iPhone playing two tracks at once - Trance Mandarin
While listening to audiobooks is OK, they can get bland. It's just voice. Literally, voice. At least there are a few different voices, but I am always aware that the rest of the spectrum can be filled up with something. Hence I was determined to find a way to play music at the same time as listening to these podcasts. On a computer, it's easy - open up two media players and run them at the same time. But on iPhone it's a little more difficult.
I imagined that there must be an app out there that allowed you to have separate audio streams with their own levels, mixed into a final channel. I began by searching in the App Store for 'simultaneous songs/audio', and found no results. I tried forums as well - there were a couple of posts on the Apple Community Forums from 2010 that had no useful responses. One suggestion mentioned reversing those y-audio cables you can get to split an audio signal into to headphones.... bit of a shame. As it wasn't a huge problem to me to have music with my audiobooks, I decided to let it be for the time being, and just put up without the music.
Then on the bus on the way back from the east, I had a stupidly brilliant thought. That app I was imagining with separate audio streams already exists and I've been using similar apps for the last eight years... it's a digital DJ deck! I felt so stupid. I immediately downloaded Djay as it's constantly refered to as a brilliant app and is now on sale for $1.99 over Thanksgiving.
And quite rightly, it's a wicked piece of programming. I run ASOT on one deck, and then load my audiobooks into the other deck. There are a number of shortcomings - the first is that a 200MB, 2hr ASOT podcast takes about three minutes to load into the deck. This is fine as you can listen to the audiobook first, and then the ASOT kicks in when it's ready. The second is that although there is an automix function, you can't have one deck continually push track after track from a playlist once the previous track finishes. The automix is for mixing between decks. But that's fine - loading tracks is a breeze and manageable.
The app as well is buttery smooth. No doubt it is killing my battery - I had it crash my phone already today, but then I don't think having a full 2hr podcast on the decks is the way it was meant to be used.
At the end of the day, it works and I'm happy. Now I've just gotta learn to speak. Zai jian!

