The Kids hit the APP store!! Augmented Reality Reactive Minimal Techno Madness just a click away.

Ladies and gentleman, we are proud to present the latest child in the RjDj family: The Kids on DSP app is out from today 2nd of october 2009. Almost one year after RjDj’s initial launch, the Kids on DSP mark a remarkable progress in how reactive music can sound. The Kids app is the logical progression from RjDj oldies such as “Echolon” and “Worldquantizer”  and at the same time embeds those first experimental approaches into an unparalleled holistic musical experience.

London based Kids on DSP worked closely with artists such as Carl Craig and Acid Pauli. The application features 8 scenes which all play in the reactive minimal techno domain with a twist on microphone input. Read more about the app here.

I don’t know if it is a good sign or a bad sign but the kids on dsp app is in review since one month. We never had anything like this before…. .If anyone from apple is listening, please let us know what is going on.

Last year we were dreaming about an RjDj sprint at sxsw but in the end we were too late and it was too complicated to organize something. This year we are stretching out early enough. So if you have an idea about the best way to organize an RjDj sprint @sxsw let us know. In the meantime i have registered for a panel and the PanelPicker is still open for votes! So please go through that hilarious signup and vote for my panel.

We just received the follwoing from iLike:

We wanted our artist community to be among the very first to hear officially that MySpace has entered into an agreement to acquire iLike.

That is heavy stuff, especially because iLike just started rolling out “Artist apps” through their artist dashboard. Now the question is how happy apple is that the whole myspace artist community will be in the position to produce apps with a click… maybe we will see the music section in the app store being swamped very soon if apple does not react, which brings an email from Jokton Strealy into my mind. He was writing:

I propose that we all get together to come up with some suggested sub-category names for the music category. I will start the list off and hopefully some of you will chime in and give suggestions for other categories or add more definition to a sub-category that is alredy here.

Also Fred Wilsons post trying to get Tumblr back into play points out how heavy the marriage of iLike and myspace really is:

MySpace has always been the social media destination for musicians and their fans. The rumored acquisition of iLike (new mgmt’s first purchase), suggests that music and entertainment will be even more of a focus for MySpace going forward as it looks to differentiate itself from Facebook and other social networks. avc.com, A VC, Aug 2009

Short update from the RjDj land.

• Andie is busy integrating the RjDj in App store. We are currently submitting the scenes to apple for review and hope they will be approved very soon. See my last post about the details but it basically means that we have to say goodby to the free RjDj app and switch to a 0,99 app with the advantage that soon you will be able to buy single scenes through the apple channel
• Speaking about scenes brings me directly to a new production which i think is very, very interesting. There are two scenes from the kids on DSP available already and here is a video about their TimeCrusing scene which they did together with techno legend Carl Craig. Very interesting…

Hey RJDJ,

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.

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 :-)

Since our last update a month ago we received about 10000 recordings of crazy RjDj scene mixes (some of them featured above). Thats really great and the crew here in the RjDj land certainly had great fun listening to the highlights ;-) We decided to leave the RjDj album and the RjDj shake free for another 7 days and switch back to paid mode on wednesday the 13th of April.

So anyone who didn’t get it yet… 7 days left, tell your friends and parents too! Get it in the app store and let us know how you re getting on.

We just uploaded 3 new, free scenes from Stefan Smulovitz, Frank Barknecht and Chris McCormick

Stefan Smulovitz’s scene is called Time and is a wonderful piece he created together with Viviane Houle. Viviane is a vocalist, improviser and songwriter known for creating a huge array of sounds. The scene is using the touchpad to trigger the vocals. Try it and you will be soon lost in the voice and stories of Viviane.

It seems to me as if Frank was testing the new abilities to include buttons in a scene. He just stretched the idea a bit by putting 256 buttons on it and made them all musical reactive. The result will make you smile!

Chris is the creator of the smashing hits CanOfBeats and GhostWave. This time he stepped back of doing yet another musical craziness. He just simply created a moonboot synthpad. If you are into sawtooth or square waves, rock n roll!

On another front we have also made progress. The RjDj app is featuring a built in webbrowser which is accessible via the RjDj.me tab on the bottom right side. We started to call this part of our app the iApp and it is handling all the scene downloading, recording uploading, your account etc. Last night we updated the iApp and included some useful features

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