Words, and pictures : Eksovichea Tito Hak
Nostalgic for the Pacemaker? Well this is one instance where stuff has actually gotten way better since, only most people didn't actually notice, or knew of the origin context to appreciate it. I remember one time how Pioneer fanboys used to talk smack on Tonium's 'Pacemaker' DJ device all the time, saying that it will never replace professional CDJ's. To which I thought, 'no shit', but that wasn't the point of the Pacemaker DJ device. What the Pacemaker device essentially did, was take the dedicated two turntable metaphor DJ setup, and condense it into a pocket sized device that pretty much allowed you to create fully professional sounding DJ sets, anywhere, and anytime. It had a battery that allowed it to run for 3 hours without mains power ( the average length of a DJ set), that allowed you to potentially bang out a fully professional sounding DJ set using it, but despite what the pocket sized DJ device could do, those that feared it would constantly say it was 'nothing but a toy' that will never replace CDJ's. It was never meant to, but if the kids wanted badly enough to party, they would simply use what ever means they had that allowed them to knock out professional sounding DJ sets, just like back in the day when someone thought using vinyl turntable to beat match records together to create a seamless DJ set was a good idea, although the technics turntables weren't actually specifically designed for that purpose, but Tonium's Pacemaker DJ device is. Back in the day when raves, house parties, and illegal warehouse parties were happening, DJ's could have only dreamed of something like the Pacemaker DJ device, since there's no heavy records to carry where it's 120GB was ample to store thousands of records worth of tunes, and there were no heavy vinyl turntables to carry/transport either, meaning that it your illegal shin dig got busted, you could be out of there in no time with your pocket sized DJ device. It had built in stereo headphone monitors that were independent of the stereo line outputs too. Admittedly it did take somewhat of a learning curve to become accustomed to it, but most enthusiastic users would have been able to bang out a professional sounding DJ set on it within the hour of having hands on with it, and sure, it was a little more fiddly to use that a CDJ, or vinyl turntables, which for those that went out, and ordered one as a pre-release device was something that wasn't an issue, and/or they didn't really give a crap about if you were one of those enthused people that actually bought one back then. Sure, it was never going to replace CDJ's, but like I sad, that wasn't the point.
Eventually Tonium's Pacemaker DJ device was then officially, and exclusively brought to the Blackberry Playbook, for the Pacemaker DJ project to finally come to close in its final form on the final Blackberry OS device before they completely switched to running Android on Blackberry devices instead. (I nearly forgot that the Pacemaker DJ app saw its final place exclusively on the IPad).
Since then though, it seems Pioneer have made an official free mobile DJ app for both Android, and iOS (that doesn't require a paid subscription to use!) that is essentially close to what the final form of what the Pacemaker DJ device should have become, where the software and interface is now highly optimised to a pocket sized phablet device that everyone (nearly everyone) owns. It's also possible to use Pioneer's WeDJ app with an external DJ controller too, which I'm guessing Pioneer would more than likely hope you would use one of their Pioneer DJ controllers with.
