People of earth, your attention please.

I've finally found a convenient subject for another set of mixes and after a little shuffling and tweaking the first one is ready.

Many years ago I used to tape a couple of radio stations that played dance, techno and other stuff. One was 4ZZZ, a Brisbane alternative free radio station, whose program Crucial Cuts introduced me to many new mixes and great tracks. I fondly remember hearing "Insomnia" by Faithless three years before it 'hit the charts' commercially here. And the other was Triple J, the youth radio arm of the Australian Broadcasting Corporation, Australia's advertising-free broadcaster. Triple J still broadcasts its Mix-Up program every saturday night, featuring local and international DJs and artists mixing it up for three hours.

As soon as I had a computer worthy of the task I started transcribing those tapes into the digital domain. I removed noise, tweaked a few EQ settings and generally tried to get back as much as possible from the tapes. And, of course, I started compressing those songs into MP3 files. For one day I would have some device that would allow me to play all those songs whenever I wanted.

And now, still without an empeg, I decided that there was something I could do about getting those songs to my ears. I took the MP3 files back to wave files and mixed them together - although some of the tracks were already mixed by the DJs playing them and were left in their original order.

So, as the astute would have realised, this mix is not an example of sterling fidelity at all. These tracks have been through as much audio mangling as they can take and still sound like the original piece. Likewise, in more than a few cases I have no idea what the name or artist is for a track - that's the problem with not having access to the playlists. So those people that can recognise the tracks marked "Unknown" and tell me what they are will be doing me a great favour. People who criticise me for the quality of the audio can sit down on a flagpole.

But, after all that, the music is still the thing we want to hear, and that music is what I present to you. This is the "Mid Trance" mix: it's in the middle of the BPM range of the tracks I picked and it's a mixture of what I call trance and techno. Two other mixes are planned, one slower and one faster, as I get around to finding elegant ways to mix the tracks together. This starts at around 135BPM and makes its way up to 156BPM, it's encoded with Lame's high quality VBR encoding (at -q 4) and the whole file is around 64MB.

Please email me at [email protected] for the file's location. This allows me to not kill dionysius under the download deluge. You can find the track list at my home page (which might be still being created ).

Have fun,

PaulWay

Save the whales. Feed the hungry. Free the mallocs.