Tag: gpl

There’s a open life in the Pacemaker yet

pacemaker_sonar_june_2007_07

Just when I was starting to wonder if I was going to have to switch back to using a laptop to dj… I receive a email message from the new Pacemaker community…

As you probably know we were trying to get hold of the Pacemaker source
code so we could see a future for the Pacemaker.

We have now had contact (has joined our forum) from Jonas who was to
original inventor of the Pacemaker and founded Tonium. He has purchased the
rights to the Pacemaker design & software back, and intends to take this
project forware again!

Not only that he has already offered that the GPL’d source code WILL be
made available on Sourceforge.

We are yet to find out Jonas’ intentions, but this is exciting news for all
us Pacemaker users. Keep checking our forum for any updates.

Jonas posted a message on the forum…

Dear PMD users, I invented Pacemaker back in 2005 and founded Tonium later that year. It makes me very happy that PMD is still alive and being used, despite the lack of support and hardship that I know you have gone through. I even recognise some of you from the good old Pacemaker.net days – Sox, Migzy, Regis and many more, you are all remembered.

Developing Pacemaker was among the most exciting things I have ever done. It was a project that came out of a pure passion for music and a feeling that it had to be possible to create a DJ system in the size of an iPod. Developing Pacemaker was also the toughest thing I have ever done. Starting from scratch with nothing but an idea for a hardware device. Luckily, I was very naive and did not foresee the challenges lying ahead.Following the launch and our expansion in the spring of 2008, I was exhausted. We had basically expanded from two people to more than thirty in just a little bit over one year, while developing PMD, PME and Pacemaker.net. Honestly, I was a little bit over my head in managing the kind of company Tonium had become. Therefore I stepped down as the CEO in May 2008. That proved to be a mistake. I was not too impressed with how the company was managed going forwards. But that said, it was not easy for the new management, they were in for a great challenge given the global economy crisis, the smartphone revolution and new disruptive music services popping up. And now, as you all know, Tonium have ceased its operations.

But! I have some news for all of you. On Thursday January 12, it will finally be official that my new company 100 Milligrams have purchased the intellectual property rights for Pacemaker, something I have been trying to do for years. Taking part in this venture is my long time friend Daniel Wallner, co-founder of Tonium and the engineering genius behind Pacemaker®. I am also happy to say that we have added a fresh face and a third member to our core team, Olof Berglof, an innovative designer and marketeer. We have also been able to get a little bit of funding and the three of us are now working day and night to transform Pacemaker into the new music and technology landscape.

We would also like to help supporting PMD users in the best kind of way. Your forum is fantastic and we will point people in your direction as well as trying to be here ourselves as much as possible. When it comes to hardware problems, we will try to be as helpful as we can by providing component information, schematics etc. Unfortunately we cannot promise new firmware versions, at least not for some time. We just do not have the necessary manpower. However, we will in time make sure the auto upgrade from Pacemaker® Editor is working and the GPL source code from Pacemaker Device will be available on SourceForge.

I will personally update you on the progress of the New Pacemaker Project and let me know if you have any questions or ideas.

Cheers,

Jonas (@jonorberg)

How awesome is that!!!
Can’t wait to see what comes next… Open is the way forward, open hardware, open software, open idles…

New Pacemaker firmware 16219

Pacemaker

Forgot to blog this but it seems like Tonium has pretty much disappeared from the scene but some how they uploaded a secret firmware upgrade package… If you have a Pacemaker and would like to try out the new firmware, here’s the details of how to do it. Bear in mind, this firmware is not official and was found on the pacemaker download site by chance. So its very beta, you have been warned

  1. Point you browser to this address: http://www.pacemaker.net/Default.aspx?documentID=158&
  2. once there you’ll be presented with a XML file… now Copy The sessionID… Then point you browser to this address : www.pacemaker.net/Default.aspx?documentID=159&FirmwareVersion=16219&SessionID=(SESSIONID)&DSN=00AA0xx101XXX
  3. Note Look at the address where is says (PASTE SESSIONID) cut that part and replace it with the ID you got from browsing the other page… once done you’ll can download the firmware file..
  4. Once downloaded, rename it to .ZIP… extract it…. the put the extracted file on you pacemaker in the .pacemaker directory (if you can’t find the .pacemaker directory make sure you can browse hidden files on your OS)… once done unplug the pacemaker and the update will be installedWarning: As there’s no official release, theres no manual as well…

You can also download the firmware here, if you can’t be bother doing the session ID thing.

I’ve installed it on my own and not noticed any side effects except the very small one of losing all my previous setup. After 5mins it was all back to as i remembered it.

New changes seem to be.

  • BeatLock – The beat lock has been much improved according to some people. I always use my ear so it little difference to me.
  • Snapping loops – I think the loops now snap to the beat, making it much easier to loop
  • Beat jumping – You can now skip jump beats if your timing isn’t quite right, this could be useful.

I would have liked to have seen more, but the community is getting organised so we may see some serious hacking very soon. I do wonder if they will respect the GPL by giving us all the source code.

Hacking the Pacemaker (progress)

Pacemaker Manager

At last a break through, someone (musicinstinct2) has cracked the way the pacemaker adds and removes music to the SQLlite database.

My initial experiments involved using the sqlite database browser to open up music.db and enter track information. Then manually copy the tracks over to the device, making up random hash values (as I couldn’t work out how Tonium were creating these hashes). It works! The device doesn’t rely on any particular naming convention, whatever is in the filename field in the database (music.db) is used by the device to load the track.

Fantastic…! Now this is cracked and Musicinstinct2 is working on a open source client to manage tracks. The next stage is to crack and understand the XML file which is attached to every single track uploaded on the device. The bulk of the data in stuck in a XML element called realBeatLocations.

I expect it won’t take long before we have the whole thing pretty much cracked. What would make things move along quicker is if Tonium would publish the source as it was created under the GPL.

Gimpshop beta, I love it

Gimpshop in action

For some reason I just can't get on with GIMP (the GPL Photoshop). Its weirdly layed out and if your use to Photoshop its simply a nightmare. Its funny because I've not used Photoshop seriously for maybe 4 years but these habits die hard. I've managed to get on with Illustrators GPL replace Inkscape no problem but GIMP? no even close.

So I remembered I had tagged this project called gimpshop and decided to go try it out. Although its still in Beta, I was highly impressed. I mean although its just (well its never that simple, when working with someone elses code) moving around some of the options and finally adding a backdrop. I've been able to work with it and design things much quicker than before.

I did look around for other opensource and gpl photoshop applications but besides a range of Japanese apps like Canvas 4, I was pretty much stuck with Gimp.

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