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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."
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
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
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*/
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.
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.
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Like Ayn Rand novels?
...wearing a skin-tight topless leather jumpsuit, with cutaway buttocks and transparent crotch panel.
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.