Tag: Spotify

Traktor for iPad

Native Instruments is getting serious about iOS.  Apps like this are why Android tablets are still very much behind iOS ones.

Some juicy details:

  • Traktor recognizes class-compliant USB audio interfaces, so a separate cue/mains mix is possible in stereo (lots of DJ apps hack this by making you pathetically use a headphone splitter).
  • It recognizes transients, and makes them playable sampler-style hits that can be played while the song is going on.  Very cool – and something that is much harder to do on a full computer.

Also this:

Traktor DJ also does something DJ apps haven’t done before: it builds a recommendation engine into the app itself. That seems to me to be inevitable in the Spotify and Last.fm age. While it may make some DJs cringe, the software itself now uses tempo, key, and even timbre metadata to work out what music will match well with what you’re playing.

Huh?  We’ll see if that one works out in real life.

Anyway, read the full post over at Create Digital Music.

Streaming services: piracy-lite?

It’s hard to say what deals the major labels get (they won’t tell), but I don’t see a huge benefit beyond piracy besides giving people a legal way to freely listen to your music. Digital music news says:

If Spotify, Rhapsody, or other streaming services won’t answer the question, maybe indie labels and artists will. These figures are from an independent catalog of 87 albums and 1,280 songs, as posted on The Trichordist. On Spotify, they seem consistent with reports of per-song payouts of roughly one-third to one-half of a penny

Either they see it as free marketing to out music on these services (probably) or they’re just really nice guys.