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thoughts on generative & mobile music making from the co-founder of intermorphic

Archive for the 'loops' Category

miniMIXA in Radio 1 Newsbeat wrt SYPC Mobile Mashup

Posted by Tim Cole on 27th March 2007

In relation to the SYP Mobile Mashup below, there was also a report on Radio 1 Newsbeat during the Scott Mills show, just before 6pm yesterday. You might be able to hear it here for 7 days (it is at the end of the 15 minute report). I understand that Radio 1 has an audience of 2 million listeners, so that is pretty good! When they mentioned it will cost you £200 to £400 pounds, what they meant was that that was the price of a higher end Smartphone or PocketPC – not the price of the miniMIXA software (which is around £10 to £20)! I guess there will be information about miniMIXA posted on the BBC website later.

NB: You might also be searching for mini mixer, mini mix, minimix, minimixer, music mixer, mobile phone etc.

Posted in DJ, Mobile, Music software, Pocket PC, Radio, SYPC, Symbian, Windows Mobile, loops, miniMIXA | 1 Comment »

Music mixing DJ performance at Tao 3GSM party with miniMIXA on Windows Mobile device

Posted by Tim Cole on 16th February 2007

>> Hear the mix here: Red Lounge – Tao 3GSM Party Mix.

On Monday night (12th Feb) at the Tao 3GSM party in Barcelona’s Red Lounge, I did short performance on miniMIXA, mingling with the party goers – in between a great set from the house DJ, “DJ Monk”. I had miniMIXA++ running on an PocketPC and sending the live 22Khz stereo audio output stream via bluetooth to the venue’s PA system. It all worked fine, and I had some senior mobile industry figures mixing live, too.

For the set I had purchased from Time and Space some middle eastern audio loops (Roots of the Middle East and North Africa from Big Fish Audio and SoundScan Arabian Traditions from Universal Sound Bank) and was mixing these together with some excellent bass and drum loops from the Music Tech Magazine, plus an audio track and a modular synth riff, together with some spot loops. I had set these up with the miniMIXA++ Cell Mix (MusicDJ) mode, and used the new beta XY control surface and quality filter to cool effect.

Tao miniMIXA MusicDJIt really was pretty spectacular (and fun) to be doing this all live on a mobile device, on the floor. I lost the bluetooth connection a couple of times when someone passed in front of the bluetooth module (it was a low power one), so that was useful to know.

Even though I am not a DJ, people seemed to enjoy it, and especially enjoyed participating in the mix and hearing themselves over the PA – seeing the excited reactions was really cool. The XY control surface went down particularly well, too. In the hands of a real DJ, this could all be so much cooler still.

For those interested, I have uploaded a quick mix of roughly what I did. It uses 11 of the 12 tracks in miniMIXA, and all 4 sections in MusicDJ mode. It uses high quality low pass and high pass filters (controlled with XY control surface), reverbs and even a modular softsynth. You should hear that everything is pretty tight. It was live mixed, and recorded (direct to SD card) on an HTC Universal. You can find the recording here :Red Lounge – Tao 3GSM Party Mix.

Was this a world first performance? Quite possibly(!), as it included the following elements: live 12 track mixing on a Windows Mobile device; 22KHz stereo output over bluetooth to the club’s PA; audience participation; modular synthesizer; spot loop triggering; full track audio file streaming from storage card; XY control panel (controlling filter cutoff/Q); loading content into the mix on the fly (auto pitch shift/time stretch from other MIXApaks); use of a range of live fx at track and global level.

Posted in 3GSM, DJ, Mobile, Music software, Pocket PC, Windows Mobile, loops, miniMIXA | 6 Comments »