Radio Show Again, Software Choices
When the semester starts up in (eep!) a matter of days I’ll be back to doing a radio show at UMBC’s on-campus station, WMBC. Rather than just one night a week, however, I’ll be polluting the airwaves twice a week: 8-9PM on Tuesdays and 7-8PM on Thursday. Tuesday will be reserved for genre explorations, as per my show last year, and Thursday will just be me playing whatever I’m feelin’. My show’s name is Selection 3, for pretty obvious reasons. And yeah, they have MP3 streams, so you’ve got no excuse but to listen. Expect an electronic bent, but not without occasional indie, post-punk, hip-hop, dub, and rap forays.
I’m trying to figure out what to spin the shows with. Thursdays I may just play tracks out of iTunes or off my iPod for simplicity and my sanity. But Tuesdays I would prefer to do “real” mixes, though obviously not on vinyl. The station has a rather beat-up DJ setup, but I have neither the wax collection nor any interest in keeping Final Scratch with its lousy library functions, expensive upgrades, and difficult set-up. However, I’m thinking of taking advantage of the DJ mixer and employing one of a couple other DJ software packages.
The software that Final Scratch was built off, Traktor DJ Studio 2, has improved quite a bit since I last looked at it. The 2.5 series is actually much improved over TraktorFS, which was overtaking its parent software in stability for some time. For whatever reason I find “pure” digital DJing a much more natural fit for my mixing style, and Traktor is the benchmark digital DJ application. Version 2.5 adds a host of neat features and interface improvements, but like TraktorFS its library could stand to be improved, but that too has improved from the pre-2.5 series.
Traktor now has the ability (finally!) to route output through multiple CoreAudio-supported audio interfaces. This feature alone makes the software seem worth paying for (at an academic discount, anyway). Rather than shelling out for the software and a bulky, expensive, crappy multichannel USB or Firewire audio interface you can just use a $40 Griffin iMic and the built-in headphone output on your laptop. Route those through a hardware DJ mixer and get mixin’. Keen. I intend to work the hell out of the demo before I put any of my ex-FinalScratch cash towards Traktor, as I’m wary of more Native Instruments nonsense, but I think 2.5 has improved the application enough to make it a solid buy.
I explored open source alternative DeKstasy last night as well, and while it’s come a long way from earlier versions I’ve tested, it has a long way yet to go. Most puzzling is the author’s decision to break the application up into panes, with only one pane visible at a time. This means, for example, that you can’t simultaneously view the progress of a playing track and your virtual mixer. While that isn’t a problem in the output scenario with a hardware mixer described above, it makes a entirely software set quite difficult. The program abounds with such odd separation of interface and functionality, such as separate panes for importing tracks (a time-consuming and cumbersome process) and organizing them into virtual crates. DeKstasy does offer AAC support, unlike Traktor, and is no slouch in the BPM matching department either. For the price of free one could learn to live with its eccentricities. Given the choice between it and Traktor, however, I have to overlook open code for features and performance and go with Traktor. Improvements down the road may change that verdict.
A final option, and one I’ve explored before, is using my beloved Ableton Live for an odd sort of DJing, half pre-prepared and half improvised. While I’ve read that Live can make a fine DJ tool, it has no MP3 support, and thus tracks must be converted to WAV or AIFF ahead of set-building time. This is hardly more cumbersome than DeKstasy’s awkward importing process, but a damn sight less spontaneous than Traktor’s ability to mix any MP3 you throw at it. Live as well requires a multichannel audio interface for pre-listening, making its use as a DJ tool an investment of both time and money.
The devil is in the details. Whatever software I decide to work with behind the scenes, rest assured that hype mixes are on the way.