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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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.

Popular amongst game programmers, OpenAL provides interactive positional 3D audio on the Mac, as well as Linux, Windows (to name a few OSs) and is natively supported in OSX since Tiger. Not all Mac games use OpenAL as their audio library, but a good number of flagship titles such as Call Of Duty 2 or Unreal Tournament rely on OpenAL for their game audio.
The OpenAL renderer is the piece of OS software that gets directives from the game engine such as "play this sound at this 3D coordinate", or "the listener is now at that 3D coordinate", and computes the sound stream that you will listen to on your speakers. In order to do the best job possible, the OpenAL renderer needs to know what your speaker setup is. Do you have just two speakers? Or do you have a 5.1 speaker system? 6.1? 7.1? You want the renderer to take full advantage of all your speakers so you can enjoy the most accurate spatial recreation of the game soundscape. Depending on the audio output device you use, you need to tell OSX how many speakers you use, whether it's your laptop speakers, a Creative Xmod, or a Griffin FireWave.
Unfortunately, you cannot use System Preferences to take care of that. Instead you need to launch Audio MIDI Setup located in Applications > Utiities. For instance to properly configure an Xmod, in the drop-down list "Properties for", select "Creative Xmod". Click "Configure Speakers". Select "Multichannel" then "5.1 Surround.
Note that clicking on each speaker label will play white noise in that speaker. Use it to test you are getting "surround sound".
Now go and test that Call Of Duty 2 (or any OpenAL title for that matter) and enjoy the difference this makes.

Disclaimer: my current employer is Creative Labs, which is an active supporter of OpenAL, and I have been involved in the release of OpenAL on Windows. Oh, and I'm an active supporter of OpenAL too!