Making mix-CDs with MixPixie – hit or miss?

Hello all, we’ve had to remove a comment as the author had direct involvement in the MixPixie site.

Although we accept company comments, we do not accept comments that are purely attempts at marketing and promotion, especially if the commenter pretends to be a general member of the public. You can find out more in our T&Cs. Thanks.

Yes, looks like someone’s alerted the MixPixie fan club to this article!

I think it could be a good idea for some people (i.e. people who still use CD players!) but I probably wouldn’t use it.

I’ve been given mix CDs in the past, and one of the things that makes them personal is that someone’s spent time slaving over them, and often drawing/making a personalised cover. Perhaps I’m just an old romantic but I think ticking things off a list on a website (although you’re making your own choices) seems to take away some of the personal aspect.

On top of that, I wouldn’t really know what to do with a CD these days – I only have one computer in the house that actually has a drive which will play CDs, so it’s far more limiting than a Spotify playlist. Not to mention the environmental impact of creating physical objects when the same thing can be done digitally far more efficiently.

Incidentally, mix CDs I’ve received in the past have now been re-created as Spotify playlists – they don’t lose any value by existing there instead of on a physical disk – the songs still have the same impact, and can be played on any device!

Do they do MiniDiscs as well?!

I think it’s a nice idea too, but will surely only have limited appeal….

It sounds like a nice idea at first, but I probably won’t use it. I do use sites that create personalized greetings cards, but this one is different because they charge for each track. The problem with that is that you (or the recipient) most probably has already bought all the music they like. MixPixie would have been good if you could tick a box that said “I already own this track” so you are not charged for it (except, say, 5p to cover their cost of burning the track on the CD.)

And there’s a couple of other issues. First, music on a real CD is not compressed (and therefore suffers no loss in quality, except for the quantization errors of the 16-bit, 44 kHz sampling). However I suspect that the tracks recorded on the MixPixie CD originate from stored MP3s recorded with a certain amount of lossy compression.

And lastly, these recordable CDs have a shorter lifetime than mass-produced music CDs.