People still ask me, do you really still use that Pacemaker thingy? To which I reply, yes of course? People still seem to think of the pacemaker as a bit of a toy. Well that may be the mindset but hopefully the video above will give you a idea of how serious you can get with the pacemaker. Its all shot live and I replaced the audio from the speakers to the recorded mix from the pacemaker using KdenLive.
Author:
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
Foolproof Sets or Snakeoil for djs?
So I stumbled across this competition by Mixed in Key yesterday.
The challenge: Showcase your favorite music genre in a 10-15 minute mix that will impress the world's best Djs. The top winner receives prizes worth over 3000 dollars.
So I started thinking wow, 15mins to do a complete mix, thats very tight if you want to take the listener on a journey. Looking a bit deeper the site talked about Mixing in key, which pointed to a application you have to download and pay about 60 dollars for. The site opens with a picture of Pete Tong saying how much he loves Mixed in key, then a piece about improving your djs sets.
Mixed In Key is software created for the world's best DJs. With its user-friendly design and trusted technology, Mixed In Key makes harmonic mixing easy.
Mixed In Key takes your mixing to the next level by showing which songs you can mix together without a key clash. It works with all CD decks, Ableton Live, Traktor, Serato Scratch Live, and all other mixing software and hardware. Your DJ sets will always sound smooth and professional.
By now my nose is smelling digital snake oil, and why not? Anything which promises to take your mixes to the next level, deserve to be treated suspect. So I check out the concept of Harmonic Mixing (which is actually setup by Mixed in Key!) and the wikipedia entry.
A commonly-known method of using harmonic mixing is to detect the root key of every music file in the DJ collection by using a piano. The root key that fits the track perfectly may be used to create harmonic mash-ups with other tracks in the same key. The root key is also considered compatible with the subdominant, dominant and relative major/minor keys.
A more advanced harmonic mixing theory has been proposed which accounts for the various modes as well (aeolian, ionian, lydian, mixolydian, dorian and phrygian). It is shown that these alternate modes can be seen as variations of the traditional major and minor keys, and that they can be translated to traditional keys via the Circle of Fifths.
In 2006 and 2007, harmonic mixing has attracted substantial media attention. Pioneer Pro DJ, the manufacturer of DJ products have released DJM-800, an audio mixing console capable of correcting the key of the track while it is being played. Allen & Heath has teamed up with Mixed In Key to release music software that analyzes MP3 and WAV files and determines the musical key of every file. MixShare frequently updates a freeware utility called Rapid Evolution which can also detect the musical key, in addition to the BPM, of audio files. MixMeister has continued to offer “harmonic mixing” features in their DJ software. Traktor DJ Studio software from Native Instruments and Torq from M-Audio display “Key” columns in their interfaces to allow for easy sorting of songs by key as does Virtual DJ from Atomix as of version 5.0.
There has only been one software key detection accuracy comparison to date, initiated by Camelot.
DJing for Dummies book, published in the US on January 29th, 2007, and in the UK on December 1st, 2006, includes a chapter dedicated to harmonic mixing called “Building a Foolproof Set.”
Reading further I read that lots of top djs are using this technique, Paul Van Dyk, Tiesto, Markus Schulz and the number one dj in the world Armin Van Buuren. Back to the harmonic mixing site, theres a guide which explains how it all works. In principle it works by using the dominate key of the song/track. Then using the Camelot system/wheel to play tracks in the key up or down from that one. So if you were doing a set, you could start at 3B then go up to 4B,then 5B, then 6B. You also seem to get a interesting effect going between Minor (A) and Major (B). There's also the idea of a energy boost where you jump a load of keys, so from 6B to 9B should boost the mix if you do a break a pose to a long mix. So in theory it seems ok and its nice to have a rough formula to this stuff, being a logical person. Even guides like this make sense.
But what really bugs me or makes me think Snake oil is the lack of mixes to compare on the site, wording like It will sound like a professional mash-up made in the studio, even if you are mixing on live DJ equipment. And finally the secret to the perfect DJ mix, which had me banging my head against the floor.
This is a special technique that is used by hundreds of top DJs. If you release and sell your CDs, this mix will get higher review scores. If you're making a mix for your friends, there's a higher chance that they will burn it onto CDs and copy it to their iPods.
This magic “sauce” creates the perfect DJ mix:
- Your first track must be an instrumental (no vocals)
- Your second track must have vocals
- The duration of your first track must be shorter than 2 minutes 30 seconds
- The duration of your second track must be shorter than 4 minutes
- All subsequent tracks must be shorter than 5 minutes
This trend appears on many successful DJ CDs. Try it yourself and hear how good it sounds.
Now to be fair, I'm just a ex-vinyl dj who played in a few clubs and bars in the past and now djing on my balcony using the Pacemaker after dropping djing on laptops. But to me music is like art, its very subjective. For example yesterday I was listening to greg downey whos number 82 in the world, his technique was great but his style of mixing wasn't great, it was just in my mind too all over the place. Maybe it was hard because the crowd was all over the place. Matt Everson also was technically great but boy oh boy did he love to play with the tracks and mixer. He even opted for a bit of scratching in the middle of the set. Very high energy but i'm not so sure.
So is Harmonic mixing snakeoil for djs? Well after looking else where maybe not in concept but there are companies which are leaching off the back of the concept. For free software check out Mixshare. Harmonic mixing is technique which could be useful but isn't a sure shot. I picked this up from a forum which sums it up.
I have been using mixed in keys for the last 6 month or so, It scans your tracks and puts them into a harmonic category, If you stick to the rules of mixed in key you can move out from one track into 3 other key ranges or of course stick to the range you are already in, there are in total 24 possible ranges to work around.
The only issue with this is tracks have different bpm's so pitching up or down to create a mix will then of course change the key range again, so to truly harmonic mix you need the facility to key lock each track.
I never key lock as I feel this adds a little variation to my style of mixing, i.e. if it sounds harmonically perfect every time it makes you lazy, throw in the track and let it ride “where is the fun in that” I like to work to make it right, if something clashes cut the EQ to make it fit ect ect.
There are so many things you do to make a mix, Mixed in key is just another tool to add another something to your style, but used in variation along with everything else.
For me Mixed in key has turned into a way of cataloguing my tracks, as I find it hard getting familiar with new tracks until I’ve played them a few time, this might sound strange but a digital file is not like having a new record where you physically have something to hold with a label on it in order to know what it is.
I'm tempted to do two similar mixes to see what the difference is and if people prefer one over the other.
Characterising Ian Forrester, wheres the APML?
Interesting data mining site, found via Miss Geeky. Like her I get quite different results depending if I go for cubicgarden or ian forrester.
I stumbled on an interesting website called Personas; it’s part of the Metropath(ologies) exhibit, that’s currently on display at the MIT Museum by the Sociable Media Group from the MIT Media Lab. It uses natural language processing to create a data portrait of your online identit
Its fun to watch it work you out by the words you use or others use about you but I can't help but feel it would be great to attach the ability to generate Implicit Data/Concepts in APML to the backend of this, so I can remove the parts I think its got wrong or at least balance it with some Explicit Data/Concepts of my own. Actually now more that ever do we need APML 1.0 I think.
Cheap cloud storage anyone?
I have been changing around my home network storage recently because I don't really want to loose a load of data again and I don't think the home server setup I have is the best. (Although to be fair fair I've only lost data in the last few year because I stupidly formatted the wrong hard drive when switching from Freenas to a plain Ubuntu install. I have never had a disk failure in my storage server yet)
Freenas was good if you just wanted a replacement NAS setup but it lacked any multimedia, backup, services. So I started running Ubuntu on the box and installed everything myself (Samba, SSH, Webmin, etc). The machine physically has 6 drives and I was planning to put them into a RAID formation but didn't see the point when I could use LVM (logical volume management) which has the effect of loads of drives looking like one. Yes I know if one drive goes down i loose stuff but its a risk I take and I tend to run Spinrite on the server and all my machines once a month so I can work out if theres any problems coming up. Oh yeah and I looked into the UnRAID stuff but it seemed to be more trouble thats its worth. For backup I then copy everything important worth keeping to a external drive which I place away from the computers (aka its only powered on when I'm backing up or restoring). But this isn't enough, I need to really look into serious remote cloud storage but I've found them to be expensive in the past.
Looking at Backblaze's solution, I'm certainly amazed and am reconsidering cloud storage again. 5 dollars a month is about 3.50 pounds a month which is good for unlimited data storage. And I can see why its so cheap compared to the others, although I was surprised to find it uses some application and it only works on PC and Mac. The problem I've always had is the word unlimited, when doing some research – unlimited has been restricted to just typical website files, not allowed archive files, backup files, etc, etc. For example check out Dreamhost's upfront unlimited policy. I already have a free dropbox account which is great but its not really a backup service like I need. I did use Jungledisk for a while with Amazon S3 for a bit but the pricing starting adding up. I've heard good things about Spideroak and they support Linux well. The last option which has me thinking is my ISP recently starting offering a online backup service, unlike the rest it uses standard protocals to do the transfering but unlike the rest the pricing model is not clear. Actually so unclear, that I can't even find it.
What do people do for backup? What services do people highly recommend? Should I just try building my own backblaze box instead?
Dan Pink on the surprising science of motivation
Everything I'd experienced and guessed about motivating people around out of the box problems is sumed up perfectly in this delightful talk by Dan Pink at TED Global. Its stunning to hear how much of no brainer this all is, but how the disconnect still challenges most companies.
Career analyst Dan Pink examines the puzzle of motivation, starting with a fact that social scientists know but most managers don't: Traditional rewards aren't always as effective as we think. Listen for illuminating stories — and maybe, a way forward.
Where RSS Readers went wrong
Dare Obasanjo wrote quite a critical blog post about where RSS readers went wrong, then followed that up with another post about where Friendfeed went wrong.
Dare's thoughts quite solid too,
- Dave Winer was right about River of News style aggregators. A user interface where I see a stream of news and can click on the bits that interest me without doing a lot of management is superior to the using the current dominant RSS reader paradigm where I need to click on multiple folders, manage read/unread state and wade through massive walls of text I don’t want to read to get to the gems.
- Today’s RSS readers are a one way tool instead of a two-way tool. One of the things I like about shared links in Twitter & Facebook is that I can start or read a conversation about the story and otherwise give feedback (i.e. “like” or retweet) to the publisher of the news as part of the experience.
- As Dave McClure once ranted, it's all about the faces. The user interface of RSS readers is sterile and impersonal compared to social sites like Twitter and Facebook because of the lack of pictures/faces of the people whose words you are reading
- No good ways to separate the wheat from the chaff. As if it isn’t bad enough that you are nagged about having thousands of unread blog posts when you don’t visit your RSS reader for a few days, there isn’t a good way to get an overview of what is most interesting/pressing and then move on by marking everything as read. On the other hand, when I go to Techmeme I can always see what the current top stories are and can even go back to see what was popular on the days I didn’t visit the site.
- The process of adding feeds still takes too many steps. If I see your Twitter profile and think you’re worth following, I click the “follow” button and I’m done. On the other hand, if I visit your blog there’s a multi-step process involved to adding you to my subscriptions even if I use a web-based RSS aggregator like Google Reader.
I agree, the river of news style aggregator works surprisingly well, I don't know what it is but that movement of scanning a load of headlines is quick and effective. I actually liked RSS Owl's aggregator mode, where you can select a load of feeds and just have them all available in one massive long list. This is great for reading on the train for example.
The social nature of the RSS reader has always been a problem. Not only did I want to share bookmarks via delicious but I also wanted almost equal balance with being able to blog parts of
what I was reading. So in RSS Owl there was the concept of newsbins which you could dump news items into. I wanted those bins to be linked to things like tublr blogs but it wasn't to be. I guess Google readers like feature is as close as I could imagine it would work. However it would be good to make for example public and have a rss feed in the future.
I'm not tied to the look of blogs, its nice but not essential for my reading, although I can see others seeing it as important. The wheat and chaff argument for me wasn't as bad when I was using Touchstone/Particls. It was like having your own Techmeme on your desktop, to be fair also Particls had nicer ways to share news that most rss readers. The APML support and concept was ahead of its time and I'm sure will make it into future rss readers. And finally adding feeds is agreed still too painful, what really does my nut in is when someone links a podcast to the itunes store. So you can't actually get the RSS feed its self. Sometimes I have to pull down the source and search for *.rss or *.xml feeds which is shocking. Discovery should work but it doesn't always and very few seem to cope with multiple feeds.
Don't get me wrong, I still use Liferea with Google Reader sync but I don't bother with folders anymore. I tend to use Liferea when I'm offline to catch up with stuff. My more general use of RSS is as plumbing between components and services, there's no doubt thats what its best for.
Loving this remix: Henry Rollins ft. Techno Viking
On Jon Udell’s Interviews with Innovators
So I had the pleasure of being on Jon Udell's Interviews with Innovators series on IT Conversations. I'm talking about the data and feeds used on BBC Backstage and example of mashups using that data. Its about a hour long and we cover quite a lot of ground in that time. Jon Udell did cut quite a lot of the ramble which was actually a good thing. Anyway you can judge for yourself.
BBC Backstage is the umbrella term for an evolving set of feeds and APIs that the BBC has been offering since 2005. In this conversation, Ian Forrester updates Jon Udell on what progress has been made, and what obstacles remain, as the BBC navigates toward its digital future.
Thanks to Jon Udell for having me on the show.
Apple being hit from many sides
So after the surprising announcement that Spotify was accepted by Apple on to (into) the App Store. And the recent Google Voice pondering, will Apple also allow Real's Rhapsody too and even more interestingly will Netflix get a on to the App store? What kind of justification could they use against those two but not the others? Will the FCC also add to the pressure of the app store submission process?
This is why being the filter between yes and no is a very bad position to be in. Apple will get it from every single direction, not only the large players but also the smaller players. Anyone considering building a App Store modeled on the Apple Store better take note (microsoft), this is simply not sustainable. One yes to one player such as Skype/Spotify, gives others the grounds to push there application too. I mean really whats the practical difference between Spotify and Rhapsody? Maybe Napster might also want to get in to the game, heck even Microsoft Music might get involved. If Netflix do get on to the app store, why would Apple not allow a specially crafted Boxee for example? Or even better examples Hulu or BBC's iplayer?
I know I bash Apple a lot but what would you say when Netflix come calling?
TV Show: The Cube
I downloaded the first episode of this new show and to be honest I was surprised how addictive it was to watch. Its a very simple concept, do a task which most people could do then put it in the cube, crank up the pressure with large sums of money with a large drop to zero if your limited number of tries/lives end.
What makes the cube even more impressive to watch is the use of high definition and high speed footage with 360 degrees of views. So one of the tasks was to drop a ball into a tube and catch it at the other end before it hits the floor. Seeing how close it gets in HD on a super highspeed camera is something else. Its not just close, its nail biting eerily close. Another aspect of the cube is the lateral thinking which goes into beating the cube. So in the task mentioned earlier the guy knocked the ball up in the air with one hand then got into a position to catch it on the way down. In the most recent one, a guy striped down to his pants to complete a task which involved walking over two barriers without being able to see anything.
If this came straight from the production of ITV then I'm sure this format will appear in other countries very soon. Its also got legs for a gameshow, so you can imagine a celeb version at Christmas and New Years then even a doubles version further down the line. There's also a almost unlimited amount of games you can play in the cube. Everything from Basketball with a square box to flicking a ball into a small glass of water. You can even have the same game with different levels. So the flicking the ball into a glass of water means at 2k a bucket of water, while at 100k its a pint glass and at 250k it could be a large test tube. Clever stuff, although I would love for the voice of the cube to be a little more like the computer in Portal. The Body also looks like something out of Ghost in the Shell, nice move.