Scratching, meet recycling. Rather than allow MIDI DJ controllers to consign themselves to landfills, a new open source project promises to retrofit these gadgets with scratch capabilities.

Scratch Decoder is a collaborative, open source effort to add or extend obsolete controllers, CDJs, and turntables with digital vinyl control – before they get tossed. Inspired by a 2009 thesis by Swiss student Ramon Mathis, advised by the folks who first developed the Ms. Pinky vinyl control system for Max/MSP, and rooted in years of work, the system is now publicly documented.

The ingredients:
An Arduino hardware board
The encoder sensor and board on a Numark CDX – which this project actually hacks into
MIDI, and Ms. Pinky’s software library

Upshot: add a computer, and you can translate scratch movements to MIDI messages for use with your DJ software of choice.

The video is in Spanish, so Mudo, who’s on the team, explains:

In the video, Norbert shows, as proof-of-concept, hijacking the encoder signal and connecting it to the digital inputs at Arduino. Then he sets up the software involved (serial-to-MIDI translator and Traktor controller panel) and starts the platter of the Numark CDX (the CDX is a CDJ without the ability to send MIDI from the platter) — all without a timecode CD, of course. It is not perfect right now, but it works at last.

I actually kind of like that it isn’t perfect.

This deserves further explanation for those for whom this isn’t obvious (mainly, most normal people). Typically, digital vinyl works by including a disc (vinyl or CD) encoded with timecode. That way, by looking at the audio playback from the device, as someone moves the record, the audio stream can be decoded in order to tell that, say, they’re scratching the disc.

In this case, a device that lacks that timecode disc and has sensors that refuse to see MIDI can be retrofitted to provide signal to software.

The team in this case is inspired by other experimental turntablists, artists who explore the potential of modifying technology for use in turntable performance technique. The project says it draws from the artistic ideas of these inventors as well as their technological research, looking to the likes of DJ Sniff, Jason Sadural and the Rastieri Project, Aaron Faulstitch, Jesse Kriss, and Scott Wardle.

I’m finishing editing a video interview with DJ Sniff showing of his current rig, but I asked Sniff, aka Takuro Mizuta Lippit, about this project. He points CDM to a range of “hackable gems,” devices for DJing that failed in the consumer market but are now available for creative use in used form.

Examples:

The Tascam TT-M1 is, says Taku “essentially just an optical encoder that rides that spinning platter.” It’s the sensor you can add to something like the CDX – a non-open equivalent of the project above, meant to rescue your CDX from the trash heap.

The Stanton SCS.3M brought to bear a fascinating array of interactive touch strips, a compact, all-touch controller for DJing. It’s a device we covered on CDM when it came out, particularly due to its similarity to [warning: getting obscure] the never-released M-Audio [then Midiman] Surface One controller prototype. The SCS got further than the M-Audio piece in that it was manufactured, but apparently has since been discontinued and didn’t quite take the market by storm. [Fair warning: I don't see confirmation from Stanton that it's discontinued, so its status may simply be, "not the biggest controller ever to hit the market" until we hear otherwise.]

Taku uses that gadget in his work, which you’ll see in the video soon.

In the meantime, to follow these community projects, there are some interesting discussions and sites coming together.

En Español and in English:
Proyecto 1: Scratch Decoder. Convierte tu viejo equipo en un controlador midi para scratch!

Discussion on the DJ TechTools forum of this project:
Which controllers with motorized platter does Traktor support? [a slight misnomer in the subject header - eventually, you wind up with the project here!]

See Ramón Mathis’ dream of an open community for sharing scratch skills, styles, and “tricks” via an interactive e-learning system and community:
http://www.skrat.ch/

Record giant Universal Music Group is cutting prices on the CD, as analysts clamor for still-lower prices. But as for actual records – the kind made of vinyl – odder and odder innovations flourish. If the CD is dying, the vinyl record is an undead, sexually-alluring vampire.

Two recent releases not only treat the record as “delivery mechanism,” but also tools for playing the record.

The late hip hop great J Dilla (aka Jay Dee) gets a well-deserved tribute from his label Stones Throw, complete with some fantastic, unreleased instrumentals (“Safety Dance”, “Sycamore”, “Bars & Twists,” and remastered cuts for Mos Def, Q-Tip and Busta Rhymes). But, working in collaboration with Serato, this release also takes note of the people actually buying records these days: DJs. There are beautiful, donut-themed slipmats. (As far as I’m concerned, anything featuring donuts earns automatic bonus points. Mmmmm… donuts.) The records themselves, meanwhile, are dual-sided. When you want to hear the record, play it face up. When you want to use DJ software, flip it for Serato control tone. (Officially, that works with Serato Scratch Live DJ, but it’ll also work with the open-source Mixxx and Deckadance apps, too.)

It’s a fascinating idea: make the record itself friendly to vinyl and digital turntablists. Of course, if you’re a digital DJ, I imagine you already have the control records you need, but — you still get those tasty donut slipmats. And it is a reminder (as if you needed one) that DJs are keeping the record format alive. Massive CD sales may have been the domain of the mass market, but vinyl demonstrates how powerful niches and the long tail can be.

J DILLA DONUT SHOP (SERATO/STONES THROW) 2 DISCS, 2 SLIPMATS & DILLA BEATS

What’s that? No space for turntables? (Believe me, I feel you.) How about a record whose sleeve becomes a DIY turntable, spun with a pencil?

That’s the idea of a direct mail piece created by sound design studio Griffiths, Gibson, and Ramsay Productions (GGRP). Originally intended just as an attention-getter for creative directors, the concept has caught the imagination of bloggers, and those who got them wanted extras for their kids. (It takes me back to all the strange, cheap, disposable records we were handed as kids during what was supposed to be the last days of vinyl.)

The basic apparatus works just like a conventional record player: spin the record (using a pencil in this case instead of a rotating turntable), and a needle transduces the sound (here, amplified by the cardboard housing). I really like the cover on the record, too.

Links:
GREY SPINS VINYL HITS FOR GGRP [Marketing Mag Canada, via GGRP's own excellent Making Noise blog]

And from one of my favorite design blogs, the eco-centered Inhabit:
Album Sleeve Transforms Into a Cardboard Record Player!

For their part, Inhabit notes the value of cardboard as construction material and the green-minded reuse of packaging.

It’s an idea that would be great fun to build upon. The only thing that’s missing, that I can see, is an easy DIY way of producing the records. (Lasercutter trick, maybe?) Adding a piezo element to amplify the signal could be a thought, too.

Another how-to on a handmade paper+needle configuration (suggested only for playing records you really don’t want to save), in a video on WonderHowTo (also via Inhabit):

And some more pics of the two designs mentioned here:

More software is speaking timecode, opening up control of digital sound to real, physical vinyl on turntables. The latest addition: Time TunnelXL is a pair of externals that decodes Native Instruments’ Traktor Scratch vinyl and scratches not only sound, but visuals or anything you can make in the open development environment Max.

Right now, it supports Max/MSP (and thus Max for Live) on the Mac, but support for Linux and Windows and the open-source Pure Data as well as Max are planned.

I’m actually hopeful a lot of these efforts can support Pd, too. Pd does some things more effectively than Max, just as Max does some things more effectively than Pd, and by supporting Linux, you can have a flexible computer rig running on an OS you can optimize and tune. It brings virtual vinyl full circle, too: the first commercial product ran on BeOS and Linux before Windows or Mac.

Of course, Max support and Max for Live can help DJs and turntablists invent their own live performance rigs in the Ableton environment, too.

Project site:
Time Tunnel XL @ komika.org

Ms. Pinky Revised from Mastah Lee on Vimeo.

What should DJing in Ableton Live look like? How could conventional vinyl cueing and scratching be integrated with the Live environment? Serato and Ableton gave us one possible answer to that question last week with The Bridge. Their solution: use your Serato DJ set normally, and simply sync the transport of Ableton Live when the two run simultaneously.

That solution could be ideal for some users, but it falls short of what many expected, which was the ability to scratch audio elements from Live as though they were on vinyl. Scratching Live clips would seem to be the best of both worlds: you get all the live sequencing features of Live, but you can still manipulate sound as you would on a turntable.

Enter Ms. Pinky. The vinyl control system has long been a highly-precise, solid-performing alternative to better-known names. Its ace in the hole has long been open control from your own custom patches, via an external object for the graphical programming language Max/MSP. The results have ranged from custom visual performance to a vibrating chaise lounge controlled by a turntable. With Max patches now able to interact more deeply with Live through Max for Live, that opens up the chance to build your own DJ-Ableton integration.

Ms. Pinky and Max for Live user Lee Goodrich has just done that. We saw an early version of the patch last month, but a new version irons vastly expands on the integration with Live, making this a truly complete solution for digital DJing.
Post on the patch with download
Information on the update

Some of the tasty features you get:

• Set Ms. Pinky to any track and use clips in that track
• Trigger a clip as you would normally, and it cues right into Ms. Pinky for scratching (see Lee in comments for more, but do note that the catch is that Ms Pinky actually loads the original file, because clips in Live don’t yet provide access to their playhead)
• Trigger different sequences of audio clips using a pattern contained in a MIDI clip (essentially automated cueing)
• Record clips using Live’s recording facility
• Scratch away with control vinyl

In relative mode, you can proceed directly to the beginning of the next clip without back-cueing.

The net result of all of this: Ms. Pinky acts like a scratch-anything device you can drop right into your existing Live set. With clever use of sampling and re-sampling, that opens up integration with any synths or external audio sources, not just audio clips.

Ironically, this is much closer to what I had predicted the Serato – Ableton collaboration would resemble.

Lee shares some comments about his experience:

I understand the concern people have about the one big caveat of Max For Live programming (You gotta pay to play, and no free runtime limits potential casual users), but honestly I think Max for Live is a slick enough product to overcome this. Making Max For Live patches has been the most fun programming I’ve ever had, and it is amazing how much you can do and how easy it is to do it. If other programmers are having as much fun as I am, then the bevy of awesome patches that come out of this product will end up being worth paying $300 at the door.

Perhaps the only other thing I’d like to say is that I’m not actually affiliated with Ms. Pinky at all, just another customer who wanted some functionality and due to the versatility of the software was able to extend it. So big thanks to Down Low Pinkstah and whoever else has worked on Ms. Pinky to make it so easily extensible.

Thanks, Lee! It’ll be interesting to see where else this may lead.

If you start using this in your sets, let us know – and get some photos / videos / mixes / whatever.

Oh, yeah, and I want to see a vibrating chaise lounge interface inside Ableton, too.

http://www.mspinky.com/

Live maker Ableton and DJ and virtual vinyl developer Serato today announced the results of their partnership. First off, this isn’t what many of us originally speculated: it’s not a DJ deck inside Live. Instead, the collaboration seeks to bridge (ahem) the gap between the way DJs perform and the way Live users perform. The result focuses on the way a performance set is assembled in the two paradigms, an attempt to guide the flow of music between the two programs. Here’s how it works.

Bring Serato “mixtapes” into Ableton Live: Save a DJ mix – called a “mix tape” – in a Serato product, and export it to Live, and what you get is all of your edits in a form that can be further manipulated in Live. Waveforms and automation data from your DJ session, however they’re manipulated and transcribed by the Serato software, appear in Live.

Put the Ableton Live Session View “inside” Serato: Here’s where things get in interesting. Rather than put Serato inside Live, we’re getting Live inside Serato – after a fashion. Ableton Live runs in the background. Integrated into the Serato interface (as seen at the screenshot at top) are all your Session View clips from your Live Set. Serato’s control – via audio input from vinyl or CDJs, or an ITCH control surface – manipulates the entire transport of the Live set.

Unknown: Turntablists are probably wondering, can they scratch Live? How much are those Live clips able to do? Do they behave as they do in Live? (As far as I know, yes – Live is, after all, running in the background and appears to have its normal capabilities.) I’ll work on these questions with Ableton and have an update by tomorrow.

ITCH: Yes, you can use controllers that support Serato’s ITCH, not just vinyl or CDJs, in order to control the transport of your imported Live set.

Pricing: Free. Own Serato Live/ITCH and Ableton Live (full version or Suite)? The Bridge costs you nothing. (Yes, this seems to be a departure from the arrangement from Max for Live.)

Availability: “No release date has been set yet.”

Naturally, all of this begs the question: do you really want to do this? And I expect that question is about to get turned over and inside out all over comments here on CDM and around the Web. It’ll naturally depend a lot on who you are.

Taking Serato sets into Live is clearly great for Serato users. It means you can get a head start on assembling an arrangement just by DJing, or alternatively, that you have the ability to use Live as a way of editing your Serato set. (Now, again, this appears to be a proprietary format – but that raises an interesting point. Ableton now uses an open XML format, meaning you could also presumably deconstruct this new Serato export and enable it to be used somewhere else, whether intended or not. But I digress.)

It’s the more ambitious reverse direction that’s both the most interesting and the most potentially controversial. After all, if you’re using Session View inside of Serato, why not just use Session View? Will it be more useful to put Live inside the virtual vinyl environment than the virtual vinyl inside Live? (If it turns out you favor the latter, you have other options – not least the recent evolution of Max for Live patches for Ms. Pinky. More on that in coming days.)

Side note: check out the VIDEO-SL integration. That makes this all even more interesting as an a/v, virtual vinyl environment; see our ongoing coverage of VIDEO-SL and other vinyl visualism for Create Digital Motion.

I’m not a turntablist, though, so I think the real question is what their take on this is. And kudos to Serato and Ableton for taking the gutsy route here as far as combining these products. We’ll get a closer look soon, and I’m curious to hear the reactions – however impassioned they may be. (On your mark … set … comment. Oh, boy.)

http://www.ableton.com/thebridge
http://www.serato.com/thebridge

It’s something we take for granted now, but not so long ago, the only way to scratch and cue records was with analog vinyl. Now, of course, simulating those behaviors using digital records on turntables connected to computers is commonplace. But that hasn’t stopped the question of who owns the technology from spawning legal disputes. Most recently, a suit brought by patent claimants N2IT against M-Audio was dismissed. You can read the history from the time N2IT, a two-person company, launched their first commercial digital DJing (for BeOS, no less) back in the late 90s.

In patents, “first” is everything. And while N2IT had the first commercial product, it seems that broadly speaking the concept of how to make digital DJing work was not exclusively theirs. Chris Bauer writes CDM to share documentation of his own working prototype in 1998, before N2IT shipped their product. Nor is he alone. N2IT hasn’t yet brought suit against digital DJ maker Serato, and Serato’s Steve West publicly demonstrated research at the University of Aukland which leads back to 1996, well ahead of N2IT’s own demos.

It’s well worth reading the whole article for the timeline, but the basic concept is this:

the system created the illusion that the music being heard was actually on the record. and any piece of digitised music could be ‘played’ using this one special record and the spacedeck prototype. the system was fairly crude, but was certainly a working proof-of-concept. you could also perform needle-drops, and very rudimentary scratches. both of these techniques are essential for djing with vinyl, as this is how djs cue and beat-match the records they play.
the main steps of development were as follows:
1. research timecode. it soon became evident that SMPTE timecode would probably be the easiest to work with.
2. burn CDR with SMPTE and write code to ‘listen’ to it and get the speed, direction and position of the code.
3. research and write code to manipulate the speed, direction and position of digital audio files. i used quicktime.
4. write code to playback an audio file according to the incoming timecode data
5. get acetate record (dubplate) with SMPTE timecode on it, test with the system and and fine-tune timecode reading routines
surprisingly, there were no major problems in development. this is probably due to the concept being very simple.

And while N2IT indisputably had the first commercially-available product, this could call their patent claim into question:

the granting of N2ITs patent/s is extremely contentious, as they failed to mention various pieces of ‘prior art’ in their original application, including my project/MA thesis, which they were aware of as early as 2001. patent applicants are obliged to disclose this type of information if they are aware of it.

Chris’ full article:
the spacedeck project 2009

It’s round, it’s mechanically-resistant, it’s tangible, it supports multi-touch and gestures. Yep – it’s the turntable, and outdoing it would mean reinventing the wheel, literally. And so it is that more than a few Ableton fans have wondered how they might work vinyl into their software axe of choice.

Ableton and digital vinyl vendor Serato have announced they’re doing “something,” and then announced at the beginning of October that an announcement would be announced on January 14, 2010 at NAMM. Oh, and they said it will “unleash your creativity,” which sounds good. (It’s better than, say, “Ableton and Serato’s creative partnership will unleash two dozen angry badgers,” or “if you own Ableton Live, what we will say in 2010 is that we will unleash an unspeakable, nameless evil, known only to the ancients, which shall bring about the endtimes.”)

Here’s the surprise – you likely won’t have to wait for Serato to get integrated digital vinyl control. It’s already working with Ms. Pinky, and that means more choice, more DIY possibilities, and a broader variety of ways to integrate turntables and Live.

You see, there’s this little thing called Max for Live, which allows the use of Max patches inside Live as seamless instruments and effects. And one of the best – if least-known – vinyl control systems out there has long featured Max integration: Ms. Pinky. People have already made use of VST plug-in integration, but because Max for Live also connects to the Live API for control of Live itself, the functionality of the two can be expanded.

Via our friend Luthier.Lab, we get a first look at the Ms. Pinky plug-in. And this should be just the beginning, as Ms. Pinky and its Max/MSP support could be a great construction kit for building your own solution – something that may not be possible with Serato.

Ms.PinkyforLive [Luthier.Lab - en Español]
Google Translate (which has some very funny ideas about how to translate Spanish)
Discussion on the Ms. Pinky forum

While you ponder the possibilities, it’s time for a video from Daito Manabe demonstrating that not all turntablists sound quite the same.