying tracks and shuffles within them, so the radio leans hard towards new work. Results are cached for an hour, which means a station costs the shared database one query regardless of how many people are listening.

The stations

Stations are expected to change. The list is deliberately a one-line edit in a single file, and which ones people actually press is logged — anonymously, timestamp and station only — so weak stations can be retired for better ones.

Two of them union more than one tag. Lo-Fi is the instructive case: the library had accumulated both lofi and lo_fi, spellings that overlapped by only six tracks. Playing both took the station from 184 tracks to 215, and dropped the most-played artist's share from 45% to 38%. Small, but it was the entire available win — every other spelling of the word turned out to be empty.

The look

The visuals are drawn from the MixterPlus image library, filtered to human-made uploads and chosen for size and orientation, so a desktop browser gets landscape work and a phone gets vertical. Each image holds for a minute and is preloaded and decoded before its turn, so the change is a true crossfade rather than a wipe. The artist is credited in the corner, and the credit fades with the picture it belongs to.

Over the top sits a "certified human" stamp, modelled on the Denominazione di origine controllata marks used on Italian wine. It picks a fresh slogan with every image:

Natural Intelligence! · Slop Free Zone! · Caution: Humans Ahead · Not Spotify · Carbon-Based! · Truly Organic! · No Artificial Ingredients · Free-Range Music · 100% Human · Human Made. Machine Delivered.

There is an eleventh slogan, "Try Pressing 'F'!", which is the only clue that the F key puts the page into true fullscreen. Given the brief, a permanent button would have been one piece of furniture too many — so the stamp tells you, eventually.

Listening

Signing in with a Google account adds a heart to the player: press it and the track is saved to your favourites. Signing in is entirely optional, and the radio never mints a session cookie for someone who is only listening.

Song History at mixterverse.com/songHistory shows the last five tracks on each station. It is public on purpose. The airplay log records only that a track was on a station at a time — never who was listening — so there is nothing there that is not simply a fact about the radio, and it doubles as a courtesy to the artists, who can see their work getting played.

Curation

Administrators listening to a station get an overlay with two verdicts on the playing track: wrong for this station, or not right for the radio at all. The first is for a mistagged track that is perfectly good somewhere else; the second is a quieter judgement. Both take effect for every listener on the next tune-in, and both are one click to undo.

History

• July 2026 — the apex domain mixterverse.com is brought online, and a "▶ Listen to Music" button appears on it. The radio ships behind that button over two days, built from scratch with no JavaScript dependencies. It opens with five stations: Chill, Lo-Fi, Instrumental, Ambient and Downtempo.
• July 2026 — the API gains the filters the radio needs: excluding a tag across both of the library's tag systems, and minimum-appreciation thresholds for each library. An hour-long cache is added in the same pass, to keep a popular station from becoming a load problem for the eighteen-year-old database underneath.
• August 2026 — the station line-up is measured against the live library for the first time. Lo-Fi is widened to play both spellings; Party joins as a two-tag station.
• August 2026 — the public listening page launches, alongside Song History, listener favourites, and the administrator flagging overlay.
• August 2026 — the Big Bang event opens on MixterPlus, asking artists to tag new uploads with the station they belong on, so that the radio is fed directly by new work rather than only by the back catalogue.

See also

• ccMixter — the original remix community, and one of the two libraries on the air
• mixter.plus — the newer multimedia library
• MixterVerse History — how the shared universe came together
• Artists — the people whose work is playing