I demoed Final Scratch at a local shop (Platinum in Portland, one of six retail dealers in the US, it's just three blocks from me) and thought the quality was really quite good.
As some might remember, I was skeptical of Tosh's contention that FS is the future of DJing. I'm still skeptical about that, but I do think it's a valuable addition. It would be very surprising to see even 20% of all DJs using it within, say, five years. That doesn't undermine the importance I think it will have. As a system, I'd say FS is a clever hack, a kluge, whatever you want to call it. In engineering terms, that is fairly high praise :) I view it as sort of a bridging or transitional technology, and the driving factors are the desirability of some life extension for turntable-based mixing and the high cost (both in dollars and weight and risk of loss or theft) of carrying around vinyl records. FS will help keep the fun in DJing by making it easier to have a wider selection readily available when you're playing out, by providing some new moves for the technical or tricks DJ, and maybe by helping bring good old tunes back in the mix and start putting some pressure in the market to improve the absolute flood of mediocre tracks out there now by showing how it *should* be done. What I mean is, it's going to have the side effect of getting people motivated to rip their really good old tracks, not just the famous ones that you could download from Napster in the day. This is incredibly important in preserving the first couple eras of house and techno, since the records are mostly sitting in boxes and DJ record bins and not hardly ever found in the stores. Given that the average run of a non-charting 12-inch dance single has always been 1000 or less, often much less, this is a big benefit as far as I'm concerned. For me, it solves a long-standing nagging dilemma. I bought a Denon dual-CD unit in 1994, pretty much lost interest in it right away and sold it within a year. Mixing off CDs is like driving blind, unless you know the records really well. And I'm not the kind of DJ who wants to play the same 30 tracks every time...! It's true that CD mixing technology has really come a long way, and there are some really good CD consoles now of course including the Pioneers. But the visual and electromechanical elements of turntable mixing can't be substituted. It's not that one is better than the other, it's that they are suited for really different purposes. What is *really* happening is that MP3 (with all its sundry technical and licensing shortcomings) is the great bridge between analog and digital recordings, and now there are devices oriented toward *both* sides of that divide that let you use your preferred method without giving up half your musical catalog, your favorite playback equipment and of course your astonishing DJ artistry ... ! phred --------------------------------------------------------------------- To unsubscribe, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] For additional commands, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
