Slashdot Mirror
Control Digital Audio With Turntables
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.
Believe it or not, there is actually a turntable that uses a laser out there. Very expensive, but very good sound quality. The LPs aren't as prone to wear out since there is no physical contact, and the laser gets percision that only the best styluses can match. If you're an analogue buff with $13,000 to kill, then it's probably a nice toy to have.
So here's why club DJs prefer vinyl. It actually has nothing to do with sound quality. Until recently, vinyl turntables offered the following three advantages:
1. Groove contrast
2. Needle dropping
3. Scratch cueing
Groove contrast is where you can visually locate a dance song's "breakdown" just by looking at the grooves. Very useful, and was impossible with CD or tape.
Needle dropping provides the DJ with quick random access to any part of the song. Until recently, no CD or tape player offered this feature.
Scratch cueing is where the DJ scratches the first beat of a musical phrase in time with the song that's currently playing (the outgoing song), then lets the record play when the outgoing song reaches the first beat of a phrase. Ta-daaa, the songs are in phase/sync. Until recently, no CD or tape player offered this.
Those three features are vital to club DJing ("beat mixing"). So there really was no choice, DJs had to use vinyl.
Recent pro DJ CD players like Pioneer's CDJ-1000 do a great job of emulating those features in software (in fact, Pioneer calls the CDJ-1000's scratch technology "vinyl emulation").
FinalScratch takes this a step further, though. The DJ can continue to use the tried-and-true vinyl turntables they've gotten used to over the years. That's a huge plus.
So is FinalScratch a perfect replacement? Well, I don't think so. You can't look at the record itself to see the groove contrast, you must look at the computer screen. And mechanical failures during a performance tend to be easier to fix than having software freak out on you -- I'd argue that there's less that can go wrong, but that point's debateable.
But FinalScratch is great technology, and it is going to change the way club DJs perform.
- Shawn Dodd
No, not really. First, I'm one of the founders of N2IT, the company that developed FinalScratch. We've had a few snags, mostly management related, yet we have pushed on and patented the placing of a timecoce on a fairly ordinary vinyl record.
What Wired, BBC and several news organisations covered was a 'proof of concept' prototype. It used ordinary soundcards and had a simple interface device to control the software. Problems with cueing, noise, high seek latency were so great that a new interface was designed and new code was written to allow the new (USB) interface.
The BeOS version version worked quite well, but BeOS fell and Stanton Magnetics wanted an equally reliable system, so the obvious choice was Linux. The "Mac version" is indeed just 'vapourware', but at worst, Linux can be ran out of Mac in much the same way the commercial version can run Linux out of a Windoze filesystem. (After release, there will be a dedicated Linux version and hopefully the same for Mac.) Anyone who knows Linux can hack it now to play out of the ext2/3 filesystems.
As to "competition" that uses vinyl records, the patent is granted (hardware patent) and is infringing on N2IT. As to latency, you can call anything under 50mS "no latency" as human perception is not all that fast. With a scope and some fancy tricks, we've measured the latency of the Linux and BeOS systems and both are a fraction of what you can call "no latency".
We'd like to stay clear of this debate and the actual measured values are a company secret. Even an analogue record has 'latency', so claims of 'no latency' are false, unless they do use the well established 50mS as the imperceivable point and market as 'no latency'.
FinalScratch has been tested by a wide range of DJ styles from some of the biggest names in the business. Even the 'fast scratchers' cannot tell it from vinyl. The only serious fault I find is it sounds 'obviously digital', like all DJ cd players, when ran at super slow speeds.
Bill Squire
Electrical Engineer
N2IT Development BV
Amsterdam, NL
Anyone that knows, a bigger advicate to the technology is John Acquaviva who has been in to the company from the start. I saw him on New Years eave and i don't think that he even brought any normal vinyl with him.. everything came off his finalscratch machine. So go check out his site www.jacq.com and slashdot his server.
-b