Unanalog

The NAMM show opened its doors at Anaheim this morning. If you're a laptop DJ, you were in for a treat. This year, it seems the music industry finally realized there are a bunch of Traktor users out there looking for surface controllers, audio interfaces, time coded vinyls, and competition to Traktor. It's worth noting that back in October NI had announced they were dropping support for FinalScratch, so we knew they were up to something in that space, along with M-Audio which had already released Connectiv Vinyl. So here we go for a quick shopping list for "unanalog" DJs:

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• M-Audio: Torq Xponent (USB MIDI controller + MIDI interface + USB audio interface).
  
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• Vestax: VCI-100 (USB MIDI controller)
  
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• NI: Traktor Scratch (Traktor + time coded vinyl support + dedicated audio interface), Audio 8 DJ (USB audio interface with phono preamps).
  
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• Behringer: the BCD2000 has finally been updated to become the B-Control DEEJAY (MIDI controller + USB audio interface) with Windows/OSX support and ships now with Traktor LE at the behringersque price of 299USD.
  
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• Numark: Total Control (USB MIDI controller) which looks almost identical to the ION iCUE I saw at CES.
  
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I'm using RapidWeaver to author this site, and I was wondering whether it was at all possible to add specific code to all pages of the site. Why would you want to do that, one might ask. Well maybe you want to add javascript code to incorporate tracking statistics, or use snap.com for page previews. RapidWeaver has limited code editing capabilities: it either lets you author a page from scratch in HTML, or you can use the Page Inspector (Window > Page Inspector), with which you can edit the page prefix, add custom CSS styles, or custom javascript code that will end up in the header.
If those options are not enough, all is not lost. Here's what to do:

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2. Create your own theme: if you make any mistake, you don't want to alter the themes that ship with RapidWeaver, so make your own. So click the Toggle Themes View button (left of the Publish button on the lower right of the window), right-click on your current theme and select Duplicate Theme.
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4. Select this new theme and right-click again to select Show Contents. This will open in the Finder the location where RapidWeaver stores all the files that make up your new theme. The file we want to edit is index.html, it is the template RapidWeaver uses for all your site pages. Open it in your favorite text editor and make the required changes. In my case I added the javascript code at the start of the body section for statcounter to track this site's page stats.
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6. Save the file, look in the Code view of RapidWeaver to double-check your changes were incorporated at the right place, save and publish your changes.
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That's it, you are now an official RapidWeaver power user.

So I'm walking down the aisles of the central hall in the Las Vegas convention center for CES 2007, and I stumble upon the Numark/ION booth. I see speakers, MIDI controllers, people playing keyboards and drums, seems like a fun booth, especially after countless displays of wireless chips and iPod accessories. Let's see what else they have. Cool, they have the iCUE, a new DJ controller! It looks a lot better than M-Audio's X-Session Pro, with blue and red backlighting (one color for each deck). On the booth, it's connected to a desktop Windows PC but nothing seems to work. Fair enough, maybe they don't want people to mess with the settings. On the screen is the Numark DJ app that uses the same color cues as the interface, nice. A quick look at the facts sheet tells me it only runs on Windows. Bummer, I really wanted one... but wait, what's that picture on the top of the booth? An iCue, connected to a Powerbook 12"!!! So it's not using BootCamp or Parallels, it must be OS X. I ask the first person I see that seems to be in charge of that booth section: "Can the controller and software work on both Windows and OS X?". I can tell by the way the guy looks at me that a/ he didn't understand the question at all, and b/ he's going to BS me big time. "Uhhh, well you can turn the knobs to change the way you scratch the music" he says. "Sorry Sir, I meant: can it run on a Windows PC and an Apple computer?" I fire back. "Oh, yes it uses MP3s, and what you play on your computer". I was speechless! Why couldn't he just say "Shhh, I have no idea what you're talking about, but let's keep that between you and me, I have a family to feed", or "I don't know, but let me ask someone who is more familiar with this product line". Hopeless...
If you go on the ION website, you'll get the same confusing message: Powerbook picture with "DirectX compatible soundcard" requirements. Come on ION, there are cool looking non-Apple laptops out there! UseSony Vaios, or a UMPC, but don't confuse your audience! If you want sexy laptops, port your stuff to sexy laptops. Ni's doing it, M-Audio's doing it, why can't you?
CreateDigitalMotion (a great blog BTW) has a good coverage of the Numark VJ'ing solution, whose controller seems awfully similar to the iCue, and they mention cross-platform support. Let's hope the same will materialize at NAMM for the iCue. I'll definitely keep an eye open for USB DJ solutions at the next NAMM, it seems companies are finally taking notice of this market opportunity. CreateDigitalMusic (another great blog) has already posted some really interesting infos about upcoming NI and M-Audio products.

A number of alternatives to the good ol' Google search interface are starting to create some buzz. I've started to play with two of them that offer pretty interesting features.
The first is Snap.com. You may have heard of Snap not for its search engine, but rather for its website enhancement that's pretty clever. With a tiny bit of Javascript magic (relying on the defer command), leaving your mouse over a link will display a snapshot of the link content. Snap is currently caching an impressive number of website snapshots and is supposedly increasing its coverage at lightspeed. Besides this feature, Snap is also a regular search engine that will display your query results on the left side of the screen, and a snapshot of each result you click on in the other half of the screen.
On Snap, the image search follows the same model. But this time it uses a Flash interface to incrementally display the images that have been found, and display the one you've clicked on on the right side, along with the image URL and size. It's quite nice to see the page getting populated by the pictures, and the preview size is quite large.
Next up is searchmash.com. A number of sites are reporting this is Google experimenting with a new search interface. I read this online, so it must be true. A few random tests I've made have given me the same results between Searchmash and Google, so it could really be true, unless this is a good service mashup. Anyway, the cool feature is that this engine packs on the same page traditional search results plus image results, blogs, videos, and wikipedia entries. On top of that, you can directly preview the videos inside that same page (Google videos only, wink wink...). Proof that this is an experimental site, a feedback section asks you whether the results for each category were useful to you.
While I can't give you any metrics as to the quality of the links that were found, I can comment about how the result were displayed. It seems Snap wins for the most stylish layout, albeit with a slower display, especially for the picture display (first the Flash plugin needs to be loaded, then the images are displayed as they are downloaded). Searchmash definitely gives you a pretty complete overview of all aspects of your search, even though the first have to expand all the search result sections before they are displayed. I did a few searches and counted how many results were displayed, here's what I got:
Text search (in number of links per screen): Google: 11, Snap: 15, Searchmash: 11.
Image search (in number of links per screen): Google: 20, Snap: 18, Searchmash: 6.
All searches were performed on a 1200 pixel high screen, in Safari, with tab display activated.
So after this test, am I still a Google fan? Yep! It seems to fully take advantage of Snap, you'll have to do a lot of clicking to see the site previews, which I don't believe is quite necessary since I'm quite fond of tabbed browsing, and I'll quite likely use that instead. The cool thing about searchmash is that it lets me directly access results that would have otherwise required me to go to specific sites for the search (videos + wikipedia), and the blog search is quite useful too. Let me know what you think.