I made you a mixtape

posted by chip on 2010-08-24 17:09:42
For a long time I've been a wannabe DJ. Whenever I'm in a club, I want to be the guy playing the music. I've indulged in Beatmania IIDX, which despite having a turntable on the controller, is really more about micro-motor skills than DJing. I even have a pair of over-ear studio headphones (which are fucking excellent besides).

In the past year or so, I've been working on actual DJ skills. I started by toying with Mixxx, which is a pretty decent two-deck DJ mixer. Alex got a DJ controller that came with a copy of Traktor, which made things easier. Then I started playing with Ableton Live, which is powerful beyond compare. I got a KORG PadKONTROL to help with sequencing in Live. And last year, I co-DJ'd a party at our house with Alex. I crossed that line from wannabe to amateur. :)

I do a lot of playing around in Live, practicing mixing things that no one ever hears. I decided to take that a step further and produce some mixes for the web. It's a little practice, a little performance, and a lot of fun.

It is the Saturday Night Mix.

I threw in a number of advanced HTML tricks to make that page snazzy, including the use of two webfonts and the audio tag. Fun fact: The audio playing in the audio tag is Ogg Vorbis, which has become the de facto format for HTML5 audio. I tried a MP3 in Opera, and it wouldn't play.

The first mix is mostly things I've found on Too Many Sebastians, which is mostly House. It starts off with a song of questionable legality. It was done by Shinichi Osawa and Patrick Alavi, but couldn't be cleared for release because it samples Toto's Hold the Line. (Man, everything's just coming up Toto lately...) NEVERTHELESS, I have brought it to you, because in the Dominion of Awesome, awesome trumps copyright every time.

I also have plans for a mix next Saturday. The theme was suggested by my brother Tim, and it's going to be a little more... industrial/trance-ish. I'm looking forward to it. :)

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Vorbis

posted by Jay Goodman Tamboli on 2010-08-24 18:05:22
In what sense has Vorbis become the de facto format? I thought everyone was using MPEG-4 with various codecs.

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posted by chip on 2010-08-25 01:37:26
In the sense that Vorbis worked for me in Opera, Chrome, and Firefox, but MP3 only worked in Chrome. In Macland, yes, everybody is using MPEG formats, but the smaller players aren't interested in paying Fraunhofer or MPEG-LA. For video, the battle between MPEG-4 and Theora is a pretty clear-cut win for MPEG-4, but in audio, Vorbis is a perfectly viable substitute. Maybe it's a leap to say it's a de facto format, but it seems to be more widely accepted.

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posted by Andrea on 2010-08-26 19:54:49
GOD DAMN IT, TOTO!

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