Old and busted, but awesome for it's time: QT Turntable
Back in the day, I was learning how to beatmatch using the one turntable my family got me, a ScratchMaster mixer, and a program my brother wrote for me with my design direction. It was called QT Turntable. It was built on quicktime back when you had to upgrade to get it to understand MP3 files. (o-o-old school.)
The big thing about QTTurntable was that it was barebones. It had the basic audio file playback controls you’d expect, and then it also had some very specific DJ controls. I wanted an audio file player that I could adjust the pitch of like I could on my Technics SL1200-mk2, so my brother built it for me like the above screenshot. The most major feature aside from adjusting the playback speed was the temporary pitch adjustment (horizontal slider with the pointy indicator). This simulated grabbing the spindle of a turntable platter and spinning it up just a bit or putting your finder on the side of the platter to momentarily slow it down. This is a super-basic DJ skill that you use when you’re trying to get your track beatmatched with another.
This program was awesome, and I DJ’d 3 parties with it successfully. When Mac OSX rolled around, you could still sort of watch it not work in Classic mode, and then recently I got the “circle-slash” icon on it to let me know that this program isn’t really a program anymore. So sad. I got to take a weeklong cocoa training class at Big Nerd Ranch, but recreating this is slightly out of my scope of possibility currently.
I’ve since gone on to buy or use many digital DJ solutions including Final Scratch 1.5, Hercules DJ Console+traktor, and dj1800. The all have very good tools for all-inclusive DJing, but sort of fall down on something. It’s usually the interface. Heck, even ours was challenging to use, I’ll make no claim otherwise.
I know there’s nothing like DJing with vinyl, and I sure wish I had the money, back strength, interest in physical media, time to go record shopping, and physical space to keep doing that… but I don’t. My beatmatching future is digital.
So many people are into this digital djing thing now, and I think that’s way cool. I just wish I could get this kind of pitch control. Maybe not even all of the pitch control we had, just nice big horizontal sliders, and my temporary pitch nudge controls.
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