Everyone and their dog seems to be trying to get into the social Web, but Tonium, the folks who built the pricey but slick-looking Pacemaker mobile DJ player, have an interesting take. They’re combining mobile hardware, mixing and media management and software, and social site in one integrated service. It’s a bit like iTunes, Beatport, iPod, and Traktor had a love child. The idea is a three-pronged approach: there’s the portable DJ MP3 player we’ve seen before, for storing your music library and mixing sets on the fly, editor software that lets you fine-tune mixes, and a web community that lets you share mixes with other Pacemaker users. The editor syncs with the hardware, mixes from the hardware and the software can go online — you get the idea.

All of this looks good — and literally looks good, with lots of shiny black business on the website — but the question remains whether anyone can be taken seriously DJing this way, or perhaps whether that matters. The target seems to be casual listeners wanting a slightly more interactive experience, and people with some cash to spare. The software is already interesting, but time stretch and more customized effects are still due in an update. I also wonder if some people will just forgo the hardware and use the web tool and software.

Pacemaker.net beta

Tonium launches Pacemaker online community [Webware] — our friend Donald Bell notes that the site has had to sign some deals with labels and place restrictions on how often an artist appears in a mix

Some time in the last few days, browser-based music tool Yottamusic went kaput. For those of you who never saw it, the site was brilliant. Like the Rhapsody music service, Yottamusic featured all-you-can-listen music for a subscription fee, all playable in a cross-platform browser. (Yes, even Firefox for Linux worked just fine, thanks to a Firefox extension.) Unlike Rhapsody, Yottamusic had an interface that was actually attractive and usable, and synced plays to the music community Last.fm. Social features let you easily discover music via what other Yottamusic listeners liked — not a new idea, but powerful when integrated with a subscription music service. At least Yottamusic died a graceful death: playlists created on the site can be exported as XML and even uploaded to Rhapsody.com. A lot of websites may not go as gently into that good night, or, um, whatever.

Now, some of this makes some sense. Yottamusic itself was a creation of Rhapsody. In fact, the logical next step would be to ditch Rhapsody’s clunky, obnoxious interface with animated album covers and whatnot, and learn from Yottamusic’s cooler social features and sleeker interface. Let’s see, did th– nope. Why kill bad ideas and maintain the good ones when you can do the reverse?

It’s hard not to feel like subscription-based music in general is not long for this world.

The Web holds huge potential for music sharing and music discovery, but figuring out how to make that potential work — and how to navigate copyright and licensing laws in the process - has been a major challenge. This week, the creators of the website Mixaloo promised to “bring mix tapes into the digital age.” Whether you buy into that concept or not, or their particular implementation, the site does demonstrate both some of the opportunities and legal hurdles in Web sharing. They also inherit the closed model supported by labels (no full streams, previews only, DRM), but already that’s changing (MP3, and the promise, hopefully, of full-length tracks soon). It’s like a microcosm of the whole business at the moment.

Mixaloo.com

I spoke to the founders shortly before launch, and they described how their approach differs from the online radio model, which is constrained in part by the law:

There’s the streaming radio camp … you have a minimum of forty tracks, you can’t have the same artist twice in a row, and then you get into the whole mess of royalties. Then there’s the way we’re going — user-generated albums. And we like that because it’s personalized.”

The basic model:

• 10 or more tracks on the “mix tape”
• Mix your album from 3.5 million + tracks.
• Majors and indie music — the founders say they have “deals with all the major labels” but also “a ton of independent aggregators like CD Baby, The Orchard, and Iota
• Embed players and market mixes on Blogger, MySpace, Facebook, Friendster, etc.
• Sell tracks via any of your players and earn a 50% commission
• For now, 30-second previews — but hopefully that will change? (more in a moment)

Splice, a site for remixing songs, can now do something no Web browser app has successfully done before: pass for a dedicated audio app.

It’s no [Pro Tools, Ableton Live, SONAR, insert app here], but Splice’s online editor is a basic, functional audio sequencer with real-time arrangement, instruments, sync, and audio effects, all built in Adobe Flash CS3 / ActionScript 3. Sure, Flash has been able to do basic audio playback and mixing for some time. But Splice actually does things that dedicated audio applications normally do exclusively, such as sophisticated audio effects. There’s still quite a lot it doesn’t do, and since many of those things (live multitrack audio recording, hardware connections, and so on) aren’t currently possible in the browser, Web apps are unlikely to usurp dedicated music creation software any time in the forseeable future. But maybe that’s not the point: musicians can keep using the tools they love for music creation, then throw up a track and let a friend mash-up a new beat, or let fans create remixes. In fact, it’s not hard to imagine dedicated apps having similar online counterparts, or hooking seamlessly into such services.

And it’s what Splice does on the Web that makes it interesting. Not only are the tracks actively remixable, even by a casual listener new to the software who just wants to mess around, but sound sources are shared, too. You can pull up open freely-licensed samples from the Freesound Project, a collaborative database of sounds recorded around the world.

Little wonder then, that the lead developer of the new Splice has already made a name founding the sample project and sharing unusual software plug-ins (the traditional, offline type) for free. Bram de Jong, CTO and lead developer of the new Splice, is known to plug-in devotees for his involvement in Smartelectronix, a collective of developers releasing powerful and sometimes downright bizarre plugs for free. I got to talk to Bram about his new day job. He shares what Splice is about, what people are using it for, and how the heck they got Flash doing real audio.