Category: italic+mixing

Another one of those Pacemaker mixes which I love doing. I did this mix about a week ago before going to Las Vegas but couldn't really think of a name for it. Anyhow, this should be the last mix on the old pacemaker firmware. When I get back to the UK, I'll be upgrading it to the new one which everyone seems to be raving about on the forums.

1. Oblivion (head in the clouds) – Manix
2. Shnorkel (Original Mix) – Miki Litvak & Ido Ophir
3. Julian Jeweil – Air Conditionne
4. Dark sides (thomas penton mix) – Nugen
5. The 7th day (M.I.K.E remix) – The Gift
6. Grasshopper (dance mix) – Sandler Van Doorm
7. Lyra (leon bolier mix) – Leon Bolier
8. Jelly tracks (Rippin & Drippin Mix ) – Oliver Klein
9. Verdi – Mauro Piccotto
10. Panic attack – Simon Patterson
11. Smack – Simon Patterson
12. In the dark – Tiesto

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When I watched this review of the Pacemaker, I almost had to shut down my laptop because I was so pissed off at the stupid review of the pacemaker by Techcrunch's Crunchgear. The guy, John Biggs spend at least 10secs of looking at the box rather than playing with the device. Even when playing with it, he simply uses the crossfader to go back and forth. Now to be fair John does say in the short paragraph.

I apologize in advance for this video but I’m trying my hardest to make great mixes on my Pacemaker. Sadly, the fact that I’m old and live in my attic is causing a severe reaction to cool.

But this is certainly not the way to show off a pacemaker.

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Another week, and another mix. More travels with my pacemaker. This time just a mix of some of my favourite tunes back to back. As always enjoy…

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I'm getting a little fed up of seeing all these crazy wanna-be dj applications. Seriously I'm not against them but most of them are so very lame, there not even trying to take advantage of the fact there on mobile devices.

DJ Party Mixer for Windows Mobile doesn't even support pitch control. IPJ for the iphone and ipod looks much better but fails for not supporting 2 or more tracks. You have to use a external mixer which ruins the whole concept of mobile. The shaking effects is interesting but ultimately its all a bit of a joke again. Also a expensive one at 50 dollars. Pocket studio seems to have most of the features needed to get a decent-ish mix but this is the rub why all these devices suck for mixing. The Pacemaker not only has everything sorted for a real time performance but it also has dual sound outputs. One for monitoring and the other one for audience output. This is simply not possible on any of the mobile devices to date. The Samsung M7600 is selling its self as a dj phone but once again theres only one output. And even the most advanced Windows mobile phone can not seperate the audio out between the headphone jack and the bluetooth sound connection which could count as two. If it was possible it would be interesting to monitor on a bluetooth headset and have the main output plugged into a amp, system, etc. No I'm sorry to say but Tonium have totally got this area covered at the moment. I do hold out hope (I still remember the first digital dj app – virtual turntables and they said it wouldn't take off) for clever IP djing but right now, its not even close to interesting. What is interesting is Wiijing

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Heavy snow in the midnight city mix by cubicgarden

1. Tin There (edit) – Underworld
2. The 7th Day (M.I.K.E Remix) – The Gift
3. Sky Falls Down (Armin van Buuren Remix) – Oceanlab
4. Bulgarian (Signum Remix) – Travel
5. Beauty hides in the deep (john o'callaghan remix) – The Doppler effect
6. The Pride in your eyes (Martin Roth mix) – Tillmann Uhrmacher
7. Language (Santiago Nino Dub Tech Mix) – Hammer and Bennett
8. Gamemaster (Matt Darey 2003 Club Remix) – Lost Tribe
9. Attention (steve birch remix) – John 00 Fleming vs Christopher Lawrence
10. She wants him – Moussa Clarke & Terrafunka
11. Into the danger (M.I.K.E remix) – M.I.K.E vs Andrew Bennett
12. Gouryella (extended version) – Gouryella
13. Heal – Electrique Boutique
14. In the dark (tiesto trance mix) – Tiesto

This mix was recorded during the snow storm hit the South East of the UK on Feb 2nd. The slips are where my cold hands would wipe snow or ice off the pacemaker, Enjoy!

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So my first recorded mix of 2009 and its a festival of hard beats and bleepy sounds. I would normally call it progressive trance but I'm fed up with the confusion between that and progressive, Which seems to be some kind of rock genre. So now I'm calling it Tech Trance. Anyway, whats important is the mix is pretty fast pace due to the introduction of a Rave classic (Put the bassdrum on by the ascendant masters) at the start which I also had to slow down by 10%. There's a bunch of new tunes which I've never played before in this mix including the show stopper Panic attack by Simon Patterson.

The Panic attack at midnight mix is available for download as a Mpeg3 too and is licensed under a creative commons nc-nd licence, obviously the tunes themselves are all rights reserved copyright. Enjoy!

1. Put the bassdrum on – the ascendant masters
2. a new dawn (virtual vault mix) – Steve Forte Rio
3. smack – simon patterson
4. shnorkel – Miki Litvak & Ido Ophir
5. Rheninkraf – Oliver Klien
6. Panic attack – simon patterson
7. Pegasus (megaminds mix) – Mauro Picotto
8. Body of conflict (cosmic gate mix) – Cosmic Gate
9. Kink – Trentemøller
10. Grasshopper (dance version) – Sander Van Doorn
11. Coincidance (Trentemøller Remix) – Mathias Schaffhäuser
12. first strike (signum signal 2004 remake) – Signum
13. Interstate Emperors – Jeffed
14. Kalopsia (Monogato's Filth Remix) – The Blizzard
15. Lyra (leon boiler mix) – Leon Bolier Pres. Precursor
16. The last pluck – Marcos Schossow
17. strip search – simon patterson
18. massive motion – M.I.K.E

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I could have put money on my prediction. I knew the 120gig Hard drive of the Pacemaker version 1 was too big. Currently I have 17gig of tunes on it and another 14 gig of tunes backed up in a different location on the same device. Don't get me wrong, we're still talking about 1500+ songs with a average length of 6mins each. Anyway, it still looks like the same device but they have redone the UI of the device [theres a short video from CES 09] to make it more quickly usable for new users. Auto beat match is like a major no no in the world of the dj. Version 1 had a BPM counter but it wasn't automatic. It seems one of the major changes is the automatic application of this feature. I don't quite know how pro-amateurs and pros will take the pacemaker v2 because the 1st version did come scrutiny for making mixing skill-less but they quickly found out it didn't. Either way, I'm hoping the UI changes will be a firmware update for the V1 Pacemakers. I checked for a Firmware today but nothing, however the forums seem to be on fire with the news.

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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

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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.

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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.

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