Time to hack the Pacemaker

Pacemaker in my Hand

I love my pacemaker but Tonium have really screwed the community of pacemaker djs.

It started when they moved lets mix from a pacemaker community to a generic dj community. I understand the reason why they did it but the pacemaker only djs were pretty much invaded by all types of other djs. Tonium did setup a getsatisfaction account and people started using that to voice there concerns. But after a few years, get satisfaction reports Pacemaker monitors but is not active in this community. There hasn’t been a update in years now and there’s still plenty of outstanding issues.

My pacemaker is still working as good as it always has but I could certainly do with a replacement battery. It currently lasts about 2 hours while recording is on, it use to last about 5 hours.

I couldn’t get the Pacemaker editor working with Wine again, so I finally switched to using VirtualBox (virtualisation) the closed source version because you have to use the USB to talk to the Pacemaker. It is a pain having to drag the mixes over and export them but it does work.

Open source Pacemaker

on the forums

Amias Channer wrote 1 day ago

has anyone reported tonium to the eff for GPL violations ? you are required to make source code available if you use GPL’ed code and the EFF have a legal fund to force companies to do this tonium, please save yourself a lot of money (you will have to pay their expenses) and publish the damn code. its not hard to do. i will help you if you don’t know how.

musicinstinct commented 1 day ago

I noticed if you go into settings on the device, select ‘about’ and then ‘legal notice’, then scroll down to the bottom you will find a notice that source code is available by sending 5 EUR to GPL Compliance Manager at Tonium AB. I wonder if anyone has tried this and successfully received it?

Amias Channer commented 1 day ago

http://getsatisfaction.com/pacemaker/…
this thread suggests that they have been refused every time.

So it looks like Tonium could be in breech of the GPL, but this may take a long time to resolve its self.

So its time to hack the pacemaker

I said for a while since the pacemaker does actually mount on Linux, it should be easy to hack it specially because it seems to store everything in .pacemaker and uses a SQLlite database for most of its things.

Musicinstinct wrote

I’ve also managed to access the tracks database using sqlite manager in Ubuntu, but in order to successfully install new tracks I would need to create the metadata. This is an XML file and should be doable if we can reverse engineer the format of the beat mapping data, or get access to the source code.

So now its the race to understand the XML format and create a schema which works with the pacemaker. Of course there is now another forum if your interested in following the hacking.

Fun times ahead…

Author: Ianforrester

Senior firestarter at BBC R&D, emergent technology expert and serial social geek event organiser. Can be found at cubicgarden@mas.to, cubicgarden@twit.social and cubicgarden@blacktwitter.io