mixer

Numark iDJ mixer sheds novelty, goes legit

The first Numark iDJ wasn't just half-baked, it was downright unusable for DJing. The thing needed two iPods and lacked basic DJ essentials such as pitch control.

By comparison, the Numark iDJ2 is hands-down one of the best digital DJ products we've tested. With its large color screen, responsive jog wheels, balanced XLR outputs, and support for iPod video playback, the iDJ2 performs like a champ and packs in more than just the basics. Like any sub-$1,000 digital deck, the iDJ2 still won't get you much in terms of DJ cred, but it also won'… Read more

Shake it up with a Blender Bottle

If you add a couple of teaspoons of powder to a liquid and shake, you wind up with grit in the bottom of the pitcher or the bottle you're using. It doesn't matter if you're mixing Kool-Aid or energy shakes--shaking just doesn't mix smoothly.

Until now, that is. Blender Bottles have improved on the extremely basic bottle and lid design to provide a bottle capable of smooth mixing with just a couple of shakes. The big difference between Blender Bottles and their old-fashioned counterparts is the blender ball. This wire ball looks fairly similar to a … Read more

Mix peanut butter right in the jar with old-fashioned gadget

I always thought it was a good thing to mix up newly purchased natural peanut butter. If you've ever accidentally turned a PB&J into a peanut paste, oil slick, and jam sandwich, you know why. To avoid this horror, usually you stick a butter knife into the jar and stir, stir, stir. Eventually the natural oils and peanut solids mix into the creamy, much loved substance that goes well with anything and everything.

As a bonus for doing all that hard stirring, the knife invariably gets covered in peanut butter. One could wipe it alongside of the … Read more

Photos: Traktor Scratch with Audio 8 DJ

DJs are a funny bunch, mostly preferring to use clunky old vinyl to work their magic. But technology rarely takes no for an answer and Traktor Scratch is no exception, offering traditional DJs who can't be separated from their Technics decks access to massive digital music libraries.

Put simply, Traktor Scratch is a simplified version of Traktor DJ Studio, which enables you to mix music without any special hardware. What the Scratch system adds is a very high-end sound card that enables multiple audio inputs, via which you can connect either vinyl or CD decks.

What's the point … Read more

NYC's pre-SXSW party: What the heck is the next big thing going to be?

I've heard people refer to the South by Southwest Interactive Festival as "spring break for geeks." I guess that means Monday night's pre-festival networking event in New York was the equivalent of those on-campus mixers that travel companies hold in December and January. But instead of learning just how all-inclusive that rum-soaked Caribbean getaway will be, I was trying to figure out exactly what's going to happen at this year's SXSW. Are we going to see the emergence of the next big thing in social media?

The organizers of SXSW Interactive have been throwing … Read more

Tonium Pacemaker in the wild

The DJ is getting off easy these days. As more DJs turn in their turntables and record crates for laptops and external hard drives, the entry point for aspiring DJs has become both more attainable and more portable. Swedish start-up Tonium intends to shrink the digital DJ rig even further with a handheld product called Pacemaker.

At its heart, the Pacemaker is an MP3 player with 120GB of storage, USB 2.0 connectivity, and both headphone and line-out connections. What makes the Pacemaker unique is a set of touch pad controls that allow professional DJ techniques such as crossfading, filtering, … Read more

RSS Mixer stacks up your feeds

RSS Mixer is a service for combining several RSS feeds together to create a master feed. The result contains all the feeds you've added, and makes it easy to plug it into a feed reader or share with others using a single URL. I gave the service a spin earlier today and it does just what it advertises, if not a little more.

In addition to building your own RSS feeds, there are tools for you or others to keep track of them, including a widget for Apple's Dashboard, and an embeddable version for blogs and Web sites, which I've inserted after the break. For iPhone users, there's also a short link you can pass around that's optimized for the iPhone's resolution and touch screen. It's very simple to use, and friendly on the eyes and fingers.

RSS Mixer is by no means the first service to let you blend together RSS feeds. In fact, FeedBite, FeedJumbler, and Feedshake can handle this function quite easily, and have been around a little longer. What sets RSS Mixer apart is the way you can share your feeds with others--as each feed gets its own page with the last 25 posts, links to each included feed, and easy ways to share the contents of that feed with others. All of these feeds and pages end up in a massive user directory which can be browsed and sorted by creation date and popularity.

The one thing that RSS Mixer is really missing is a way to register and manage your user-created feeds. Once you've made a custom feed, there's no way to go in and remove specific sites or to keep track of which ones you've made. Given the fact this is Version 0.1 and a prototype, I'm willing to cut RSS Mixer some slack, but having to find my created feed a few hours later without even a search tool was unnecessarily hard.

JazzMutant's multitouch music controller

Before Apple came along and integrated multitouch-screen technology into the iPhone, one of the first companies to weave multitouch into a commercial product was a boutique music controller company named JazzMutant. Their first product, the Lemur, was an extremely niche (and pricey) product that allowed musicians to use the Lemur's suite of touch-screen tools to play and tweak their music. You know its cool if Bjork takes it out on tour.

Dexter, JazzMutant's latest product, promises to bring multitouch technology to a wider audience. Released just a few days ago, Dexter is aimed at recording studio engineers and … Read more

How one guy MacGyvers his margaritas

This contraption looks to me like something that the Beverly Hillbillies would hitch to the back of their car, but trust me, it's way cooler than anything that Jethro Bodine could scheme up. It claims to be the world's fastest margarita mixer. We talk a lot about booze gadgetry here, but this one really takes the (tequila-infused) cake.

According to the LiveJournal user who documented it, this contraption made by "Uncle Don" (no, no joke) is made of "a small-block 400, a trailer, assorted parts and the ability to custom fabricate a 6-inch tall replica … Read more

Mix faster, MixerCast

MixerCast is a new Web based tool for creating sharable slide shows. It pulls media from several different popular Web services like flickr, YouTube, MySpace, and Getty images, and lets users customize the look and feel with basic design templates. The show can then be shared with others through a direct URL or embedded into several social networks.

I've played with a ton of these tools since I started on Webware, but this is one of the few that actually emulates the feel of a desktop application. In this case, it feels a lot like one of Apple's consumer applications from the iLife suite. You can pick various elements to drag and drop into the template, like photos, videos or even a map from Yahoo (which, by the way, I found to be a little buggy).

MixerCast is definitely aimed at the social networking crowd. A few of its themes and templates, including one that's a full-on Pepsi advertisement, forgo a slick, clean look as you can get with a competing, mixed-media sharing tool like SplashCast. It's still really simple to put together a rich slide show, and share it with others, which makes it worth a try.

I've embedded a MixerCast module below, with pictures from last night's Digg 1 million-user celebration here in San Francisco. More screen shots of the user interface are shown after the jump.