Welcome to RjDj

RjDj is a music and sound application for mobile devices with microphone and various other reality sensing detectors like accelerometer, touch pad, GPS etc. Currently the iPhone and iPod Touch are supported devices.

What is a Scene?

The pieces of music that RjDj plays are called "Scenes". Technically a Scene is a zipped directory that contains all the resources to be played by the RjDj mobile app. Zipped Scenes end in "*.rjz".

Here at RjDj we consider music as software and software as music. So a Scene not only contains samples to be played, it also contains synths and effects and most importantly the instructions, how to bring all of this together to create a reactive music experience.

The RjDj Composer Software: Pd

You can run the RjDj composers software on your PC/Mac running Windows, OS-X or Linux. The ComposersPack includes all you need to get started on your platform. The RjDj composition software is based on Pure Data (Pd) by Miller S. Puckette. Pd in the last decade became very popular among media and sound artists because it offers endless possibilities for playing with sound and creating music as software and is not too hard to learn. (It's a bit tricky at the start, but with some effort, everyone can use it.) Pd is not a simple sequencer or synthesizer, but it also allows you to graphically create the dynamic "instructions" to play reactive music. The ComposersPack includes several example scenes that you can test and study. It also includes a Scene Template that you should use when writing your own Scenes. See the Composer Guidelines for details.

Uploading Scenes to the Player

Once you've finished writing a Scene with the RjDj Composers Software, you should test it on the mobile device. As e.g. the iPhone is much slower than your PC, a scene may run fine on your laptop, but will be too slow and crackly on the phone.

The RjDj player app on the iDevices can download zipped scenes ("*.rjz"-files) from rjdj.me and from websites that fall into the "private" range of IP numbers, like 192.168.*.* or 10.*.*.*.

To upload a scene to the website, you should first create a user account on rjdj.me, then go to http://rjdj.me/sharescene/ to upload your finished scene. You will receive a special URL to download your scene with the RjDj client app on the iPhone/iTouch. Write down that URL and navigate to it using Safari on the iThing. It should then install on your phone.

To test without using rjdj.me, we offer the rjzserver programme included in the ComposersPack, that runs on your own laptop. The rjzserver is a little webserver itself running on port 8314 of your laptop. So you start the rjzserver, configure it to find the directory with your scenes, which don't have to be zipped here - rjzserver does this for you. Then navigate to http://your-ip-address:8314/ with Safari on the iDevice and download/install the scenes you've made.

Distributing Scenes

Once your scene is finished and you like it, you can also offer the scene to us to include into the official scene selection on rjdj.me or even in the AppStore. Just write us a mail to [info at* rjdj.me] and we will do some further tests and probably include your scene. You can decide whether you'd like to sell the scene to get a share or if you'd like to offer it as a freely downloadable scene.

Resources

Events

Misc

Links

  • irc channel: #rjdj on freenode
  • mailing lists: http://lists.rjdj.me
  • subversion repository:
    • svn co http://svn.rjdj.me/scenes/trunk/rjdj_scenes (read-only)
    • svn co https://svn.rjdj.me/scenes/trunk/rjdj_scenes (read-write for developers)

Developers

Wiki News

  • Because of too much spam defacing attempts we had to disable anonymous editing on the wiki. (2009/07/14)