Ghetto-Fabulous Digital Vinyl: Make a Mouse Into a Turntable
Scratching with a mouse just doesn’t feel right. One solution, as in FinalScratch and other products, is to print timecode onto the vinyl. But then there’s the direct approach: strap that mouse right onto your turntable and hit the club!
That’s just what the DIY-oriented community of users of terminatorX have done. terminatorX is a fully open-source scratch synth on Linux, with support for files like OGG, MP3, and WAV, and even (recently) Linux’s open stereo plug-in format, LADSPA. terminatorX lacks fancy features like support for timecode-printed vinyl, so users take a more literal approach to melding mouse and turntable.
Practical? Well, not especially. But fun? Heck, yeah. (Added benefit: a couple of these are far lighter and smaller than a real turntable.)
Necessity is definitely the mother of invention:
- Some of the projects use a series of belts to connect rotation mechanically to the mouse apparatus
- Toqer worked with a DIY optical sensor apparatus; several of these use optical sensors on the mice to keep from touching the records (thus making these even kinder to records than an actual cartridge would be)
- A number of projects feature full-blown motors and entirely-concealed mice
- Adam King built an entire DIY turntable with a mouse connected inside the unit (pictured, top)
- My personal favorite, Fernando S. Fabreti took the brute-force approach and put a mouse directly on the tone arm. (below) Insane. Brilliant.
More projects, photos, and links to specs and how-to instructions (I imagine you could do damage with ideas like this using other software, or even applications other than turntables):
This should also leave you more than typically safe from stepping on any N2IT/FinalScratch patents. Thank Douglas Englebart for this one.
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Digital vinyl systems like Serato Scratch LIVE and Native Instruments Traktor Scratch are designed for DJs. Part of the whole advantage is that you get an integrated system with vinyl, decoding capability, audio interfacing with the computer, and software for DJ functions. If you want to take the turntable to other frontiers, you have to find a way to get the timecode data from the vinyl directly and do something different with it, like control an instrument or scratch visuals. (Only recently did a big-name, mainstream DVS, Serato, take on visuals, 










