I know I’ve been completely asleep for the past 5 years, holy hell, take a look at this:
I’m… speechless. That was freaking amazing. Get to about the 1:20 or so… WTf?!?!?!?!
Technorati Tags: djwoody, skills, 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.
Technorati Tags: qtturntable
Derek Scott and myself (Steve Cooley) will be presenting our findings on “Making DIY music tools control DIY visuals” at the Maker Faire, 2007. We’ll be showing a combination of Pure Data (PD), Open Sound Control (OSC), Processing, and Quartz Composer. Hope to see you there!
Technorati Tags: diy, make, makerfaire, makerfaire2007, osc, processing, processing.org, PD, puredata, quartz composer
My friend and coworker Fred pointed me to: the Do-It-Yourself Smart Radio Station. The general gist is that you set up several smart playlists that feed off a core playlist of your favorite tracks, then you randomize through these smart playlists. The effectively giving you a “radio station” of your favorite tracks. Lots of cool ways to tweak this idea! I don’t know why I never really poked around the smart playlists, but they seem really powerful. So, I’ve set this up, and I’m giving it a try.
Technorati Tags: itunes
I’ve been staring at the iDJ2, and noticed there’s no nudge controls… you know, the thing that lets you simulate a spindle-twist or a finger on the platter to momentarily speed up or slow down a track that you’re beatmatching to another track… these are absolutely critical tools to beat matching… in fact, this is a deal-killer for me. So shocked was I to discover this painfully obvious omission, I emailed numark… here’s the reply I got:
Hi Steve,
I do not believe there will be a nudge feature on these though these are still in the early stages of development. I can put this in as a feature request to the engineers to see if this can be implemented.Sincerely,
Someone at Numark
Oof. To come within 99% of solving all of the criticisms of the original iDJ, and then fall on your face for the last 1%… that’s a shame. I hope someone there has enough political clout to push for one more version of this deck… without nudge, you can have scratch and pitch control, it’s pointless… ok, maybe not completely pointless, but it’s just not going to be taken seriously by people who do know how to beatmatch, and the extra features will probably go unused by people who don’t know how to beatmatch.
For me it comes down to this: No nudge? No sale.
update 2006-09-21
Rob V says:
As one of the designers of IDJ2 IÂ’d like to point out, as others have mentioned, that the nudge (momentary pitch shift) feature is implemented on the jog wheels. This is the same as many Numark (and other) CD decks and, for my money, is more useful than a button implementation. The wheels can also be switched into search (fast seek through track) and scratch modes (four variants).
My coworker Jason sent this to me:
http://www.jasonfreeman.net/itsm/
it’s a java applet that goes through your itunes library and makes an audio signature from your 30 or so most played songs… way cool 
Olivier says:
Hi!
I am on my way learning Mac OS X programming. Here is my first project (it is still probably full of bugs)…
This application can be used to receive MIDI data through a Bluetooth connection, and to create a virtual MIDI-in device to route this data to any music software. What’s the use? Well… Your Palm has bluetooth too, so you can use it as a MIDI controller with a custom client application (hacked in a few hours on a borrowed laptop
)
How to use it…
1/ Make sure that Bt is enabled on your Mac and that you are “discoverable”.
2/ Launch MidiBt.
3/ Click on “Start server”.
4/ Launch the MidiBtTinyController app on your Palm and tap on “connect”.
5/ Select your Mac in the list.
6/ Once the connection is established you can use your Palm as a MIDI controller.There are 4 kind of controllers :
- 4 XY Pads (which can be set to individual channels / controllers settings).
- 1 4×4 buttons matrix (useful to trigger drum sounds or loops).
- [In 320x480 mode] 1 1×6 buttons matrix
- [In 320x480 mode] 5 knobs.Modern music software should be able to “learn” from all these controllers, so there is no need for a lot of configuration…
If doing the same thing on a PC is easy (and I doubt it is…), and if you find it usable Bhajis Loops will be MIDIfied using this approach.
Technorati Tags: bluetooth, midi, music, palm, treo
Oh dear…Â once I got past the first 6 screens of telling iTunes that it’s WAY off on it’s “Just for you” suggestions, it started to give me painfully good suggestions. 
Good bye freedom.. hello “spending allowance”.
Woot!
New iPods record in stereo!:
Wow, this BIG! The new iPods record in stereo! Voice recording settings: Low (22.05 KHz, mono) High (44.1 KHz, stereo). At least that’s what the spec page says. This is _great_ news for anyone who has wanted to use their iPod as a recorder, but didn’t like the idea of installing Podzilla, or recording at the crippled rate the older iPods are set at. Link.
I downloaded about 40 tracks from the de:bug podcast in itunes, and dutifully put them into a playlist so I could listen to them back to back without having to go back to itunes and play each file like you have to with podcast files. (problem 1) Then I wanted to delete them from the podcast list because holy crap, that podcast is super active, and if I didn’t, I’d have a mile long list of files, quickly (problem 2). “Do you want me to throw these files in the trash, or keep them in the library?” Oh, well, keep them in the library, I added them to a playlist. That should be ok, right? I go back to the playlist, there’s no songs in the playlist now…(problem 3) nice. so, I have a couple hundred megs of files that I can’t locate easily, because they’re in the gordian knot that is my music library. You can’t search by origination point (problem 4) (podcasts.. ok, which podcast did this come from?), you can’t search by music label like “Show all ninjatune songs” (problem 5), you can’t search by “added on” date if they’re not in a playlist (problem 6). Man, I know we have to love itunes, but.. dang. Lots of room to improve here.
listening to… Beatseqr.com Haptic Synapses dobox recordings Mattski