Skip to main content

Tonium Pacemaker: Picking Up Where the iPod Left Off

pacemaker
Image used with permission by copyright holder

Do you have a music lover on your holiday shopping list – someone who loves to mix and create their own music?  The Pacemaker by Tonium may just be the perfect holiday gift for your on-the-go DJ.  In short, it’s two turntables, a mixer, effect box, and full record collection.  That is a large list of features for a gadget not much bigger than a first-generation iPod.  Sure, it has a few more buttons and switches, but it basically allows you to be a DJ and produce your own music.

Ola Sars, co-founder and Marketing Director for Tonium, told us about the Pacemaker’s inception. “We wanted to bring down the barriers for music creativity, anywhere, anytime.  And what would be a better solution than to take down a full DJ production set and pack it down to the size of a peanut butter and jelly sandwich and give it to everyone on the street.”

Tonium PacemakerWe also had the opportunity to play with the Pacemaker.  If you were to compare it to an iPod, there is no comparison – an iPod is for listening, while the Pacemaker is for creating.  The Pacemaker is also a whole lot more complicated than an iPod, but a seasoned DJ, familiar with the standard mixing and production gear should find the interface fairly intuitive.  The Pacemaker is a professional-grade piece of gadgetry, and carries a professional price.  It can be found online at retailers like Amazon and J&R for about $500.

Tonium is all about the creativity and expression involved in the production of music, and to aid in the flow of creativity, they have developed Let’s Mix.  Let’s Mix is an online community dedicated to the sharing of music.  An aspiring DJ, or simply a house-party veteran, can upload, download, and share beats, mixes, ideas and techniques on Let’s Mix.  Along with several other partners, Let’s Mix has launched “Next Generation DJ” (NGDJ), a talent competition with the chance to win a life changing prize: a DJ Contract.

So, if you are looking for that perfect gift for an aspiring DJ, or you yourself like mixing beats for the occasional house-party and the iPod just doesn’t cut it anymore, check out the Pacemaker.  Don’t forget to upload your mixes to Let’s Mix, you may make the cut, and become a NGDJ.




Digital Trends Staff
Digital Trends has a simple mission: to help readers easily understand how tech affects the way they live. We are your…
Digital Trends’ Top Tech of CES 2023 Awards
Best of CES 2023 Awards Our Top Tech from the Show Feature

Let there be no doubt: CES isn’t just alive in 2023; it’s thriving. Take one glance at the taxi gridlock outside the Las Vegas Convention Center and it’s evident that two quiet COVID years didn’t kill the world’s desire for an overcrowded in-person tech extravaganza -- they just built up a ravenous demand.

From VR to AI, eVTOLs and QD-OLED, the acronyms were flying and fresh technologies populated every corner of the show floor, and even the parking lot. So naturally, we poked, prodded, and tried on everything we could. They weren’t all revolutionary. But they didn’t have to be. We’ve watched enough waves of “game-changing” technologies that never quite arrive to know that sometimes it’s the little tweaks that really count.

Read more
Digital Trends’ Tech For Change CES 2023 Awards
Digital Trends CES 2023 Tech For Change Award Winners Feature

CES is more than just a neon-drenched show-and-tell session for the world’s biggest tech manufacturers. More and more, it’s also a place where companies showcase innovations that could truly make the world a better place — and at CES 2023, this type of tech was on full display. We saw everything from accessibility-minded PS5 controllers to pedal-powered smart desks. But of all the amazing innovations on display this year, these three impressed us the most:

Samsung's Relumino Mode
Across the globe, roughly 300 million people suffer from moderate to severe vision loss, and generally speaking, most TVs don’t take that into account. So in an effort to make television more accessible and enjoyable for those millions of people suffering from impaired vision, Samsung is adding a new picture mode to many of its new TVs.
[CES 2023] Relumino Mode: Innovation for every need | Samsung
Relumino Mode, as it’s called, works by adding a bunch of different visual filters to the picture simultaneously. Outlines of people and objects on screen are highlighted, the contrast and brightness of the overall picture are cranked up, and extra sharpness is applied to everything. The resulting video would likely look strange to people with normal vision, but for folks with low vision, it should look clearer and closer to "normal" than it otherwise would.
Excitingly, since Relumino Mode is ultimately just a clever software trick, this technology could theoretically be pushed out via a software update and installed on millions of existing Samsung TVs -- not just new and recently purchased ones.

Read more
AI turned Breaking Bad into an anime — and it’s terrifying
Split image of Breaking Bad anime characters.

These days, it seems like there's nothing AI programs can't do. Thanks to advancements in artificial intelligence, deepfakes have done digital "face-offs" with Hollywood celebrities in films and TV shows, VFX artists can de-age actors almost instantly, and ChatGPT has learned how to write big-budget screenplays in the blink of an eye. Pretty soon, AI will probably decide who wins at the Oscars.

Within the past year, AI has also been used to generate beautiful works of art in seconds, creating a viral new trend and causing a boon for fan artists everywhere. TikTok user @cyborgism recently broke the internet by posting a clip featuring many AI-generated pictures of Breaking Bad. The theme here is that the characters are depicted as anime characters straight out of the 1980s, and the result is concerning to say the least. Depending on your viewpoint, Breaking Bad AI (my unofficial name for it) shows how technology can either threaten the integrity of original works of art or nurture artistic expression.
What if AI created Breaking Bad as a 1980s anime?
Playing over Metro Boomin's rap remix of the famous "I am the one who knocks" monologue, the video features images of the cast that range from shockingly realistic to full-on exaggerated. The clip currently has over 65,000 likes on TikTok alone, and many other users have shared their thoughts on the art. One user wrote, "Regardless of the repercussions on the entertainment industry, I can't wait for AI to be advanced enough to animate the whole show like this."

Read more