History of the Pacemaker
In January 2005 Jonas Norberg saw a gap in the market for a handheld portable DJ device that would do away with a DJ’s need to lug around boxes of vinyl or cases of CDs, and the idea for the Pacemaker Device (PMD) (PMD) was conceived. In 2006 Jonas, Daniel Wallner and two friends Martin Renck and Ola Sars founded the Tonium company and developed the hardware which became known as the Pacemaker DJ device and the accompanying Editor software for music library management.
The team rapidly expanded from just a few people to more than 30 employees and Pacemaker was launched with a bang at the Miami Winter Music Conference in March 2008 in March 2008 receiving wide coverage in New York Times, Wired Magazine, Monocle, The Guardian and many more. The Pacemaker Device also received several of the most prestigious innovation and design awards including the Red Dot Design Best of the Best and no less than three CES Innovations Design and Engineering Awards. The Pacemaker was released to the DJing public, supported by the on-line Pacemaker.net community website for Pacemaker users. Sales of the Pacemaker device are thought to be in the region of 50,000 units.
In 2008, Tonium had become a fairly large large company and Jonas handed over to a new CEO. One of the first visible changes was that Pacemaker.net turned into LetsMix.com, and all support interaction was moved to a third party “Get Satisfaction” site. Unfortunately for us that meant losing all the posts from Pacemaker.net and the Pacemaker community that had been built up was lost overnight. Let’s Mix ultimately became an on-line mix sharing site for DJs creating mixes by any means and not just Pacemakers.
In July 2010 Fazz, a Pacemaker user, created the Pacemaker User’s forum as means of rebuilding the Pacemaker community that was lost. Although this free forum was not without problems, it has built a membership of nearly 1000 members in just over 2 years. Most of the posts here were technical queries from users and the administrators Fazz, Sox, Regis & Migzy were only too happy to provide an answer if they had one.
A number of our members such as DJ Pip, Doogyrev & Ubergeek were not only keen Pacemaker DJs, but also coders and tinkerers and so the hacking of the Pacemaker began. Pip found access to an unreleased version of firmware 16219 on the Tonium website, and methods of manually installing it were also found. It included new beat-lock functionality, but unfortunately the device would sometimes stop working as it hadn’t been finished.
In June 2011, Tonium decided that Let’s Mix was no longer financially viable, and the company filed for bankruptcy. As the owners of the rights to the Pacemaker, this meant that the Pacemaker would no longer be in production from that time on. A sad time for all Pacemaker fans.
Although the Pacemaker was no longer being manufactured, there were (and probably are) still units available for purchase (both new and second-hand), and the Pacemaker Users forum continued to grow. On Thursday 12th January 2012, Jonas announced on the Pacemaker User’s forum that he, the inventor of Pacemaker, had just purchased back the rights to the Pacemaker software from the liquidators. Not only that, but he had plans in the pipeline that would help ensure that the Pacemaker lived on – in one way or another – and he was fully behind what we at the Pacemaker Users forum were about.
When revealed, those plans were that his new company Pacemaker Music AB intended creating a Pacemaker Mobile Application (PMA) for a number of mobile devices, the first being the Blackberry Playbook as it seemed this tablet and the OS most suited the PMA needs. The application was built upon the existing PMD software and therefore shared many similar features. Jonas’ team have ensured that both the PMD and PMA still share a common code-base, which means some future developments for the PMA can also be applied to the PMD, and the possibility for PMD upgrades lives on! This site will be hosting all firmware versions (new and old) you should find the first new beta firmware available to download right now!
On 14th June 2012 Pacemaker Music released the Pacemaker Mobile Application on the on-line BlackBerry store, at a price of only $19.99/£19.99, along with their new website. In February 2014 Pacemaker for iPad was launched becoming the world’s first DJ application to integrate with Spotify letting users mix over 6million songs from inside the application. As of December 2014, Pacemaker for iPad has been downloaded over 1 million times and has been featured in the App Store by Apple as one of the best new apps for iPad.
In September 2012 it all became more exciting for the users of the Pacemaker Device. Admins Pip, Sox & Fazz started work on a new Pacemaker website that would offer more than just a user’s support forum, and here you are now! This is a community website for and run by die-hard Pacemaker fans. We hope to become self financed (donations welcome), although we currently have been sponsored by Jonas and the team who have pledged their full support behind this project. We are however totally independent from Tonium, Pacemaker Music AB or anyone else.
Thanks for joining us here at pacemakerdevice.org and we welcome you to contribute to this community by signing up and becoming an active member of our forum where we’ll try to help you with your Pacemaker device in any way we can.
The Admins
