The Sorry State of Laptop DJing

I have a laptop. I’m a DJ. And last I checked, the Digital Age was in high gear (or rather, no gears; it’s digital). So you’d think that a brother could do a DJ night without lugging around heavy turntables, delicate and bulky vinyl, and other cumbersome relics of the analog world. Well, you’d think wrong.

There are pretty much two ways to DJ digitally, and they both come down to how you control your sound. DJs have favored vinyl through the advents of tape and CDs because you simply can’t “get your hands on the music” with any other media. Even the best current attempts at CD turntables fall short of vinyl and a good pair of turntables. With this in mind, the first attempt at sound control uses the time-tested physical interface that DJs have relied on since the 1970s.

Stanton’s FinalScratch is a hardware device that sits between your turntables and your laptop, mapping the audio from your computer to special records. You then mix, skratch, and tweak the sound as you would with regular vinyl. This is obviously a great solution for those who have already invested in turntables, or want to blend digital audio with their existing sets. But such flexibility comes at the steep price of $500, and at least $16 per replacement “digital record,” which apparently wear out faster than acetate dub plates. Moreover, Final Scratch, at present time, runs only on Intel-based Linux systems. The package itself comes with a stripped-down Linux distribution, but the software can be run on any distribution with some serious tweaking. While Linux offers a degree of stability, I count its use in this product as a negative, as most professional musicians use Macs for their superior stability, ease of use, and multimedia performance. I have contacted Stanton about this matter, and they claim a Mac OS X-compatible Final Scratch is due in roughly February 2003, but I’m not holding my breath.

That brings us to the other method of digital DJing – strictly software. There are more programs out there that claim to be “MP3 DJ” tools than you can shake an iBook at, but most of them are little more than two MP3 players with a crossfader slapped between them. The only worthwhile exception is Native Instrument’s Traktor DJ Studio, which just saw a version 2.0 release for Mac OS X and Windows. This software offers superb playback, an elegant interface, and bonus features like customizable filters, looping, multiple cue points, accurate beat detection, and more. It seems like the perfect solution – until you try to control more than one element at once. Suddenly, your mouse is utterly inadequate and you’re unable to do the things an effective DJ does – tweak the EQ, crossfade quickly, and so forth. We’re back to needing a hardware interface. And it gets worse: whereas Traktor version 1 could happily preview (cue) the next track to your headphones through a second soundcard, Traktor 2 mandates the use of multichannel soundcard. So figure that you’re paying $200 for the software itself, probably $300 for a decent external multichannel soundcard, and at least $100 for a USB MIDI controller (basically a bank of physical knobs that you map to the knobs on the screen; and no, there really isn’t a good one for DJ use). We’re talking $600 for a setup that’s no more portable than Final Scratch, and is potentially far more awkard depending on the quality of your MIDI controller. Yuk.

Clearly, neither of these two options are ideal. Final Scratch offers more for your money if you already have turntables (as I do). But those truly 21st Century DJs who want to keep it strictly digital will sacrifice both cash and flexibility with a Traktor setup. In my perfect world, someone would design an external USB device that offered a bank of assignable knobs and faders positioned in a DJ-friendly layout along with all the audio channels to make Traktor happy: a set of RCA outputs for the main mix and a 1/4" jack for your headphones. I’ve written Midiman about just such a device, and recieved a polite but less-than-enthusiastic response. Until equipment manufacturers wise up (and listen to me, heh ^_^), it’s a grim world for the digital DJ. Here’s to better things.