Trax in Space

Trax in Space (a.k.a. TiS) was an online community of musicians from every corner of the globe. A large chunk of these musicians were trackers, while many others use different methods of creating music and others used conventional methods. It was founded by CyberLegion Artist Network in 1992, but soon became a solo project of Mysterium (Saurin Shah, born 1977), and grew from 1997 into one of the largest Internet music communities until its collapse in 2001. At its peak it had over 30,000 musicians and over 100,000 songs. The site had over 1.5 million unique visitors per month. The staff consisted of: Mysterium (Saurin Shah), Ronald "roncli" Clifford, Vincent Lau, Martin "Slammin Vinyl" Kilner (now known as slammy), Zola, Lisa Lindstrom, Marty Pickering (M.P. Productions), Solo, Sunny, Mike (Evolution), SBR (xylyx), Idaho (DotSPF), and many more. Its fame as a pioneer of the online tracking scene (TiS even occasionally gained coverage in the mainstream music press) was only matched by its infamous funding problems, which eventually caused the site to crash around September 2001 (the site having run out of money by August 2000 and Shah being in debt).

Artists submitted their musical creations to the site, where they would be hosted and queued for review. Staff and many other contributors would then assess the quality of this music (usually in their spare time) by rating elements of its composition (e.g. structure, sound quality, musical skill). These ratings would combine to give an overall score. The idea was that this score would give listeners an accurate indication of whether a track was worth downloading or not. In practice, the quality of these reviews varied. They were based largely upon the opinion of an individual, and if this individual had limited knowledge of a particular genre of music, this reduced the credibility of their comments.

In an effort to raise the profile of their music genre, and the quality of reviews, a small number of Trax in Space artists founded Drum and Bass Scene (now defunct), with the support of United Trackers. This was one of a number of spin-offs from Trax In Space, including Trance In Space, Samples in Space, and even an online music magazine called Digital Music Revolution (or DMR). Trance in Space as a site was quite self-explanatory, in that it put all the 'trance' labelled genres from Trax In Space under one roof, while Samples in Space was a pay-per-use instrument/sample site, intended to help Trax In Space cover some of the costs of running.

Trax In Space was relaunched on 17 June 2007, in beta form. There were many of the old faces putting the new TiS through its beta test. A new 'social network' element was featured on the site, which broke the mould from the standard music sharing sites, such as CTG music and The Mod Archive. However, having been relatively active for several months, the resource did not catch up and by autumn 2008 most of the activity on the site ceased.

In the middle of July 2009 Trax In Space went offline for a period of 9 days. When it became available, no explanation of the power down from the administration of the site was offered. On the 27th of July the site became unreachable again.

Related links

• Trax In Space website
• Trax in Space at the Internet Archive: 2001
• Vince Young interview with Saurin Shah about Trax in Space
• Trax in Space partial archive backup
• OSMusic.Net, new music website created by roncli, one of the admins of Trax in Space.
• Saurin's current website; Saurin's blog