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Control Digital Audio With Turntables

Posted by ryuzaki0 on from the all-that-scratching-is-making-me-itch dept.

Anonymous Coward writes "Harmony Central has a NAMM article about FinalScratch which is a digital audio controller technology for Linux/BeOS, so DJ's can play digital audio and keep the tactile control of the turntable. Some interesting technology there, and a further push for digital audio." Another one for CowboyNeal's birthday list.

7 of 290 comments (clear)

  1. hmmmm by Jebus_the_spork · · Score: 1, Insightful

    the trend for music going to completely digital is defenitly a good thing. i like the fact that even "i" can download one of these things, mess around with it (even though i have no clue what im doing)

    but is the music produced still the same as done by "hand"?

    --
    I didn't think it was physically possible, but this both sucks and blows - Bart Simpson
    1. Re:hmmmm by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Insightful

      it's called mailorder.

  2. old by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Insightful

    from a year ago

  3. sounded like BS by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Insightful

    but i know richie hawtin, who is an old name in tecno (a.k.a plastikman) was taking it to some gigs, so it is apparently legit.

    as a dj i have mixed feelings on this, it sounds realy cool but,

    a - all of the CD dj's may switch to using these to look more credible, which will just dump MORE bed techno and trance music on the scene
    and
    b- startup labels might prefer to just send around digital tracks to people, instead of running a limited press of 300 or so white labels
    and getting them distributed.

    so in the long run talented producers will get fucked, overshadowed by the kids with no talent dumping bad tracks all over the place.
    but hey, half the kids who go to parties in NY dont like good techno anyway,
    tehy are into dj's like pleasure head, who spin bad trance, and just fade one track over the other but know how to market themselves and how to perform,
    not only do they play the same tracks everynight, ive heard them play a track 2 times or more in one set. But i guess they cater to all the kids who got into the scene after the media played it up as such a great place to get and take e pills

    anyway if u want some to listen to some good sets check out kindkidz.com, the site is decrepid and dying but there are some good sets still around and a radioshow every thursday and sunday night, although i expect even this second hand /.ing will knock the server to hell
    (if anyone likes what they hear, not SEE, and wants to donate some minimal serverspace and bandwidth mail me here)

    1. Re:sounded like BS by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Insightful

      I don't think so. Sure, it is much easier to burn a CD than cut an acetate... and SURE that can invite a flood of crap to the scene, but it sounds rather ELITIST to suggest that legit music only be played from vinyl.

      The "scene" is so disposable AS IS and has ALWAYS been. There is very little "undergroud" since there are so few sources of vinyl- the club on my block was playing the same tracks I heard in Europe. It's like top 40 radio- only it is vinyl... and all the DJs are completely pretentious thinking they are playing something "fresh and original."

  4. Re:Turntables vs. CD's by PoiBoy · · Score: 2, Insightful
    Being a member of generation D, condescending elders often ask me if I even know what a vinyl record is. I tell them "sure. It's a giant CD that uses a needle instead of a laser and melts if you leave it in the sun."

    Maybe so, but have you recently listened to a well-made record on a good turntable? The sound is absolutely incredible, and I think many people would honestly conclude (1) that analog is not dead and (2) digital recording isn't as great as it's cracked up to be.

    --
    Sig (appended to the end of comments you post, 120 chars)
  5. Re:Lotta Linux using DJ's out there? by jovlinger · · Score: 3, Insightful

    Actually...

    It matters alot which OS the system uses. There are three important factors in scratching: latency, latency, and ... (wait for it) ... latency.

    Older Macs may have been good at this because they weren't preemtively scheduled, so the scratching app could grab control and never let go. Not the best way to make friends, but it does keep latency down.

    On the "real" OS side (no, a non preemptively scheduled, non protected OS is not a real OS, which apple understood, and which is why they spent so much time and effort to finally get one) BeOS was the only OS with any decent latency. Understandable; it was designed from the ground up to do this sort of thing w/o breaking a sweat. NB: QNX is realtime, which doesn't guarantee low latency, but rather "merely" guarantees that bounds exist, not that the bounds are low.

    You gotta figure, when you're mixing 180 bpm songs, that's ~300ms per beat, so a 150ms latency is the difference between perfect and couldn't-be-worse. Also, you need to take the whole input chain into account -- not just one context switch, but rather: sampling input => timecode conversion => cueing of mp3 track => decode => output. Each one of these will involve several context switches if you are unlucky. Each context switch adds unknown potential latency. It can pretty quickly add up to +/- 150 ms. Worst of all, you don't know how much (can't read the clock -- that's a syscall == latency).

    So in summarium: BeOS is a natural. Older macs may be ok, by virtue of being too stupid to be in the way. Neither Mac OS X and Linux stand the proverbial snowball's chance of pulling this off.

    Of course, now you throw low latency patches into the mix... round and round it goes, where it will stop nobody knows.

    Alternately, a kernel module may be able to do something decent, but that basically a hack to acheive the level of sophistication of old Macs.