Mixalbum.com - Itunes With A Twist

[Mission]

Okay, so I like to watch Dragons' Den on a Thursday night (BBC2 8pm) to see what madcap inventions / business propositions there are out there and which will secure funding from the Dragons (a group of 5 very successful, multi-millionaire executives). This week, my ears were most definitely pricked up at one individuals proposal - a web based music download site with a difference - www.mixalbum.com - it does what it says really, you purchase tunes ala itunes stylie but it will then mix them for you - ala dj stylie into a single mp3 file. There is a limit to the capabilities of the software, there can be no more than a 7% difference between the fastest and slowest tracks in any given mix but other than that, it will give you a dj quality mix in a single mp3 file format for not much more than you'd pay for a itunes album or a pre-mixed cd - the benefit of course is that YOU choose the tunes in the mix, rather than having them chosen for you.

 

Anyway, the dude secured his investment of 150k to get the ball rolling and I checked the URL to see what the progress was and it turned out that the site actually went live last night at 10:00pm - it looked pretty good, loads of tunes on offer (it's basically dance music orientated) but it sadly lacked anything that I actually wanted to buy - I think they need to get a serious back catalogue in place at some point.

 

The main downside I see to it is you can't actually purchase the software that does all this technical wizardry independently - something I would be keen to do, so that I could mix existing tracks that I own into some sort of decent mix that I could enjoy. I guess this could be resolved if they do a decent back catalogue of tunes though.

 

Sadly, the site is down at present, they say it got too many hits and the server threw a hissy fit but you can sign up to get an email when it comes back online again.

 

There was a demo on it too where you could try 2 tracks to see what you thought of the mixing before you committed to buying anything.

 

From the look of it, each track is 89p and the quality was good too.

 

One to try for sure I reckon, once it's back onstream.

 

[Mr. Sausages]

If you want to mix mp3s yourself get hold of software like PCDJ. It automatically synchronises the BPM of tracks, which I suspect is what this website will do - synchronise the BPMs and then play, e.g. the first 4 bars of one track over the last 4 bars of the previous. Although, if they're relying on a computer to do it for them with a user chosen tracklist, then I'm not sure how they'll avoid key clashes, vocal clashes, etc.

[Mission]

Thanks for that sausages, I'll look into it.

[PNP]

Mixmeister

[Mission]

Got an email today saying the site is now live. Not tried it yet though.

[Albert Tatlock]

The show is recorded a good few months ahead for obvious reasons as, for many of the ideas, any Tom, Dick or Harry or Jane could get a similar operation up and running within days.

 

I suspect there will be a number of copycat sites running within a few weeks, which will be worth looking out for that will compete on price. DSP algorithms can be copyrighted, but as there are so many ways of doing this most will not breach any patents - and anyway, even if accessible, the software used on copycat sites would have to be backward engineered and analysed (at a very high cost) to prove this is the case.