About

Wondering what sample you're hearing?

Mashup Breakdown is an attempt to visually describe the musical wizardry that goes into a mashup. For each track, you'll see the timeline of samples used, and with the currently active samples highlighted in real time as the track plays. (See the list of posted albums.)

I (@brahn) created the site when the spectacular mega-mashup artist Girl Talk released his 5th album, All Day, composed from an astounding 372 songs by other artists. When this site was first launched, the sample info for All Day came from the heroic efforts of Travis McLeskey at AllDaySamples; his data have since been integrated into Wikipedia.

I've just started to expand the site to additional albums -- and if you'd like to see more breakdowns of more music, here's how you can make it happen.

Thanks to...

Girl Talk for the album, licensing it for remixing via Creative Commons, and being awesome.
Mashup masters Eric Kleptone and Scntfc for providing sample data for their albums (see here and here) and for being psyched about this project.
Travis McLeskey at of AllDaySamples for including sample end times in his data.
Angela Watercutter at Wired for posting the inspiring Beat-by-beat breakdown of "What It's All About" off Girl Talk's previous album.
TheHPJC for posting the All Day album to YouTube.
Ben Bodien at Neutron Creations for his post about building a custom playback widget, from which I shamelessly stole the styling.

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