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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.
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."
There is a 'Receive info form', for Windows users, and another form for Linux and FreeBSD users. The funny part is that the HTML title of that form is 'Receive info about the system (Linux/NetBSD Form)' . FreeBSD? NetBSD? I'm confused.
{{.sig}}
I have to take issue with one thing in the harmony central article ... it says the records contain a time code. What do you do when you break these special records? ...
Religion is a gateway psychosis. -- Dave Foley
I believe Richie Hawtin has been using Final scratch for the last year or so. Furthermore, his latest CD "DE9: Closer to the Edit" is supposed to be largely mixed with it.
hummer
Actually, Richie Hawtin has been using this setup for a year now. If one of the most innovative, important and infuential djs in the world has been using it for this long, I would hardly call it vaporware.
You're scratching records but you won't be scratching mine
Don't give me chish-chash in rinky dink time
Just vive le rock, vive le rock
- Vive Le Rock, by Adam Ant and Marco Pirroni
In previous digital DJ solutions, there has been a problem where you don't get a visual indication of where breakdowns occur in songs. When you spin with vinyl, if you look closely at a track the grooves look different during a breakdown, giving you a visual indication of how much time you have to finish/start a mix. One reason for Final Scratch's success is being able to see on your laptop screen where the breakdowns are, just as if you had the vinyl in front of you.
You'll do anything to get some karma-points, won't you?
This product is real. I've seen it with my own eyes, played with it with my own hands. It's real, and very,
very cool.
it appears that Stanton Inc. is releasing Final Scratch. their site has some good info directly from Richie about using it.
/* Half alive and half dead too, work is for suckers and the sucker is you. - "Half-life" by Local H*/
The Radar24 mixing console runs BeOS.
Tascam's SX-1 mixing console runs BeOS.
Level Control Systems has been using BeOS to control their system for a long time
(it was used for the Nagano winter olympics opening ceremoney, various Broadwar shows and the Hollywood Bowl, for example).
terminatorX can do this kind of thing:
terminatorX is a realtime audio synthesizer that allows you to "scratch" on digitally sampled audio data (*.wav, *.au, *.mp3, etc.) the way hiphop-DJs scratch on vinyl records. It features multiple turntables, realtime effects (buit-in as well as LADSPA plugin effects), a sequencer and an easy-to-use gtk+ GUI.
There's a tutorial which explains how to take advantage of the support for a second mouse attached to the serial port which can be plugged into a dead turntable and controls the software, allowing users to make scratches with a real turntable for that hiphop look'n'feel. Check it out, it's a great project.
You download the software, you get the hardware out of your mom's attic :P
autopr0n is like, down and stuff.
There was discussion of final scratch back in mid-December when a user submitted a story about the DM2 and it's possible use fun/cheap music toy. This discussion in Ask Slashdot lead to other products being borught up as well, and some inciteful comments. Check out the Story.
I have to admit that this sounds like a good attempt though. The timecoded dummy records allow for new tricks that haven't been possible with simpler emulations.
But you have to remember that the complete vinyl experience consists of all the little stuff like
browsing your records physically in the box, checking out the covers etc.
flipping records with your bare hands instead of grabbing the mouse and fiddling with GUI displays
having that little extra snap, crackle & pop in the sound
letting people actually see what you are playing, since the record's always visible on the turntable
etc.
All these little things are what really contribute to the overall feeling that you get with turntables, it's not just the scratching interface. And you know, sometimes it's actually the slight inconvenience or difficulty of doing something that makes it feel cool. When you change it and make it easier, you also change the overall feeling and your emulation is not successful.
So, I believe that if you go digital, it's possible to come up with much better interfaces for DJ'ing than simple turntable emulation. If a GUI is going to be your primary interface (for finding the tracks you want to play etc), you should leverage the GUI and find the most natural interfaces there.
After all, scratching and pitch mixing are just 'hacks' applied to the original turntable device, which was designed for much simpler use. The possibilities of a computer with a GUI are endless and should not be limited to just these traditional ideas.
Depends on the music. Maybe not turntables, but you can download Hammond Organs (Native Instruments B4), various classic analog synths (e.g. NI Pro-5), step-sequencer synths (Propellerheads ReBirth 303) and drum machines (also ReBirth). You can also get the whole shebang in one app, using Propellerheads Reason - a virtual rack of synths, samplers, effects and sequencers.
It's fun to play with for those of us who can't afford a rack of gear but do have a moderate spec PC.
"don't fall into the fallacy of believing that Perl can solve social problems. Maybe Perl 6 can, but that's a ways off"
I tell you what there boy! a year are so ago i bought a Tascam CD-302. It's a duel deck DJ CD Player with Scratchem' Pads and crap. It's outrageously over priced at c. $1000, but damn it's fun. The scratching function is nothing like scratching a real vinyl, but with a lot of practice it sounds decent.
I took some vinyls and recorded them into my COMPUTAR and DRAGGED AND DROPPED THOSE WAV FILES ONTO MY CD-BERNER ICON and produced an audio CD. During playback you get all the deliscious pops and snaps and hiss, and you aren't damaging your vinyls.
HEAR THIS NOW! I recommend that if you beat mix or stuff like that, then go ahead and record your vinyls to CD and playback through a CD-302 or the like.. your vinyls will last longer and you don't have to worry about replacing needles and stuff. Plus you have access to looping and pitch shifting functions.
However if you intend to do any REAL scratching, stick to vinyl. You can get scratch like effects from digital players, but it will be a long time before they have REAL scratching. PEACE OUT MUTHA.
continuously promoting the mediocre or worse
Like Ayn Rand novels?
...wearing a skin-tight topless leather jumpsuit, with cutaway buttocks and transparent crotch panel.
I believe Craze is sponsored by Stanton but that does not detract from his performance at all. Craze spins drum'n'bass, a genre that is probably more entrenched in dubplate culture than any other form of dance/electronic music out there. A year or two ago, Craze came out of NOWHERE (as far as the d'n'b scene was concerned)and blindsided most of UK with his amazing performance. Most DJ's will throw in a scratch or two, beatjuggle occasionally, and perhaps drop only two bars... but the speed and constant variance that Craze pushes blows all else away. If his show can be done with these tools, there is NO reason to doubt these. Vinyl purists there will always be (I myself prefer it), but this is WAY beyond the league of "newbie-CD-decks" in terms of respectability.
:) DJ Hype has merely his label's plates and his forays into nu-breaks to compete with this, and that's not much IMO.
Offtopic, big up Craze for bringing stateside drum'n'bass to a whole new level
You know, it's funny.
Watching capitalists in action has definitely soured me on unbridled capitalism - the way big business conducts itself is disgusting to me, and I fear it more than big government (especially since big business subverts the government - witness DMCA and UCITA, just for starters). And Rand's strident condemnation of charity and welfare grates somewhat too.
But I still think she's a hell of a writer and I still reread Atlas Shrugged and The Fountainhead every few years. Her vision of man as heroic and life as a wonderful thing to be made the most of are very appealing - even if reality often falls short.
You are certainly entitled to your opinions on this, but I disagree.
On the other hand, "rap music" is a contradiction in terms. (Ooops, I guess that giant sucking sound is my karma heading south.)
"that's not encryption - it's a new perl script that I'm working on..." - from some Matrix parody
I was at NAMM last week and I just want to let you all know that there are quite a few companies releasing turntable methods of digital music manipulation. Two others Serato (http://www.serato.com) and Sound Graph (http://www.soundgraph.com) are using timecode vinyl similar to stanton's. The main difference between all of them will be hardware and price. Stanton's setup requires a piece of hardware with two audio inputs (from mixer), two outputs (to mixer) and usb. Serato's setup is completely software, you only need a sound card with two audio inputs. not sure how the output works though. It will be considerably cheaper though (around $200 is what I recall). Also of note, stanton and sound graph appear to be windows only, while serato was running on a mac. Numark (http://www.numark.com) is using a roller on the turntable that just keeps track of speed with position correction so you will not lose your cue point by jogging back and forth. The roller will connect to their axis 8 cd player and should cost no more than $20. No skipping, but no laptop interface either (for the time being).
Actually...
... (wait for it) ... latency.
It matters alot which OS the system uses. There are three important factors in scratching: latency, latency, and
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.
it might be wise to try and avoid making such detailed comments when you actually don't know what you're talking about. Audio latency on linux can be easily reduced to about 2.6ms at 48kHz on most current audio interfaces. At 96kHz, it can go down to 1.3ms. Yes, you need to be running the low latency patch for this to work well, and the application is question has to be written by someone who understands real time programming (true for any OS, including BeOS). You say "where it will stop, nobody knows" - I'm here to tell you that it stops there, and that in addition, i don't understand your response to this patch. Its widely understood to be necessary for Linux, has existed in various forms for more than 2 years, and is a reasonable candidate for mainstream inclusion at some point. with some cards, its possible to go significantly below these figures. The low latency patch seems to make numbers down to around 0.75ms feasible. Context switches take a tiny amount of time compared to the numbers we're talking about here. There is a constant component, which on a PII 450, which is by now an ancient CPU, is about 20usecs, and a variable component that depends on how much of the cache contents associated with the task has been invalidated since it last ran. This can cause a significant increase in the effective context switch time, but its quite manageable. nobody in their right minds would be using different threads for the i/o chain you describe. "can't read the clock - thats a syscall - latency". it takes about 60usec to call gettimeofday on a PII 450. if thats too slow, you can use the rdtscl instruction (intel only), which takes about 12 cycles. If you're interested in audio on linux, i suggest you join either the linux-audio-development or the linux-audio-users mailing lists. There's a lot of expertise there that you could learn from, and perhaps some things you could contribute. Paul Davis
Linux Audio Systems
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
My own rough unscientific study shows that you don't know what you're talking about. Musicians that make music on their computers (there's a whole lot of them nowadays) take their computers with them on stage when they perform. Macs, mostly, because most of the musicians you'll have heard of will have started doing their thing back in the day when there wasn't any reasonable audio app. for PCs. Not anymore. So now there's an increasing amount of PC-musicians starting to get good and playing live as well. Trust me, I've seen them do it. No glitches, crashes, nothing, and yes, it was CD quality. Get with the times.
News and bla for computer musicians: http://lomechanik.net/
YOU HAVE NO IDEA...Have you ever listened to Richie Hawtin? That's fuckin' Detroit Techno. Big difference from Jay-Z, Grandmaster Flash, etc... You have no idea (did I already say that). It's not about scratching, its about beat matching, keeping the crowd pumped for 4, 6, 8 hours bring them up and down on a wave of tempo changes and moods. These are the real DJ's, not these Puff Daddy guys on MTV. Not DJ Scribble. The ravers, the techno gods, these are the guys that would normally have to carry crates of vinyl, but can now just plug in a laptop...You understand now...You have no idea....
"Karma can only be portioned out by the cosmos." -Homer Simpson
The parent comment said:
All this effort so alleged "artists" can make that nasty scratching noise with a computer? Shit, why bother?
It's like there's some media conspiracy to promote rapping/DJ's as some sort of artists - like the way the Chris Rock show keeps (kept?) raving about "grandmaster flash" - what a load of crap.
I'm not often moved to remember Ayn Rand's writings, but this brings to mind the talk Ellsworth Toohey gives near the end of The Fountainhead about how to destroy the arts by continuously promoting the mediocre or worse. (Yes I'm kissing my karma goodbye - oh well.)
Yes I quoted my whole post to get out from under the moderation nazi's.
Dimbulb moderators: just because you disagree with something doesn't make it a troll. Blow me.
"that's not encryption - it's a new perl script that I'm working on..." - from some Matrix parody
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