New set-up

I finally got around to upgrading my DJ set-up from a very tired cheap & nasty Behringer Mixer & Technics 1210′s to something a little more cutting edge.

I’ve been a longtime user of Final Scratch and really like the combination of digital DJ’ing but the tactile elements of vinyl so I decided to keep the technics 1210′s but went for a software upgrade. The mixer I bought has a built in ‘scratchamp’ equivalent which hooks up to Traktor Scratch Pro – the software is pretty much the same but the timecoded vinyl system has been much improved and crashes a lot less.

The mixer itself is a Korg Zero4 which has firewire interface, midi controller and 4 channels. It does a good job of replacing my mixer and scratch amp whilst also offering a whole bunch of features like effects on a per channel basis which can then be sent through to the master and another layer of FX applied there if you want. Initial feedback is that its a pretty solid mixer and the illumination also looks pretty cool.

If I ever get around to playing out then CDJ’s seem to be the industry standard at the moment so I invested in a couple of CDJ-1000′s and stands so that I can get the whole rig into a fairly compact space. The final aspect was to upgrade the speakers to active-powered Behringer Truths which are pretty punchy for the price. Quality isn’t the best but I’m not the most demanding audiophile….yet

Also added a lap-top stand to make it much easier to intergrate Traktor into my line of sight. Its actually a pretty versatile set-up now, I can either do full digital DJ’ing using the mixer as a MIDI controller only or can go completely old school and move back to Vinyl or can use CDJ/Vinyl as timecodes to manipulate tracks in Traktor Scratch Pro.

I still have the old scratch amp which makes a pretty decent external soundcard and is the only thing I need to hook-up to the mixer so I can record sets which will hopefully be pretty soon!

Pics below:

My completed Set-up!

Korg Zero 4

Dj Set-UP

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The great firewall of china??

I recently was mildly concerned to find that in one month I’ve served in the region of 50GB of traffic from this site….. Now I host my own podcasts so thats obviously going to account for a lot of traffic (I’m looking at moving the podcasts off to a free hosting solution). But more worrying was that a single IP address seems to have been responsible for downloading 6GB for the month of March (202.108.43.220). A whois lookup reveals that this IP address orginates in China. A grep of my access logs shows that they kept downloading the same mp3 from the site which accounts for the traffic. My question is this… Is this a DoS attempt or is this some sort of traffic aggregator/proxy that all chinese traffic is routed through? I’m not sure if I should be blocking this with iptables or whether that would actually be detrimental to chinese users (who apparently are big fans of the trance mix I did a while ago?!)

Anyway – perhaps I’ll just shift the enclosures over to a free hosting supplier and let them worry about it. I need the bandwidth back and having looked into the cost of renting some webspace rather than using my home broadband connection I’ve decided its too expensive.

I’ve also introduced robots.txt after discovering that for the month of march Google, Yahoo & MSN are responsible for nearly 7GB of upload bandwidth… 7GB!!! – a quick search through the logs indicates that they are not pulling mp3s down but they do seem to have an appetite for the m4as (enhanced podcasts)….

Conclusion: Move the enclosures to seperate hosting, update robots.txt, possibly update iptables to band china(?) and I should hopefully get back a lot of lost bandwidth without having to incur the cost of dedicated hosting.

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DJ’ing on Final Scratch

I’m probably going to be taking a turn behind the decks at a friends house party this year. I’m quite looking forward to it but the main problem with playing outside of your ‘bedroom’ is that when using final scratch you run the risk of having to play around with phono/audio cabling between the decks and the mixer. This is not a problem if you’ve got some time to sort it out beforehand and there are enough channels on the mixer…. the big problem appears if you turn up half way through the party and then have to try and do this reconfiguration during someone’s set. As you can imagine you’re not going to be too popular if you mess something up and end up with a) silence or b) feedback from the speakers.
The one big advantage of final scratch however is that its so much easier to carry all your tunes around. My entire ‘record box’ fits on my laptop, I have to carry the scratchamp, a firewire card and a few power cables around. The only two records I ever need are the two timecoded bits of vinyl that you use to control the mp3′s via turntables. All my DJ setup fits in a single record bag – no carrying around 200kg of vinyl for me!

The other neat thing is that using Traktor as the interface between the turntables and the laptop is the ability to search and control your records so much easier. You’re playing at around 130 bpm, no problem just sort by bpm and pick a tune! Final scratch offers a great way to get all the advantages of digital DJ’ing coupled with the traditionalist approach of using decks. It so much nicer to use turntables than CDJ’s or a pure laptop solution, you get much better feedback via 1210′s than you do from other mediums and it still looks cool if you’re using decks

Of course the only downside is that you’re relying on a computer and if it crashes…….well enjoy the sound of silence!!

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Getting wireless working on Ubuntu 6.06

Well that was harder than I thought…. but finally have got my wireless card working on Ubuntu. I thought I’d share the steps here just in case anyone else has problems. My wireless card is a Edimax EW-7108PCg which I purchased from dabs.com. According to the ubuntu forums this is a rt2500 chipset whch is pretty well supported. That was my first mistake…. after a few hours I decided to check the chipset was actually rt2500 and it turns out that Edimax have changed the chipset for my card and its actually rt61 based.

To find this out: run ‘lshw’ from a terminal and you’ll see something like this:

configuration: broadcast=yes ip=192.168.1.70 multicast=yes wireless=RT61 Wireless

so having determined that the rt500 instructions were irrelevant I set about following a new set of instructions. This got me 90% of the way there, I had huge problems getting WPA to work with DHCP, when I had no encryption on the AP then no problems, as soon as I enabled WPA I could not get a DHCP lease from the router.

In the end I downloaded the latest tarball from serial monkey, compiled them, copied them to the relevant locations and tried again. Editing the rt61 .dat file has no effect whatsoever so don’t bother doing it! I found that a combination of the iwconfig and iwpriv commands got me there in the end.

Heres my script for bringing up the wireless interface (don’t ask me why I need to set the SSID twice, it just seems to work that way…)

#!/bin/bash
echo "Bringing up ra0.."
ifconfig ra0 up
# WPA STUF
iwconfig ra0 mode managed
iwpriv ra0 set AuthMode=WPAPSK
iwpriv ra0 set EncrypType=TKIP
iwconfig ra0 essid "XXXXX"
iwpriv ra0 set WPAPSK="XXXX"
iwconfig ra0 essid "XXXX"dhclient ra0

So finally I can switch away from a windows XP desktop – so far I’ve been very impressed with Ubuntu, although found it slightly irritating that it won’t play mp3s out-of-the-box due to licencsing issues. Not too hard to solve, update the apt sources with the ‘dodgy’ set of packages available and then just install gstreamer to get it working. Also worth checking out is Automatix which makes the whole process of updating software (especially audio/video) codecs much easier.

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Why Windows XP sucks

I’ve had enough…. I’m sick of reinstalling windows xp once every 8 months because it decides to slow down to the point its unusable…. God forbid that I should actually want to install applications on top of an OS – apparently if I just installed out of the box and left it alone then I’d never have these sorts of issues. What grates even more is that many of the apps that slow Windows down are written by Microsoft! The one company you’d assume would know enough about their own bloody OS to be able to avoid killing it.

Anyway – as I said, I’ve had enough and I’m going to switch to Linux. I’ve had linux on my desktop before but had a lot of issues with getting sound cards and wireless WPA to work so in the end I gave in, hung my head in shame and slotted in the XP install CD (again). This time I’m going to give Ubuntu a try – it looks pretty slick, comes on a single CD and apparently works very well with a lot of hardware. It might even run quicker on my now aging IBM thinkpad… (time to buy one of those new macbook thingies soon I think!)

I guess I better make the laptop dual boot just in case I have to switch back to sucky Microsoft. Have you seen ie7 yet?? Horrible…. another victory for firefox.

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