In Short:

• RjDj gets a scene store with In App purchase, which also means that we have to switch the free RjDj player to a 99 cents app (Only paid apps can have In App purchase under Apple’s terms)
• If you have RjDj already installed (for free), there will be no charge. If not, you should better go and get it now for free before we switch to paid ;-)
• We are renaming the RjDj Album app and the RjDj Shake app. In future there will be only one RjDj app. Say hello to Trippy (formerly know as RjDj Album)  and Shake (formerly known as RjDj Shake).

Here are the details and what it means for you as RjDj user or producer:

We had a lot of feedback from users who were confused about the difference between the three RjDj apps. The biggest confusion is that the free RjDj app offers features (namely downloading of new scenes) which the paid apps are not offering. So how comes that when you pay for a piece of software you have less features than the free version?

When you think software, this all really does not make any sense (because then bigger price should equal more features) but when you think music, it does. The paid RjDj apps are compilations of the best RjDj scenes and you get the compilation app for a better price than paying individually for each scene (2.99$ instead of 5$). So with the paid applications, you are not paying for features, but for content.

Since we also create artist specific apps, it is pretty clear that artists don’t want a download feature for other artist’s scenes in their app. It is already hard enough to imagine a Metallica CD with integrated download feature but even harder to imagine that over the years, when the Metallica fans get older, they would end up downloading and installing Whitney Houston songs to their Metallica CD.

It seems that these are the little learnings that you come across when you start  to sell music as software…. so what is the solution now? We still want to stick to this strategy in general but we are hearing you guys out there clearly and did two things to make this all clearer.

1. we are renaming the “RjDj Album” and “RjDj Shake” into “Trippy” and “Shake”. Soon, there will be only one RjDj app. (there can only be one).
2. we introduced the first version of scene syncing. When you upload a recording of a scene, the scene is added to your RjDj account and becomes available for download to the RjDj app through the “your space” button. So you can now buy the trippy app and get your sonic experiences for a premium price but also get those scenes into the RjDj app. As i said above, this is the first version of syncing, it can only get better ;-)

We hope it is much clearer now that trippy and shake are different apps but still part of the RjDj family and i also hope that at the same time we maintain compatibility within the family. We are also continuously improving the trippy (rjdj album) and shake applications. Just recently rjdj album got a new scene and bug fixes and we will continue to do so.

This also means that the RjDj app now becomes our center piece application. RjDj is the reactive music player, and will include the RjDj scene store where artists can reach out with their reactive productions.

We were desperately waiting for Apple to release the possibility of in app purchases and we were positively surprised when it actually happend. It makes it so much easier to buy and sell scenes that we have decided to incorporate Apples in app purchases in RjDj. Making it possible for artists to create and sell reactive music is super important to advance genre and will bring a whole new range of high quality scenes to RjDj.

Now here comes the downside: To be able to include the store, the application needs to be paid under Apple’s terms. This means when the version we just submitted to Apple goes live, we will switch the free RjDj app into a 99 cents app. The full range of free scenes will still be avaliable for download, along with the option to purchase new and old paid scenes of course also from upcoming reactive releases. We’re putting the full RjDj experience in one place – the RjDj app.

With the 99 cents you are supporting continous development on many fronts of reactive music. We are currently not only working on improving the RjDj client but also in making the scene composition process much easier. We are also developing new tools for artists and producers which we are providing for free and we are working on the RjDj web application to make reactive music more social than it is anyway ;-) Also we are porting RjDj to other platforms… so there is a lot of work to be done and our team here is full on it.

I think the magic of RjDj is very much worth your 99 cents.  We also bundled the updated RjDj app with some crazy new scenes from the Kids on DSP (doppelgaenger and drowning street) as well as with the all time favorites echolon, scrambler and can of beats.

We submitted the new apps and expect all of this to take place within a week. For all existing RjDj owners, the update is free… which means, get RjDj now! Help to spread the word about RjDj, and tell people why it’s worth their 99 cents.

Get some RjDj schwag at our Spreadshirt shop! We’ve made some t-shirts.

Mowzart

Mind twisting hearing sensation

These t-shirts ship from the US, so beware of the postage if you want them delivered to somewhere else in the world. We’re working on setting up a European store too.

For some time now we have been hard at work creating a library of tools to help everyone create scenes. These have been available for a while, as RjLib, from the RjDj website and wiki. However we have now consolidated these tools, in addition to some others, into the RjDj composer pack.

It’s available for download now here : http://trac.rjdj.me/wiki/ComposersPack

The RjDj composer pack is a set of tools designed to help at all stages of the scene creation process. It contains a series of folders :

1. Example Scenes – This is a series of examples of types  for RjDj to get you going.

2. Scene Template – This is a blank template for you to use to create scenes. It contains temporary images in the correct size and also contains the rj folder. This folder contains a large library of Pure Data tools we have developed which you can use whilst creating your scenes. It features many types of tools you would find in conventional music making, as well as many you certainly wouldn’t !

3. Rjutils -  This folder contains a number of Pure Data tools for working with scenes. They are useful for testing scenes whilst on your computer.

4. Pd – This folder contains some essential custom Pd objects that are not part of the usual Pd installations. You should add these to the Pd installation on your computer (i.e. copy them to the “extra” directory or somewhere else in you Pd search path), but don’t put these into your Scene directory.

6. Rjz server – This is a tool that lets you test your scene on your iPhone or iPod Touch without jail-breaking it.

7. Doc – In this folder we are delighted to include, with kind permission from Andy Farnell and his publisher, an excerpt from his book ‘Designing Sound’ which is an excellent introduction to Pure Data.

Eventually we hope to incorporate a distribution of Pure Data within the Composer Pack. In the meantime, please download Pd for your platform here : http://crca.ucsd.edu/~msp/software.html rsp. http://puredata.info/downloads (don’t use Pd-extended, get the “vanilla” versions on the bottom of the latter page.)

We are going to be continually updating this pack with new tools and extended documentation and we have some very exciting things in the pipeline for the composer community.

To find out more about creating reactive music scenes and RjDj, check out our wiki.

Robert

Wow. We just realized we passed two magic numbers!! RjDj Artists, Producer, Fans, Freaks, Listeners, Team, Evangelist, Everyone get yourself a drink and toast to the fact that we now have more than 100.000 scenes downloaded through the RjDj app which also means that we have officially surpassed more than 1.000.000 (ONE MILLION) distributed RjDj scenes.

And here comes my speech, although, of course the people who should really speak here should be the artists and the listeners who made all of this possible.

About one year ago we started to do some hacking with a very, very small team to prove the fact that reactive music is here to stay. In october 10, 2008 we released the first version of RjDj and now, not even one year later we have more than one million scenes out there. For the whole team here in RjDj land this is a huge success. We are so proud about this that the first thing we did is called our mum and dad to say thanks.

I also think that this is big news for the PD community. Who would have thought that there will be one million PD patches distributed to mobile phones within one year?

This all really proves that releasing music as software is a very, very powerful concept. We all have just started to grasp the potential of this and let me tell you we are really busy pushing the boundaries. We will keep pushing updates and new features and i hope we will also see amazing new scenes released on RjDj during the next couple of month. Thanks again to all the artists, producers, dj’s and hackers releasing scenes on RjDj. And of course thanks to all the listeners, who have managed not only to install a lot of scenes but also to send us those 20.000 recordings. To celebrate, we just switched one of the newest scenes from the kids on dsp to free. Go and get it :-)

We have updated all three apps in the store for full 3.0 compatibility. Please check things out and let us know how you get along.

There is one big announcement for the RjDj album app. The album was a collection of 6 of the coolest RjDj scenes for a premium price. We have increased the number to 7 and bundled a brand new scene from a group called “kids on dsp”. The scene is called DrowningStreet. Our team has been quite busy recently working with the kids and the material produced is absolutely amazing. We all feel like we have some really new hot stuff in RjDj and it is only fair to include one of those scenes in the album. There is also a free scene coming for download in the RjDj player in a couple of days and a kids on dsp standalone app in august. More to follow about the kids soon…. For now, update the album or get your version, we think the kids certainly make it worth it.

We spent the last weekend doing a workshop at the Music Hackday. The event took place at the Guardian offices in London.

To get people into doing RjDj scenes we took our Pd-ninjas, Andy Farnell and Frank Barknecht, with us. It was amazing how much effort Tom, Harold and Ian put into their scenes. Thank you guys. The RjDj-prize was a pair of really fancy Bose headphones. As it was impossible for us to decide who had done the best scene we had to use our oracle Pd patch in order to get a winner.

Harold from ookoi did a scene that creates an ambient electronic soundscape by reading through soundfiles in random speed and direction. I hope we will see more from ookoi on RjDj in the future.

Bass Race is the name Ian from darq gave to his scene. Just something more for the ladies. An excerpt from his scene is heard in the video below.

Tom was working on a looping device in funtionality similar to the Loop Stations musicians are using on stage. So you could record percussion mis-using your tea-cup, then whistle a melody to it, and finally sing on top of that all in perfect sync.

The scenes are not yet published, but hopefully will soon be ready for release.

We take our hats off from all the people behind Music Hackday. I suppose RjDj and Music Hackday share a common goal, that is encourage people in doing weird things :-)

Flo

Slow scene
When working on a scene and testing on your device, you may have noticed that if you create a scene that is too complex, your device will have a hard time in playing it correctly. When this happens, you will hear crackles and the GUI of the RjDj player will be slowed down. This is not a bug: we do not put constraints of resource usage on the RjDj player to give more freedom to composers.

80% CPU, 40 Megs
To ensure people listening to your scene won’t be experiencing this, the rule of thumb is: ensure that the scene is not taking more than 80% of the device CPU, and allocate less than 40 MB of memory.

Each iThing has its own specs
The Apple family of iThings is getting bigger: now you can run RjDj on iPhone 1G, 3G and 3GS and iTouch 2G.
They can be ranked in terms of speed from the slowest to the fastest:

• iPhone 1G
• iPhone 3G
• iTouch 2G
• iPhone 3GS

The case of the iTouch 2G is special: it doesn’t have the phone software running in the background, so it has more resources available for the RjDj client. So, if you develop on the iTouch 2G, push the CPU to 80% and publish your scene, then someone playing his scene on the iPhone 3G will experience slowness.

iPhone 3G emulation
To make your life easier, we have set up two patches that will help you knowing the limits of the iPhone 3G. They are available in: http://svn.rjdj.me/scenes/trunk/rjutils/. If you are not much into svn, just save the links provided below.

• 3gcpu_desktop.pd
  this patch shows you the amount of processing needed to reach 80% cpu on the iPhone 3G. Simply run this patch on your desktop computer and note the load usage returned by the patch. Then, when working on the scene, use a loadmeter and ensure the load stays belows the 3G load limit.
• 3gcpu_itouch2g.pd
  this subpatch will emulate the cpu usage of an iPhone 3G when testing a scene on the iTouch 2G. Simply copy this subpatch into your scene folder and declare it in your _main.pd. Test your scene on the iTouch2G and add stuff until you reach 80% cpu or experience slowness. And don’t forget to remove the subpatch when publishing the scene :-)

This is a starting point for getting an idea of where to stop adding stuff in your scene. There will be more things to come
to handle iPhone 3GS and 1G.

Keep on patching ;-)

Amaury

We have released some updates the the RjDj website, so that you can now subscribe to RSS feeds of new recordings. You can subscribe to all recordings of a scene or a user, or the full stream of new recordings.

You can now also embed recordings on other websites. Have a look and give it a try!

We uploaded two new free scenes from Stefan Smulovitz and Martin Brinkmann. And we can’t await Georg Bosch to finish his scene Bouncy, which opens up a whole new playground for RjDj.

Stefan Smulovitz’s new scene is called GranularMemory. It’s the first scene to use granular synthesis. Just tap the screen with two fingers to record one of 6 permanent memories. Touch with one finger to playback a previous memory and mix them togehter. Check out Stefan’s other work on www.kenaxis.com

Martin Brinkmann was attending the sprint in Berlin and catched up really fast on producing RjDj scenes. Most of Martin’s scenes are creating ambient electronic landscapes. In his latest scene add_blips you can add blips of varying length to environmental cuts from the microphone by touching the screen. Tilting the device lets you play with additional FX.

Georg Bosch is working on an amazing scene called Bouncy (see video below). He is putting the graphics functionality further than we thought is possible. We first met Georg at the Berlin sprint where he did Echochamber.

There are a couple of more scenes to show up in the next weeks!

Florian