Featured Artist 9
mbelow
Martin Below
Martin Below aka mbelow is a powerful force in the Audiotool team. His special field is complex data structures, which he processes with the dynamic drive with which he also approaches drumming in his metal band. A lot of our great innovations are largely due to his unbending will to optimize. Share with us the pleasure of having him on board!
Interview
Name: Martin Below Place: Cologne (Germany) Age: 34
- What is your job at Audiotool?
- I joined audiotool about 1 1/2 years ago and took over Joa's duties on website and backend development. As some of you know, Joa is now focusing on a cross-platform development toolkit called defrac, which we use to build the html5 version of audiotool. Now after the recent relaunch of the audiotool website, I started working with Andre on the App.
- What is your educational background for the job you are doing?
- I started studying computer science but dropped it shortly after. Then, I worked as a freelance software developer for different companies in the industry. Oh, and I also studied the drumset, which I think is what qualifies me for my job at audiotool in the first place.
- When and how did you start programming?
- I got my first computer in the early nineties (an IBM PC XT with 640KB RAM running at 4.77 MHz). Thank you, mom & dad. At that time, this machine was already outdated and in general not such a good fit for gaming. Well, it could run some simple, mostly text-based games, but all the cool guys in school already had their Amigas and Commodores, which where way ahead in that department. So I started figuring out what else could be done with a computer, and finally looked into this BASIC interpreter thing that was used for running most of these simple games. I think I started just by blindly modifying existing sources and observing the effect of the changes.
- How would you define your musical style?
- I have have only made my first few tracks so far, but I think they would fit best in the ambient drawer.
- Musical Background
- Metal
- Started making music
- I started playing drums at the age of 12 and played mostly in thrash- and death metal bands. I was good enough to impress some girls with it, of which one eventually became my wife.
- Message to the community
- Keep on making this great music on Audiotool! And please be patient. We know that very little has been added to the app in the last months, but there is a lot of stuff going on under the hood. Andre already has a bunch of great ideas for new tools and toys that will be integrated as soon as we have the full-fledged application running on html5. Stay tuned!
