A music video game, also commonly known as a music game, is a video game where the gameplay is meaningfully and often almost entirely oriented around the player's interactions with a musical score or individual songs. Music video games may take a variety of forms and are often grouped with puzzle games due to their common use of "rhythmically generated puzzles".[7][8]
Strong support for the convergence of live music and video games is evident with the success of the Video Games Live concert series.[9] Emergent games for live concert performance, "game-scores," augment traditional western music notation with the dramatic elements of animation, interactivity, graphic elements and aleatoric principals (Anigraphical Music). The concept of incorporating Game Theory and music is not new and can be traced back to Musikalisches Würfelspiel.[10]
Music video games are distinct from purely audio games (e.g. the 1997 Sega Saturn release Real Sound: Kaze no Regret) in that they feature a visual feedback, to lead the player through the game's soundtrack, although eidetic music games can fall under both categories.

Free form music games

Non-games such as KORG DS-10 blur the lines between video games and software utilities.
Free form music games, characterized by games such as SimTunes,[14] are those in which the creation of music takes predominance over gameplay and as such these games are often more similar to non-game music synthesizers such as the Tenori-on. Free form music games occupy a position somewhere between generative hybrid music games and non-game utilities dependent upon the degree to which their gameplay relies upon a driving underlying plotline. Further examples of this form of music game include Fluid, Electroplankton, Wii Music, Traxxpad, myRMX, and MTV Drumscape. Free form musical modes are also often made available as alternate gameplay modes or unlockables as in such games as Daigasso! Band Brothers, Quest for Fame, and Osu!. This form of music game is closely analogous to Sandbox games in the realm of non-musical games and the term "sandbox" has been used to describe this form of gameplay.

Major gameplay variations

As the genre has gained popularity and expanded, music video games have demonstrated the ability to support a range of different styles of gameplay. While the oldest form of gameplay is eidetic in nature, the most common form of music game today is rhythmic in nature and has been termed the "rhythm game." Other common modes of gameplay in music video games include the sandbox style that encourages a free-form gameplay approach and the recent hybrid style that combines musical elements with more traditional genres such as the shooter or puzzle game. Music video games are also commonly included as minigames in the party game genre.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Music_games

Beatmixing is a disk jockey technique of mixing two tracks so that the beats of one occur at the same time as the other.

Beatmixing was invented in the late 1960s by Francis Grasso, who tried to keep people from leaving the dance floor between the songs. Initially he was looking for records with the same tempo, counting the tempo with a metronome. When the tempos didn't match, he was adjusting the pitch control on the turntable to bring the beats in sync. Rosie, a mixer built for him by Alex Rosner, let him listen to any channel in the headphones independently of what was playing on the speakers, allowing him to beatmatch the records by ear; this became the defining feature of DJ mixers.

These days beatmatching and beatmixing are considered basic techniques among DJs in electronic dance music genres, and it's standard practice in clubs to keep the constant beat through the night, even if DJs change in the middle.

Technique

The beatmixing technique consists of the following steps:

1. While a record is playing, beatmatch a new record to it, using headphones for monitoring. Use gain (or trim) control on the mixer to match the levels of the two records.
2. Restart and slip-cue the new record at the right time. Pay attention to track structures; careful phrasing can make the mix seamless.
3. Before fading in the new track, check that the beats of two tracks match by listening to both channels together in the headphones, as the sound from the speakers can reach you with a delay.
4. Gradually, fade in parts of the new track while fading out the old track. While in the mix, ensure that the tracks are still synchronized, adjusting the records if needed.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beatmixing

An online game is a game played over some form of computer network. This almost always means the Internet or equivalent technology; but games have always used whatever technology was current: modems before the Internet, and hard wired terminals before modems. The expansion of online gaming has reflected the overall expansion of computer networks from small local networks to the Internet and the growth of Internet access itself. Online games can range from simple text based games to games incorporating complex graphics and virtual worlds populated by many players simultaneously. Many online games have associated online communities, making online games a form of social activity beyond single player games.
The rising popularity of Flash and Java led to an Internet revolution where websites could utilize streaming video, audio, and a whole new set of user interactivity. When Microsoft began packaging Flash as a pre-installed component of IE, the Internet began to shift from a data/information spectrum to also offer on-demand entertainment. This revolution paved the way for sites to offer games to web surfers. Some online multiplayer games like World of Warcraft, Final Fantasy XI and Lineage II charge a monthly fee to subscribe to their services, while games such as Guild Wars offer an alternative no monthly fee scheme. Many other sites relied on advertising revenues from on-site sponsors, while others, like RuneScape, or Tibia (computer game) let people play for free while leaving the players the option of paying, unlocking new content for the members.
After the dot-com bubble burst in 2001, many sites solely relying on advertising revenue dollars faced extreme adversity. Despite the decreasing profitability of online gaming websites, some sites have survived the fluctuating ad market by offsetting the advertising revenue loss by using the content as a cross-promotion tool for driving web visitors to other websites that the company owns.

"Online gaming is a technology rather than a genre; a mechanism for connecting players together rather than a particular pattern of gameplay." Online games are played over some form of computer network, now typically on the Internet. One advantage of online games is the ability to connect to multiplayer games, although single-player online games are quite common as well.

During the 1990s, online games started to move from a wide variety of LAN protocols (such as IPX) and onto the Internet using the TCP/IP protocol. Doom popularized the concept of deathmatch, where multiple players battle each other head-to-head, as a new form of online game. Since Doom, many first-person shooter games contain online components to allow deathmatch or arena style play.

As consoles are becoming more like computers, online gameplay is expanding. The first online game console was the Super Famicom, which offered an online service with the Satellaview. This service was however offered only in Japan. Once online games started crowding the market, open source networks, such as the PlayStation 2, Dreamcast, Xbox and Nintendo GameCube took advantage of online functionality with its PC game counterpart. Games such as Phantasy Star Online have private servers that function on multiple consoles. Dreamcast, PC, Macintosh and GameCube players are able to share one server. Earlier games, like 4x4 Evolution, Quake III and Need for Speed: Underground also have a similar function with consoles able to interact with PC users using the same server. Usually, a company like Electronic Arts or Sega runs the servers until it becomes inactive, in which private servers with their own DNS number can function. This form of open source networking has a small advantage over the new generation of Sony and Microsoft consoles which customize their servers to the consumer.

Early real-time strategy games often allowed multiplayer play over a modem or local network. As the Internet started to grow during the 1990s, software was developed that would allow players to tunnel the LAN protocols used by the games over the Internet. By the late 1990s, most RTS games had native Internet support, allowing players from all over the globe to play with each other. Services were created to allow players to be automatically matched against another player wishing to play or lobbies were formed where people could meet in so called game rooms. An example was the MSN Gaming Zone where online game communities were formed by active players for games, such as Age of Empires and Microsoft Ants.

As the World Wide Web developed and browsers became more sophisticated, people started creating browser games that used a web browser as a client. Simple single player games were made that could be played using a web browser via HTML and HTML scripting technologies (most commonly JavaScript, ASP, PHP and MySQL). More complicated games such as Legend of Empires or RuneScape would contact a web server to allow a multiplayer gaming environment.
The development of web-based graphics technologies such as Flash and Java allowed browser games to become more complex. These games, also known by their related technology as "Flash games" or "Java games", became increasingly popular. Many games originally released in the 1980s, such as Pac-Man and Frogger, were recreated as games played using the Flash plugin on a webpage. Most browser games have limited multiplayer play, often being single player games with a high score list shared amongst all players.
Browser-based pet games are also very popular amongst the younger generation of online gamers. These games range from gigantic games with millions of users, such as Neopets, to smaller and more community-based pet games.
More recent browser-based games use web technologies like Ajax to make more complicated multiplayer interactions possible

MUDs are a class of multi-user real-time virtual worlds, usually but not exclusively text-based, with a history extending back to the creation of MUD1 by Richard Bartle in 1978. MUDs were the direct predecessors of MMORPGs

Massively multiplayer online games were made possible with the growth of broadband Internet access in many developed countries, using the Internet to allow hundreds of thousands of players to play the same game together. Many different styles of massively multiplayer games are available, such as: