Or you can buy a slicker "professional" version of the program and a dozen $50 sound discs with dance hooks galore.
You can also record sounds directly into Mixman from a microphone or stereo or import sounds in the common ".wav" file format. You can, however, go to the Mixman site to download more, and trip-hop pioneers Coldcut, among others, will provide new musical inspiration shortly (see below for a list of Mixman-enhanced discs). The letdown: With just a song's worth of cuts on each of the handful of Mixman-enhanced discs, the offerings are meager. When the adrenaline kicks in, drop out the grooves while you plug in a goofy turntable scratch from De La Soul's "Me, Myself and I." When the rhythm returns, it's time for Coolio to flow: "One, two, three, it's like A, B, C. Then drop in four-to-the-floor drums from electro breakbeat artist Darwin Chamber and bump up the speed until it's a zooming 135 beats per minute. Take the bass line from Naughty by Nature's "Hip Hop Hooray" and lower its pitch by five notes until it's a low growl. Things heat up when you load in snippets from several different albums. Hit the record button and you're rolling. Change the pan, pitch, volume and speed of each track individually. You load beats and pieces into tracks, represented by buttons on the vinyl. On screen, Mixman merges the metaphors of a tape recorder and turntables.
Put the music disc in your computer's CD-ROM drive to pull up the elements of, for instance, Afrika Bambaataa's "Planet Rock," and the Mixman LE software that lets you rebuild it. Some song parts are as short as a finger snap, some as long as a rap verse. It works like this: San Francisco-based Mixman Technologies arranges with artists to put the raw ingredients of a song, with separate vocals, drums, synth lines and the like, on the computer-readable slice of an enhanced CD. One of the first programs to put the "enhanced CD" format compact discs with a computer-playable component to good use, Mixman has fine-tuned the genre of beats for geeks.
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