Heads up fans, producers, and DJs! We’ve got a brand new remix contest for all of you looking for new and impressive ways to participate in the creative process and show off your DIY skills. MixMatchMusic has joined forces with Bay Area rapper Lyrics Born and eyewear company Sutro Vision to bring you a chance to remix Lyrics Born’s newest single, a re-union track with the other half of his Latyrx duo, Lateef the Truthspeaker, called “Pushed Aside, Pulled Apart.”

“Pushed Aside, Pulled Apart” will be appearing on both Lyrics Born’s upcoming Variety Show mixtape and the studio album he has due in 2010. The track utilizes female vocals, synths and moving drum and clap percussion to frame uptempo lyrics from Born and Lateef surrounding the decisions and choices they’ve been faced with making for their careers. Check out the video for the single below.

In an effort to engage and interact with fans, as well as contribute to the growing number of artists allowing fans to remix their work, Lyrics Born has loaded the stems to “Pushed Aside, Pulled Apart” into the MixMatchMusic Remix Wizard and has given you two options for making a remix: Either download the stems for free and use any software you want, or just click on the MixMaker button on the widget to make a remix in MixMatchMusic’s simple online music editor. If you’ve never experienced remixing before, or just want to see how the song was made, check out the MixMaker. Once you’ve completed your remix, upload it so that others can listen to, vote on and share it.

So what will you win? From the entries, Lyrics Born himself will be picking three winners – a grand prize and two runner-up prizes. The grand prize winner will receive a pair of Lyrics Born signed Sutro sunglasses (these shades are sweet!), autographed copies of the entire Variety Show catalog, a Lyrics Born T-Shirt, 2 free tickets to any Lyrics Born show, a meet and greet with Lyrics Bron at said show, and their track featured on LyricsBorn.com presented by Lyrics Born himself.

The 2 runner ups will each receive a pair of Lyrics Born signed Sutro sunglasses (he will sign the case), a copy of the new Lyrics Born Variety Show mixtape, a Lyrics Born T-Shirt and 2 free tickets to any Lyrics Born show as well as their remix featured on LyricsBorn.com. The official rules for the contest are available here.

So what are you waiting for? The contest starts today (Tuesday, August 25th) and runs through Friday September 25th. Tune in, sign on and start mixing!

Recently, MixMatchMusic launched the Remix Wizard, a free widget that any artist can use to host remix promotions on their websites, blogs and social network pages.  Artists customize what the widget looks like and provide the stems to a song (the various parts of a song, like the vocals, guitar, drums, etc) for fans to remix, either by using the online MixMaker or by downloading the stems for remixing in any music software. All the remixes are then published to the widget for others to play, vote on, and share. The widget is designed to be flexible, so that artists can sell the stems or give them away for free, set deadlines and give prizes to winners, and set the legal agreement that covers the rights to the stems and remixes made (who owns them?).

I recently recorded a new song, and have embedded the widget on my Myspace page so that y’all can remix it:

The play button next to the left of “A Little Fuzzy” lets you hear the original song. The tracks in the middle of the widget (Dark Sunrise, Now’s the Time) are submitted remixes. When you submit yours, it will be listed there. Then, people can hear it, vote for it, and share it (by making a separate, mini widget).

Click “download stems” to get the stems in your home software, and then be sure to click “upload stems” to publish it. Or, click “MixMaker” to see how the song was made and to create a mix using the online sequencer. You’ll be able to publish it to the widget directly from there. The “wanna remix more tracks” link will take to a gallery full of Remix Wizards deployed around the web!

So, what are you waiting for? Host your own remix promotion today! Or, click here for more info.

We’re big fans of Creative Commons over here at Mixwit. That’s why I’m stoked to announce today that we’ve  integrated ccMixter into our mixmaker. This means you can easily add any track you can find on ccMixter to any of your mixtapes. If you are not familiar with ccMixter, it is a great repository for tracks, remixes and samples, all licensed under Creative Commons. All you need to do is just select ccMixter in the drop down box in the mixmaker. Once your there, try an artist like the Rapture or the Beastie Boys or a genre like “funk”. Super bonus points if you try “bark”

Over the next few months, we’ll be working hard on improving search by continuing to add more services to help you find media around the web. Although, it does makes our life a whole lot easier when people like ccMixter, Seeqpod, and Skreemr have very nice APIs for us to work with. That’s why those are the three sources we have to date, but rest assured there will be more to come. Got a favorite source? Let us know, and you may just see it appear in the near future.

Lastly, in celebration of the upcoming 4th anniversary of the Wired Magazine CD, what more appropriate than a Wired mixtape? 2008 is the year of the mixtape, right? Enjoy!

Hi all and welcome to the first post of the Mixwit blog.

Several major and minor features have been added to the Mixmaker and Mixtape so naturally the entire Mixwit team (both of us) are really excited to see what everyone does with them.

The Majors:

1) Share your mixtapes anywhere. On your blog. Myspace. Facebook. Anywhere online.

2) Add your own image to your mixtape: Make your mixtape your own.

3) Mixtape template PDF: We’ve posted a downloadable PDF template to enable you to accurately create your own skins.

4) Public alpha: No more alpha-user login box (i.e. no more “hamburger1″). The private testing is complete, but the project is still alpha quality (until a few more core features can be completed).

The Minors:

1) Image control: Your image is masked by the mixtape body, or can fill the whole tape. You can also scale the image and click & drag the image to make it look it’s best.

2) Text editing: You have options for editing and moving the text labels around, including click-and drag positioning. You can also double click on the text to enter your title and alias.

(quick note: the text editing & image dragging features will seem a bit quirky. We plan to expand these features pretty quickly, so the quirkiness will be resolved then.)

3) Glossiness: has been greatly increased to give users more bling contrast. This was rolled out last week, but we want to mention it for the early users, because old mixtapes are going to look extra-shiny.

4) New gears and spooled tape: We’ve replaced the schlocky gears with real-ish gears. Woot. The cool part is actually the spooled mag tape: It acts like real… uh… spooled tape. You’ll see.

5) Add your own track: Now you can add any track that you can find on the web.

6) Bug fixes: We still can’t claim to be bug free, but we squashed quite a few the past week. Most notably we worked out most of the kinks with Internet Explorer. Big thanks to everyone who reported bugs and an especially big thanks to Jake for lending us the windows box. Keep the reports coming!

There’s a ton of extra tweaks beyond these (like the addition of this blog), but why say more? Go play!