Lately I’ve been thinking about the mix CDs I used to burn for friends. Building the perfect mix for someone took a lot of time and intention, but it was a great way to expose friends to the rare musical gems I’d discovered, and sometimes, they even returned the favor.

In the transition from physical mixtapes to cloud-hosted playlists, we stopped giving each other digital things. These days, we mostly point to things that we don’t control.

Mixapps are my answer to this loss of digital ownership. Drop some .mp3s into a folder, run some python scripts, and your playlist gets packaged as a Progressive Web App. Upload the resultant “mixapp” to any HTTPS-enabled host, and your friends can install it to their home screens with just a few taps.

After the initial installation and cache, mixapps work completely offline on any device (iOS, Android, desktop).

Source code: https://github.com/hunterirving/mixapps

Live demo (using public domain tracks): https://hunterirving.com/vibe_capsule