RELEASE: Pixelated Soundwaves (2022)

Mockup of the Pixelated Soundwaves Album

‘Pixelated Soundwaves’ officially releases on October 7th. It is the newest project (and the first one that is primarily audio-based) by A Pixelated Point of View. It is a digital, freely accessible music album that contains 12 custom made tracks with existing audio samples across various genres. In addition, the project contains a thirteenth video, a so-called ‘continuous mix’. The total runtime of the album is approximately 45 minutes and has been composed, mixed and mastered in Ableton Live by A Pixelated Point of View. 

The samples used to compose these tracks have been derived from the game ‘Habbo Hotel’; an online browser game originally released by the Finnish company Sulake Oy in early 2000. The main goal of the game is to create your own virtual avatar called a ‘Habbo’ and explore the premises of the digital hotel. Players can also visit public spaces or the private rooms of other habbo friends, play games, make new friends, trade, or make your own room and furnish it with pixelated furniture (or furni for short) that can be bought with Habbo Credits. Habbo rapidly expanded in the early 2000’s in many countries across the world, such as the United States, the United Kingdom, Japan, Russia, China, Spain, Italy, The Netherlands, Brazil and Turkey. 

During the peak of its popularity between 2007 and 2009, Habbo introduced a highly popular feature in their furni catalogue called ‘Habbo Trax’. The Trax furni line was based on a pixelated stereo which allowed the player to create custom soundscapes or music tracks with precomposed music samples. These music-samples were available on so-called ‘trax cartridges’. Each of these cartridges revolved around a specific genre or theme and contained 9 different samples. The player was able to load up the Trax UI by double clicking on the trax machine. From there you could either play the songs you had just created, or create a new song. Once inside the trax composer, you could load up to four different cartridges (36 different samples) per project. Making music was as simple as dragging the sample into the composition grid and press play in order to hear what you were doing. A total of five tracks could be made per trax machine and played in a so called playlist. Only one trax machine was allowed per room. 

Since the popularity of Trax surged, Habbo introduced a jukebox furni later on, which could held a lot more songs. The difference now was that after you finished a song in the Trax machine’s UI, you could burn it onto a pixelated disc for one credit, and load and unload your songs from any trax machine at will from the jukebox, adjust playlists on the fly and keep the music flowing. You were also able to trade these music discs, so you could make copies of your creations and give them to your friends so that they could listen to it.

Trax inside the Habbo Catalogue, circa 2007. Cartridges are shown on the left, Trax machine shown on the picture to the right. Courtesy of Habborator.org ©

 

Photo compilation of various Trax Machines. Courtesy of Pinterest user 'Habbo Life'

Screenshot of the Trax UI. The top left shows which cartridges are available. The top shows which cartridges are loaded. The bottom is the Trax timeline. Courtesy of HabboXWiki user 'Ozzin'

My own Trax jukebox and Trax discs collection on Habbo NL

 I myself consider myself an 'average habbo enjoyer' since the very first hour and a huge fan of Trax. I have spent countless hours tweaking with the various cartridges and samples on offer. Every few weeks or so there would be new cartridges released in the catalog. Some were there to stay, and some were there only for a short period of time, such as during Christmas or the summer holiday period. I think that back in the day I had made over 30 or so different trax songs and since that very day I wished more could be done with Trax. Unfortunately, due to Habbo’s 2009 move from Macromedia shockwave to Adobe Flash, Trax became irreversibly broken and the feature was removed from the hotel. No more songs could be created. After a couple of updates, existing songs could be played again, but the highly popular Trax UI was no more. Luckily, many of the original samples can be found on the internet and fan-made software exists that allows Habbo and Habbo Trax fans to revisit the old days and make their own creations again. There is even a dedicated piece of software that allows you to combine all of the trax sample cartridges at once and surpass the five minut time limit on songs in order to be insanely creative with your creations. You’re even able to save your songs as WAV files this way.

Habbo Trax Maker V 9.2 - Made by RageZone user 'killerloader'. See the differences with the original UI. This version allows you to save the projectfile and export as wav audio files. All samplepacks are loaded by default.

Longing for Trax to make a comeback somehow, I decided it was time to act. I rerecorded every single Habbo Trax sample and edited them for use in Ableton Live. This process took a couple of weeks to complete. Once done, I listened to all of my old Trax creations that I have made on Habbo  and the samples that were available to me and made a list of potential interesting songs I wanted to make. After a short test period in Ableton Live without any issues, the green light was given for the go-ahead on production. Composing all of the tracks took around a month and a half to complete, including a couple of revisions for various tracks. 

The video’s in this project only served a complimentary role for the audio tracks. In order to make it look and feel more like a music album, I seeked for help from the highly popular Midjourney AI in order to create the album cover art. Every single video contains a composition of visuals that react to the audio in their own way. Therefore I had to render batches of 3D visuals twelve consecutive times, with each of them feeling somewhat unique. This process was highly time consuming in Cinema 4D and took almost an additional month for rendering alone. The visuals inside of the videos represent the various icons and trax sample buttons that have been embedded into the original Trax machine.

Comparison shot. Above: Trax symbols made in 3D, underneath: trax symbols inside of the Trax UI.

I consider Pixelated Soundwaves a final respect towards a highly popular feature that is unfortunately no more. I also consider it my final and definitive take on the Trax genre since I did spend extensive amounts of time on creating soundscapes over the past few years (unfortunately I lost those due to a crash in 2018, otherwise I would have added them on the album). 

Pixelated Soundwaves is a freely available album for everyone to enjoy, no matter if you still play the game or if it is now a memory of the past.  The album will release on October 7th, 2022. All of the tracks will release automatically between 12PM CEST and 3PM CEST. Please find an overview of the exact release times down below. Please be reminded that Pixelated Soundwaves will only release on my YouTube channel. Feel free to check it out. A dedicated APPOV talk containing more in-depth talk about the project will release later this year.

#01	EARLY DAYS	12PM CEST
#02	VERMILION	12.15PM CEST
#03	SEARCHLIGHT	12.30PM CEST
#04	MIRAGE	12.45PM CEST
#05	DISCOVERY OF DESTINY	1PM CEST
#06	LIGHTING THE TILES	1.15PM CEST
#07	ROYALE	1.30PM CEST
#08	VOLTA	1.45PM CEST
#09	BLIZZARD	2PM CEST
#10	DOWNTOWN	2.15PM CEST
#11	FREQUENTIA	2.30PM CEST
#12	CALLER UNKNOWN	2.45PM CEST
#13	CONTINUOUS MIX	3PM CEST

 

Habbo, Habbo Hotel, Trax and the Trax Cartridges and Samples are trademarks of Sulake Oy, Helsinki Finland. A Pixelated Point of View is not affiliated with Sulake Oy in any way. Sulake Oy is not involved in this project in any way.

This project has been made for entertainment and not-for-profit purposes only and primarily serves to relive the good old days of Habbo Trax music. Compositions were composed, mixed and mastered by A Pixelated Point of View. 

Please find a number of tracks down below. The remaining tracks are available after premiere on my YouTube Channel