Category: italic+mixing

In a very surprising move, Tonium has done a deal with HMV to sell the Pacemaker on there site and in selected stores. This is great news, because finally the device will be available outside of the pro dj shops and in the hands of the general public. I do however wonder if people will understand it without some direction or some time in such a busy shop? Oh well its yours for only 399 pounds now, which isn't bad if you consider how much I paid for mine back in May 2008. At least I can claim braggin rights with number 211.

Oh if you've ever wanted to see whats actually in the pacemaker, someones actually taken it apart [1] [2]. Here's how to do it.

The case is held together by two sets of pins on opposite sides.

If you attempt this yourself, gently pop one side off, then even more gently wiggle the other side off. If you've ever yanked a laptop hard drive, you know the side-most connector pins will get bent if you rush it.

The twin chips are each 512mb of RAM. The spotted one is possibly the Freescale i.MX31L. The spots run to indicate moisture damage. The uppermost chip is audio power management. I didn't look underneath the hdd's ZIF connector as it's really fragile.

The USB and phones boards are tightly secured to the back piece. All of the jacks are snug against the pc boards and i didn't notice any weak solder points.

Looking at the front piece, you can see that everything is screwed tightly to the chassis and backed up further by the hard drive and battery. This means no buttons to break off and push in and nothing to jiggle loose.

Beautiful work Tonium.

As expected its pretty straight forward because the guys behind it only had off the shelf “standard” components to work with. There's already talk about replacing the Samsung HS122JB hard drive with a ZIF comptable Flash Drive on the forum. But the biggest challenge is software it seems. People are trying to build replacement ways to get music on and off the device without the editor. The best attempt so far is the Pacejacker software, which is written in Adobe Air and allows you to alter the song names, genres, etc without touching the files. I'm convinced once this device gets more into the public, your going to see much more hacking on it.

Technorati Tags: pacemaker, pacemaker.net, tonium, hmv, hacking, hardware, dj, music, djtool, mix

Comments [Comments]
Trackbacks [0]

I gave almost the same talk at Berlin as I did 3-4 weeks ago at BarCampLondon5. Except this time the room was packed and the reaction was a lot more positive generally. So much so, twitter was full of comments. I captured some of these in a screenshot.

Comments [Comments]
Trackbacks [0]

Interesting interview with the guys behind the Pacemaker here. Of course some really good quotes to get you going.

What was the inception of Tonium?

MR: Two and a half years ago, I met this odd fellow. He came up to our agency that we had at the time; it was called New. We were doing lifestyle graphic design and advertising for music clients and culture things and fashion. He came up to us and told us about this idea that he had. He was talking about computer processing capacity, developing, portability and the digitizing of music. He held up this little cardboard cutout mockup—it looked like an iPod. He said, ‘What if this was a DJ system?’ And we were like, ‘That sounds like fun. What are you paying us for this?’ At about the same time, the two colleagues at this agency with were drifting off into another focus where they wanted to be more involved in real art stuff and more graphic design. At some point, this guy, Jonas Norberg, asked me if I wanted to join the company—there wasn’t any [real] company—and I said, ‘Yeah,’ because it sort of summarized all the stuff that I had been doing up until that point with music and design. That was two-and-a-half years ago.

You had it in the street and the public gravitated towards it and instantly wanted to know more.

MR: Yeah, I mean this is a huge conference. I was totally blown away when I came down there because I’m not really a house music or an electronic music fan myself. [I’m] much more old school. I thought there should be around five, ten thousand people there, but it was over 150,000 people there, and [all of] Miami was all about the ‘dunka dunka.’ It was really cool to be down there with this thing because, since it’s portable, all you need is some sort of portable speaker system. We had this little tent for meet-and-greets with the industry, but then we had our guys with us that would play it and showcase it and we were just walking around Miami with this portable speaker playing and people were just huddling around us and were really just astonished with it.

Is the cost something that was an obstacle for you perhaps?

MR: When we developed [the Pacemaker], we had this naïve attitude: ‘Let’s not care what it costs; let’s just do something that we want.’ So, it ended up being pretty expensive. Some of the reactions that we’ve been getting is that it’s too cheap. [But] because the people that are most interested in this device are quite young—they’re in their early twenties—for them, $6,500 kronor is a hell of a lot of money. We’re looking into it [to] maybe see if we can offer a version that’s not as big a hard drive.

Comments [Comments]
Trackbacks [0]

At long last I've uploaded my Pacemaker presentation which a few people have seen at BarCampLeeds2 and BarCampBrighton3. I keep meaning to add more to the presentation, but I just find it easier if people simply just get up and have a go for 5mins. Enjoy…

Comments [Comments]
Trackbacks [0]

So it was the 18th Gay pride in Manchester this weekend and I had planned to be Dorset but my plans fell through at the last minute. I had already turned down the two parties I was asked to go to in London (thanks Nicole and JC), so I was pretty free. Anyway I was hanging around sackfield garden reading my book and I started doing some mixing with the pacemaker against the loud music. Some guys spied the pacemaker and started asking me about it. Before you know it was djing at a house party in the northern quarter with about 40 people. It was pretty cool and I got two sets off (I charged my pacemaker in between, althought I think it could have managed without it, can't beat USB charging).

It was one of those unique experiences which happen and don't really think about too much. It was a party and I was having fun. Didn't really get chatting with too many people, but it seemed like a lot of people were in town for the gay pride weekend. The only person who seemed to live in Manchester was the host and she wasn't very happy about the music. But most of the others enjoyed it, specially the trance set. Later in the evening, I toned it down and went all down and dirty with some progressive trance and lots of electro dance. I think the playlist speaks for its self really but the tunes which got people going the most was the Josh wink remix and the horrorist which if you've never heard this tune, you've got to hear! Its so wrong on so many levels but so great. (Funny enough, I found my mix on the Horrorist site).

Some guy I spoke to said my dj name was crap and I should come up with something
new and exciting to go with the pacemaker. The best they could come up
with was Dj Pace.

I recorded both sets using the pacemaker's internal recorder, so I could upload them later. The party did have a name funny enough, but it was something obscure and sounded like progression. So thats where the name comes from.

Live at the progression bank holiday weekender (party mix)

1. Intutition – Marninx presents Ecco
2. Bulgarian (signum remix) – Travel
3. Embrace Embrace (ferry fix) – Ferry Corsten
4. The fall (richard durand remix) – way out west
5. In the dark (tiesto trance mix) – Tiesto
6. As the rush comes (carl B remix) – Amazon vs Midway
7. Big sky (agnelli & nelson remix) – John O'Callagham featuring audrey gallagher
8. resound – thomas bronzwaer
9. Born slippy (richard durand remix) – underworld
10. Seven cities (v-ones living cities remix) – solar stone
11. Shadow world – thomas bronzwaer
12. The labyrinth (part one) – Moogwai
13. Intuition (martin roth remix) – Marninx presents Ecco
14. Helsinki scorching (alex morph remix) – Super8 versus Dj tab
15. Communication (part 3 coldware remix) – armin van buuren
16. Heaven scent (greg downey remix) – bedrock
17. Beautiful thing (photon project remix) – andain
18. Moonlight party – fonzerelli
19. Southern Sun (dj tiesto remix) – paul oakenfold

Live at the progression bank holiday weekender (after party mix)

1. Roots – tomcraft
2. atom bomb (straight 6 instrumental mix) – fluke
3. the fade (oliver lieb mix) – ambassador
4. Attention – John OO Fleming vs Christopher Lawrence
5. Higher state of consciousness (dirty south & tv rock mix) – josh wink
6. flash (timo mass remix) – green velvet
7. On screen – tomcraft
8. Girls (the rouge element remix) – prodigy
9. Polar shift – Trentemoller
10. Grasshopper (raw version) – Sander van doorm
11. Body of conflict (dub mix) – cosmic gate
12. The red light (album version) – green velvet
13. One night in New York city (chris liebing mix) – The horrorist
14. Rheinkraft (extended mix) – Oliver Klein
15. Verdi – Mauro picotto
16. Percolator 2000 (album version) – green velvet
17. Communication (more mix) – mario piu
18. Answering machine (album version) – green velvet
19. Windowlicker – Aphex twin

Comments [Comments]
Trackbacks [0]

There's something very special about letting people play with technology and tools that also enjoy. At the Geekparty Ryan Alexander asked me if I had the pacemaker on me. Of course I did and gladly handed it over for him to play with. I'd forgotten how much Ryan would appreciate it, because he loves dance music and dance music culture. Ryan had already seen part of what was possible on the videos I had posted already but the smile which reacted over his face was like a kid in a sweetshop. I reckon 10mins with the pacemaker and he would have would have be that close to buying one. You could just see the sparkle in his eye as he played with the effects. Fun times!

Although the photo has little to do with the title, I just love the look on our faces. It was a long night at the geekparty and I spent maybe too much money on cocktails but it was all good. Well captured rainycat.

Comments [Comments]
Trackbacks [0]

So Finally in firmware update #8793 you can now record/save a mix on the device while on the go. In the past, I was recording using my laptop to record the main line-out using Audacity. But now its all working as advertised.

Some of you might like to know my 2nd recorded mix using just the pacemaker and headphones is now officially up at my Pacemaker DJ site. The mix is called Manchester to London a short mix and used the method described here to put up the mix via the editing software, so theres no track lists I'm sorry to say.

So as said before the Pacemaker now does everything it was advertised to do from last year, recording was added as of the 4th June but I wasn't able to pull down the firmware update because I had an old version of the Pacemaker software installed on my machine. As many people said, why don't you just uninstall it then? Well I couldn't because I was using Wine on gnu/linux. Somewhere along the line, it had got stuck and I couldn't uninstall or reinstall the editor software. So I had to manually remove it myself. Before I go into details, I wanted to spend sometime talking about getting the Pacemaker working under Wine, because if I'm not mistaken, I'm there only gnu/linux user.

Wine is pretty easy to get if your using a modern distro like ubuntu. #sudo apt-get install wine will do the trick, when your done download directx 9 or 10 and you may need a copy of the .net framework (its what I had installed already). I'm using wine 0.9.46 and getting things started I recommend you just hit the http://www.pacemaker.net site and download the latest editor application for windows. Once its finished downloading, unzip it and right click on the setup.exe and select open with wine windows emulator. If everything works, it should install without a problem. You should now be able to launch the application using the desktop icon. My editor only seems to open when I got the Pacemaker actually plugged into a USB port, this might not be true of yours. Once your in the editor everything works as expected but its quite slow, so if your analysing 5000+ songs, I recommend you leave it overnight (yep even on a Dualcore2). When you come back it will take a whlile to transfer but you should be ready to mix. Now what your meant to do is eject the pacemaker but that doesn't work in Wine. So I've learned to unmount the pacemaker device on the desktop then hold the on/off switch to put it to sleep. You only need to do this to stop the hard drive check when you pull the USB cable too soon. Everything else under wine works including firmware updates (yep I was bricking it when do this for the first time). If you find you can't upgrade the firmware of software, remove the pacemaker manually by removing all entries for pacemaker in the wine registry – http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=678747. Because its only wine, you can be pretty raw with the deleting of everything pacemaker. The last thing to add is I tried to virtualise the pacemaker software using Windows XP SP3 on Ubuntu using VirtualBox but it failed to work due to a problem with the USB connections. I'm sure VMware would work, but I don't have it to try.

So generally, yes the pacemaker can and will work on gnu/linux but its not very user friendly but also doesn't require any serious hacking. I know a lot of penguin-heads don't like Wine because it causes the user to use closed software but I don't really have a choice right now. People on the forums are asking for itunes, windows media, winamp, etc support instead of relying on a propitery editor but there a long way off. I think it would actually be easier to write a python script which read the BPM from Amarok, Exaile, etc copied the mp3 to the correct directory and write the metadata .xml file, which goes with it. But that can be a task for another day… I'm going to mix myself to sleep instead.

Comments [Comments]
Trackbacks [0]

I also took my Pacemaker to Bristol on the weekend and got a chance to quickly flash my pacemaker past my cousins noses. My cousins were the ones which taught me how to mix and somewhat scratch all those years ago. So I was interested in showing them that my move to laptop djing hadn't gone to waste.

I've been thinking about doing a couple of sets in a few Manchester bars/clubs. Unlike London people don't mind a bit of trance while drinking, so I could I reckon convince a few managers to give me a spot. I mean the pacemaker is still rarely known by people and it uses up much less room that a dj box or even a laptop. I was actually mixing away in Kate's car the other day going up to Newcastle. All I needed was one ear phone in and I could comfitably do mixes while chatting away. Try doing a mix even on a laptop while in a moving car…

Comments [Comments]
Trackbacks [0]

I filmed this a while ago after the first few days of using the pacemaker. Hopefully it will explain what it is and how it actually works. Who knows maybe I might do a live demo at BarCampNorthEast or bring it out at the Geekdinner this Friday.

Comments [Comments]
Trackbacks [0]

Yes I did get one. You can see the unboxing sequence here if you like. For me its the thing I've always been waiting for. I never quite understand why anyone would want a ipod or mass storage music playing device. I mean playing music can be done by your phone and when I tend to listen to music, its mixed up. Most of the time I would like to mess with the music, remix it maybe even just speed it up a little or slow it down. Well with a ipod or even a phone you can't (without some extra software). So the pacemaker is the ipod of the remix generation. Yes its expensive (but not bad value compared to the top of the range ipod), yes its going to get out paced by something better in the future and yes its 1st generation so theres lots of tweaks I'd like to see but it bloody works and is addictive.

I did a mix last night at 2am while lying on the bed (yes its super-light to hold) and got my first proper sounding mix going using A9 (original mix) and Body of Conflict (cosmic gate mix). The controls are tricky at first but now I'm pitching and control the tunes like I've been doing it for years. Actually the pacemaker is comparable to virtual turntables or VTT which was the first dj application on the market (way back in 1997). There seems to be no auto BPM but it does give you a BPM counter which you can use as guidance. I am still a little confused about looping and cueing but I can mix in the headphones and put out a decent mix. I expect to be doing more complex mixes pretty soon. I'm just transferring the rest of my tunes over as I type.

Which leads on to some issues I've had already. First thing I did was plug in the power and USB lead (yes it charges over USB and uses a standard usb to mini-usb cable, same as my phone and my bluetooth headset using a adaptor) it pops up as a mass storage device with a folder pointing to a executable for mac and pc. So I ignore that and copy some tracks over to a folder. Eject the device using the standard eject and the pacemaker complains its hard drive needs checking. 1min later its checked and said everything is fine, but can't see the music. So this time I install the pc application using Wine (windows emulator for gnu/linux, although it actually standard for wine is not emulation – those crazy guys). Anyway luckily it runs and doesn't require any weird libs. I load my music in and it starts to work out the BPM and lengths, etc. Then I start to transfer tunes. It only transferred the ones which it had analysed and look inside the .pacemaker folder I could see it wasn't just dumping the mp3 file somewhere. Nope it was renaming them, creating a xml file and adding them to a SQLlite3 database for quick look up. This now means you must use the editor to drag and drop files which is painful. I also can't seem to eject the device from the editor due to wine hardware support I guess, so I end up checking the disc everytime. Its no big problem now because I finally have everything on the device (all 1733 tracks, 15gigs). I'll have to start ripping stuff in FLAC because I got a stupid amount of space left over, plus it does support FLAC, Ogg, Wave, Mpeg3, AAC, etc.

That's my main issue really, but it would have been nice to have a bigger instruction Manuel or even a PDF. All the docs are online and I'm still not online. So generally I'm impressed by the speed and implementation of everything I've seen online in videos. There is another room to plug in a Bluetooth adaptor if I wanted to. It also does charge over USB, so no need to carry any big power adapter ever. My 3 hour train journeys between London and Manchester are going to get more musical it would seem.

Comments [Comments]
Trackbacks [0]

Its weird how I missed out on all the hype for the launch of the Pacemaker. People were even doing unboxings for the launch. I think this guy is right, the pacemaker is a fantastic device but its not quite a revolution, djs are not going to just drop what they have been doing for it. It may however attract a whole new group of people like the sweetie whos doing the review above, to maybe give it ago. If they really want to get a more general crowd the price will have to come down.

I've been checking out some of demos and tutorials and I'm still impressed but there are a couple of things which I didn't know before hand which is a little off putting. The first one is the music management, 120gig of music navigatable in only about 6 ways – this is a worry but obviously theres no keyboard so searching for tracks is going painful. Luckly it does support Mpeg3, Ogg Vorbis, Flac, Wav, etc but exactly how open device is the device? It seems to me that you can edit the filters and stuff but only using their own propitery software which is Windows and Mac only. So that really screws over someone like myself, although I guess I could run it virtualised – maybe? I heard there is a auto BPM feature but does it syncronise beats too? The loop system seems a little less automatic. One of VirtualDj features is the Automatic beat-aware LOOP function, which makes loops quick and easy.

I can not for the life of me work out if while recording the mix live, it also saves a metadata file of what actions you made during the mix. It does seem to keep a track of what tunes you used and in which order but does it keep times too? Currently in Vitualdj I keep a playlist open and everytime I use a tune, I also try to remember to add it to the playlist too. Then I can export it as a M3U list. Some of you might say the alternative is just a pen and paper, but it should all be automatic and live alongside the raw wave file. Maybe SMIL or XSPLIF could make sense here? Ok last thing I noticed which is a little off putting is the lack of multitouch. A trigger is a key which pushes the crossfader to the far left or far right. These are very useful for doing very fast cuts into the music. If the was multitouch, you could doing some combination like hold down the left side of the crossfafer (maybe with a thumb) and press on the right with a finger. It would then be clever enough to notice the action as a cut or trigger. Otherwise just a couple extra buttons for triggers could have been useful. Currently you have to slide from one side to another but this can get quite tiring if doing lots of cuts. Generally a multi-touch pad and some keys could allow some interesting uses when editing a loop or fx.

I think I'll get a pacemaker in the end, virtualdj is the only reason why I still keep windows on my laptop. The gnu/linux dj software are so far off its not even funny. So this would be good. I looked on ebay and there selling for more that the online store price. I do wish it had Bluetooth Stereo but I can attach my dongle to the headphone socket for use with my bluetooth headphones/headset. Its good to see it will charge over USB too, so I won't have to carry a heavy power adapter around with me if I went on Holiday. But I can't help but feel version 2 is just around the corner.

Comments [Comments]
Trackbacks [0]

Wow I really want one, but I still really want a Pacemaker. The major difference is the price. The Kaos is 100 pounds compared to the Pacemaker which is almost 400 pounds. Yes they do different things but there both tackling the same problem (as such). To make things even more difficult, theres the Korg Mini-KP which seems to fit between the two nicely. Hey and how cool is it to hit the streets with a miniKP pas.

Comments [Comments]
Trackbacks [0]

I recently spent some time at a old friends house. We were going through his old vinyl and tunes as he reminded me that I had actually taught him to mix on decks years ago. He also played some amazing tunes which I had forgotten about till today. He's some of the better tunes… (any with a star mean I don't have a decent quality version of this tune).

• 2 Bad Mice by 2 Bad Mice
• Sugar is Sweeter by CJ Bolland
• Trip II the Moon by Acen
• Energy Flash by Joey Beltram
• Such a Feeling by Bizarre Inc
• Ecstatic (dry mix) by Zentropa
• Papua New Guinea by The Future sound of London
• The Bouncer by Kicks like a Mule
• LFO by LFO
• Waterfall by Atlantic Ocean
• I need your loving (original mix) by Baby D
• You got the love by Candy Statton
• Gonna make you sweat by C&C Music Factory
• Injected With A Poison by Praga Khan
• Passion (do you want it right now edit) by Gat Decor
• Not over yet by Grace
• Rock my heart by Haddaway
• Hurt you so by Jonny L
• Feel real Good by Manix
• Acid Trax by Phuture
• Go (rainforst mix) by Moby
• Insanity by Oceanic
• We got to live together by R.A.F
• Searchin for my Rizzla by The Ratpack
• Break 4 Love by Raze
• Instruments Of Darkness (The Prodigy Mix) by The Art of Noise
• Move your body by Xpansions
• Far out by Sons of a Loop Da Loop Era
• Le Voie Le Soleil by Subliminal Cuts
• Renegade by The Terrorist *
• Playing with Knives by Bizarre Inc
• Rush in the House by Xenophobia
• Trip To Trumpton by Urban Hype
• Some Justice by Urban Shakedown *
• Salva Mea (Epic Mix) by Faithless *
• Let me show you (vocal mix) by Camisra
• Rip Groove (RIP mix featuring TopCat) by Double 99 *
• Spin Spin Sugar () by Sneaker Pimps
• Sugar is sweeter (Armand's drum n bass mix) by CJ Bolland
• Professional Widow (Armand's Star Trunk Funkin' Mix) by Tori Amos
• The Chopper by The Terrorist

Comments [Comments]
Trackbacks [0]