Aspiring DJ's - Leave your records at home

July 15, 2001 5:06 PM

Aspiring DJ's - Leave your records at home, and pack your laptop, mp3s, and this program to your next jam. Tactile12000 is a free opensource interactive simulation of two turntables and a mixer. I picked up some loops, breaks, and acapellas- and i was on my way. Its mighty funky stuff.
posted by ewwgene (15 comments total)

an interesting concept. though people have been mixing with mp3s for a while (i knew a guy who used to do so in college). problem is, all the songs i really want to play are released on record only. the person mp3ing them would likely be me. and most clubs often already have a dj setup (most likely two technics SL-1200mk2s), which is another reason why records remain so popular...
posted by moz at 5:28 PM on July 15, 2001

This is cool, but there's no way anyone could actually use the imitative turntable interface to DJ effectively. Trying to beat match with a mouse is ridiculous, unless they design an interface that isn't just trying to mimic the physical one.
posted by Big Fat Tycoon at 5:31 PM on July 15, 2001

For me, it seems like the perfect idea. All my songs are on my harddrive (around 10gb worth), and im not a pro at all- never touched a turntable. However, I love turntablism hiphop and breakbeats. I love the price, portability aspect, along with with it being opensource.
Plus I'm not a dj- so i can put up with their limitations.
In the future they hope to support more virtual turntables (5 turntables would be really neat), and have streaming capabilities.
posted by ewwgene at 5:42 PM on July 15, 2001

I had no idea they were still even making vinyl, let alone that it could be described as "popular."
posted by kindall at 5:55 PM on July 15, 2001

Vinylfever here in Tallahassee is always packed full of djs who need their vinyl fix.
posted by ewwgene at 6:07 PM on July 15, 2001

Richie Hawtin and John Acquaviva use finalscratch, a much more intuitive (and expensive) solution to digital playback. It's pretty awesome, uses your existing turntables as an interface. I can't wait till it's actually commerically available!
posted by chrisege at 6:21 PM on July 15, 2001

This all seems pretty cool. I'm glad to see a there's a community of Meta-Djs. I'm heavily into turntablism in all its forms and a couple of guys at the cutting edge, so to speak, of djing have been tinkering with software for multimedia mixing for a quite a while now.

They are Matt Black and Jon More, they're known as Coldcut, their lable is Ninja Tune and all stuff about them and all their releases is available here. Vjamm looks like a pretty cool program.
posted by davehat at 6:36 PM on July 15, 2001

quality?
posted by hobbes at 7:21 PM on July 15, 2001

A few years ago there was a program that let you mix mp3's using any turntable as an input device. It came with a special record that played regular ticks, so that the program could mimic scratching and such by measuring the tick frequency. It ran only on BeOS, so it's probably well into obscurity by now.

I highly suggest BuzzTracker to anyone looking to experiment with computer audio; it's also free and very flexible.
posted by skyline at 8:49 PM on July 15, 2001

Heh. Neeeet.
I'm never going outside again.
Suka DJs, they get stopped by a single finga.
posted by dong_resin at 9:50 PM on July 15, 2001

The Orion demo is great to play with, too.
posted by dong_resin at 9:52 PM on July 15, 2001

"I'm never going outside again.
Suka DJs, they get stopped by a single finga."

mod this up! doughty ref!

*blink blink*

where am i?
posted by jcterminal at 11:57 PM on July 15, 2001

I have many gigs of mp3s as well but I can't stop spending $$$ on dance music vinyl. In fact, with the recent uptick in popularity of dance music in general, I think vinyl sales have definitely risen. There's something about vinyl in terms of sound quality and the physical nature of the medium that is hard to replace with a PC interface. I hate lugging my vinyl around but it's worth it when you, "put the needle on the record and the drumbeat goes like this..."

For those who want to live in both analog and digital worlds, I suggest the Denon DP-DJ151 which is a turntable with digital coax output so you can record your vinyl to CD-R or Mindisc or DAT. I may replace one of my SL1200 M3Ds with this Denon.
posted by gen at 6:02 AM on July 16, 2001

I love that you can drop in any wav file and scratch it. My voice, or a quirky sample from dailywavs.com, can easily become a part of my oddball composition.
posted by ewwgene at 8:12 AM on July 16, 2001

There seems to be lots of programs that mix mp3s in different ways.
posted by ewwgene at 10:13 AM on July 16, 2001