As most people reading this will already know, I write for DJ Times magazine, primarily tech reviews, with the occasional feature article here and there, and it was my work with the magazine that brought me to the show. I spent Thursday and Friday nearly jogging around the show floor, meeting with various manufacturers of DJ goodies, from controllers to sound reinforcement to production stuff to lighting. Today (Saturday) I was able to “relax” and stroll the floor with few appointments (albeit with a bigger crowd; it was impossible to get around).

There was a lot of new stuff introduced, and manufacturers were showing-off a wide range of interesting products that will be coming in the months ahead. I’m looking forward to taking a look at many of those products in the months ahead, and you can read all about it on the pages of the magazine.

I was left with the impression that every company under the sun now makes headphones. Headphones that swivel. Headphones that don’t. Headphones with detachable cords. Headphones that fold. Headphones with integrated EQ control. Headphones in rainbow colors. Headphones with sleek designs. Headphones with cobranding. Given the margins in headphones, I’m sure it’s an attractive thing to want to do, but I’m not sure the market can support 2,736 different models of headphones, even if many are indeed quite good.

I do a lot of reviews in the DJ controller space, and there were a lot of those, too, although not many that were new at the show. I have reviews in the pipeline for the magazine on some of them, with more to come in the months ahead — some of which I’m actually pretty stoked about to be honest.

There were several things I thought were particularly interesting. A few of them:

• Fusion Bags out of the UK have some exceptionally cool DJ gig bags for digital guys like me. With the wide range of controllers on the market, it’s tough to make appropriate bags, and frankly I’ve never found anything that works well for me, so I end-up with several separate bags for my gear which is rather a pain in the butt. Their current line is pretty cool, and they have some new product hitting later this year that’s particularly innovative.
• iConnectivity out of chilly Calgary makes a crazy cool little box called the iConnectMIDI. I’ll be giving this a hands-on for the magazine soon, but think of it as a universal MIDI hub. Plug 5-pin DIN MIDI devices in. Plug USB MIDI devices in. Hook it to your computer. Hook it to your iOS device (like an iPad). And everything gets all happy-happy with MIDI deliciousness. One of those “doh!” devices you wonder why nobody thought of before.
• Nothing related to DJ stuff, but Peavey will have a new electric guitar on the market in a couple of months called the AT-200. Claiming to have Antares Auto-Tune technology on-board, it is basically an self-tuning guitar with automated intonation improvements. Now, I play acoustic, but this thing was cool enough that I’m sorely tempted to pick-up electric guitar just because. MAP is $499. Not only does it tune itself, but you can set alternate tunings, like Double Drop D, in seconds. I can’t imagine these babies won’t just fly off shelves in quantity.
• While it’s not a new product, it’s the first time I’ve heard of or seen the JBL MSC1. Honestly, I gotta have it. Simply put, it’s a tool to tune studio monitors to the characteristics of a room. So much music production, especially in the electronica realm, happens where it can. In my case, it’s a basement office with poor acoustics and high reflectivity. I struggle constantly with the low-end in my mixes; virtually every project has ear-tiring low-end problems that I’ve not understood, let alone been able to fix. But a big piece of the problem is an inability to tune my monitors properly. I am, after all, not a sound engineer by trade. The MSC1 is designed to address this sort of thing, and it works with any brand of monitors. Plug the monitors into the box, including your sub, hook-up the included mic, press a button, and the environment is evaluated automatically. The unit then shapes the audio feeding the monitors accordingly, essentially adjusting the monitoring system to the room. Amazing. The device itself provides some other niceties for studio work. Definitely on my radar, and it might well be the answer to a long-standing problem.

Anyway, time to get a shower, get some sleep, and get back home. And then lust after the opportunity to look at these and many other NAMM-discovered goodies in more detail soon. What a show… Can’t wait ’til next year.  ;-)

One of the things I wish I was there to hear first-hand is Party in a Box, a new toy from SOUL Electronics:

SOUL's Party in a Box

If you looked at the picture and got the impression it’s an iPad dock, you’re on the right track. iPod/iPhone docks are a dime a dozen (yeah, yeah, some sound better than others of course). But this is the first iPad dock-like system I’ve seen. But to boot, it’s got an 8-speaker sound system that the company says is stunning and room-filling. Add-in AirPlay support, Bluetooth support, the ability to essentially “network” multiple units together world AC power, rechargeable batteries, and 12V DC power support, and this thing’s made for parties on the go. There’s even a mic jack to make the system act like a PA system.

No word yet on price point, but if looks and specs are any indication, this might well be one of the coolest iOS platform devices to hit in awhile… Not to mention being the ultimate party-on-the-go platform.

Now if I could just hitch a quick ride to Vegas, and sweet-talk my way in the door so I can hear this beast first-hand…

The magazine also offers coverage of production and remixing, and I was recently tasked with reviewing Native Instruments‘ new software synthesizer and effects bundle, Komplete 8, which arrived the other day.

So far, all I can say is, “Awesome!” With all of NI’s flagship platforms (Guitar Rig, Kontakt and Reaktor), as well as all the key standalone synths (Absynth, FM8, Battery, etc.), Komplete covers an incredible amount of territory, especially given that there’s 80 Gig (compressed) of presets, samples and other content to go along with the 5 Gig or so worth of software—all of which is delivered in a “book” of 12 DVD-ROMs.

I’ve not spent much time with Komplete just yet; mostly it’s been trying out the various synths standalone to get a feel for how they’re put together and what sorts of sounds they produce. I’ve used NI’s Absynth for well over a year now, and I’ve dabbled with some other NI products, including Retro Machines (which was recently updated to a “MkII” version, and moved from the older Kore platform into Kontakt), so I have some sense of the quality and approach NI takes.

Over the course of the next month, I’ll be using the tools in Komplete 8 in a couple of remix projects that are on my plate—the perfect vehicles for truly digging into all of it. I plan to use everything in the bundle in some way across these projects, and will be giving a full run-down on the pages of DJ Times afterward.

Based on my initial playing around, as expected, there are some incredible sound-making capabilities in Komplete… Just digging into Kontakt is like being a kid in a candy store of sound, but I was perhaps most taken so far with FM8, NI’s (obviously) FM synthesis offering; for me anyway, there’s just a freshness and vibrancy of sound there that I found inspiring, and I can’t wait to run with it a bit farther. Massive is another one of the products in the bundle that stood out as being pretty darned impressive; in short, it lives-up to its name.

Look for my complete review in DJ Times soon.

For those who are blissfully unaware, Spotify is a new streaming music service. They boast of having “all the world’s music” in their catalog* available for listening anytime, anywhere. Want to relive your youth to that Aldo Nova track you’ve not heard since back in the day? Search for “Aldo Nova,” and bathe in the ability to queue-up any of his releases on-demand. With a paid subscription, you gain the ability to load-up your mobile device with a bunch of music, and enjoy it on-the-go without the need for a data connection. It sounds like nirvana for most music lovers, and indeed, the service has been wildly successful in its home country of Europe. (Read more on their web site if you’re still confused.)

So what are the ups and downs?

• There are serious holes. *In other words, it’s not “all the world’s music” by any stretch of the imagination. The service does have most of the material offered by the major labels, and a shocking amount of indie material; pretty much any independent release that has used an aggregator (such as Tunecore, IODA, CD Baby, etc.) to release their material to retail. That’s a crapload of music by any measure.But for dance music lovers like me, more of my favorite artists and producers are missing than are represented based on the searches I’ve conducted. Much dance music is either unreleased, is indie, or is import, and Spotify can’t do much with music that’s only been offered to DJs and not made available to the pubic.

  As for imports, this has been the bane of many a music lover since the dawn of the Internet drove awareness of what we’re missing out on. Like retail, Spotify is beholden to territorial issues revolving around copyright and the way that many labels choose to release music. Most European labels prefer to license tracks to a US label to release here (it works the other way too), vs. selling the material directly worldwide. If no US label bites, it’s not available here (except, perhaps, to DJs). None of this sort of content is on Spotify, nor is anything to speak of in foreign language. I’m a fan of several Dutch recording artists, none of it’s released here (most Americans have no interest in Dutch-language music), and consequently, none of it (or very little) is on Spotify.

• On the up side, back in the days of the original Napster and original Audiogalaxy, I had enormous amounts of fun with “music discovery.” Rediscovering long-forgotten artists and tracks, and discovering literally dozens, if not hundreds of artists I’d never heard of to begin with. Spotify brings back this process of musical discovery. When you find an artist you’re looking for, Spotify shows “similar artists,” whose music you can then listen to in full. (There’s also social media integration to help this along.) And when looking for certain singles to listen to, I’ve found albums I didn’t know existed. It’s been amazing hearing fresh new-to-me-yet-quite-old music again, resurrecting the real joy (for me) of Napster back in the day.Related to this point, Spotify has already resulted in my buying a ton of music on iTunes. I can’t remember when I last bought albums; it’s been years. And here I am, finding new/old albums on Spotify, and going and buying them. I love it. Many users will simply pay for Spotify and listen as much as they want without buying; I prefer not being tied to any specific platform, or the need to keep paying for the service indefinitely to enjoy specific music.
• On the down side, it just doesn’t work that well. Spotify utilizes a peer-to-peer underlying infrastructure, and like any peer-to-peer, it works and it doesn’t. Most things play immediately, yes. Many don’t seem to actually play at all, seemingly mostly more obscure tracks. Strangely, some of the in-stream advertising spots don’t play either, and you cannot bypass them and play something else when they don’t. The Spotify client very frequently just sits there, playing nothing, until I exit and restart the application, at which point my play queue is gone. For a service that’s accepting paying customers, and which has been running in Europe for years now, you’d think that the kinks would already have been worked-out. They haven’t been, and I’d be reluctant to pay for a service that frequently just stops working.
• Much has been said in music industry press about Spotify’s low rate of payment to record labels for the right to stream the tracks. It’s based on a revenue share model, and we’re ostensibly talking about fractions of pennies per play. The major labels eventually caved, but many independents are bemoaning Spotify and accusing it of aiding and abetting the killing of what’s left of the music business.With all due respect, I disagree. Piracy has already decimated the music business. Piracy pays zero. Spotify pays something, even if it’s only a little. Spotify pretty much removes the motivation to pirate material… If you can listen to anything, anywhere, anytime, why do you need to download a copy, or record the Spotify audio stream? It’s just a bunch of needless hassle. Of course, there will always be piracy, but personally, I’d rather have the possibility of some stream revenue, and what’s left of retail, than to have only what’s left of retail (which is dwindling by the day).

  The truth is, success is the music business is elusive, and it always has been. Few have true breakthrough success, and that’s not any different today than it was 2 or 3 decades ago. What’s changed is that the barriers to entry have been removed, and most musicians seem to have an inflated sense of self-importance and relevance, believing they deserve to succeed where others apparently don’t. Like anything else, you have to work (hard) for it, and Spotify changes nothing about that dynamic other than affording many more people the opportunity to discover you. It’s still up to you to stand out and get noticed.

The music industry seems in most ways to be on its last legs. Is Spotify—or some other service along the same lines—the savior? Or merely the shadow of death in a new cloak? I certainly have no idea.

What I do know is that for me, even with its problems, even with its massive catalog holes, Spotify is a very cool service indeed to discover music I’ve not come across before, and an opportunity to hear that music, in-full, multiple times if needed, to assess its merits before laying down money buying an album with one or two good tracks. It’s like iTunes with full-length samples instead of stupid 30 or 90 second ones.

Will I sign-up for the paid version and carry my tunes around on my iPhone too? Not sure yet. But I’m intrigued…

When the online digital music store Masterbeat launched a few years ago, ostensibly as an alternative to Beatport (whose owners seem to think Apple’s corporate behavior is something to be emulated), I was ecstatic. With a user experience much like that of Beatport, I was rather enamored of the “renegade alternative” that Masterbeat represented.

Unfortunately, Masterbeat launched as—and still is—a Flash-only web site. No Flash? Masterbeat basically says, “F___ you. Store’s closed, loser.”

I was never much of a fan of Flash-only web sites, long before Apple in their “wisdom” barred Flash content from their iOS devices. Flash has a place, but to build Flash content (or whole sites) with no rollback whatever is just plain stupid, and it’s getting stupider by the day. And say what you want about Apple’s Flash decisions vis-à-vis iOS—right, wrong or otherwise—the simple fact is that iOS represents millions upon millions of users, and you can lock each and every one of them out at your own peril.

Beatport is Flash-based too, but they do have a rollback (at least for mobile users) that presents a usable interface for iOS (and other) users. Masterbeat, on the other hand, displays this:

The problem is, what started all of this on this particular morning is that a fan asked me where to get a copy of my remix for You I Need‘s song, Waiting. The track is exclusive to Masterbeat at this time. Here’s how things unfolded in attempting to tell this fan where to buy the track:

• I went to Masterbeat, which will not load on the PC I’m writing from. It hangs on “Loading UI” and won’t go past it. It’s been that way for months, and I have no idea why it doesn’t work. Fail #1. (And yes, I’ve checked the Flash is current on this machine, etc.)
• I used my iOS device to browse to Masterbeat. That resulted in the screen above. Fail #2.
• I went to another PC in my office, and successfully got to Masterbeat. I found my remix. But can you just copy the URL from the address bar of the web browser? Of course not, because the site is Flash-only, the URL only gets you to the home page. Fail #3.
• At the bottom of each Masterbeat page is a rather industry-standard widget to post to social media and whatever else. I don’t want to post the track, I want to link to the track. Is there a way to do that? No. Fail #4.
• I then decided to try and use the share-by-e-mail function and just e-mail myself a freakin’ link to the remix. I entered all the information, and got instead some sort of error message that their system can’t e-mail the link. I tried it twice, and it failed both times, so what the heck? Fail #5 and #6.

In the end I gave-up. I had an artist link from an earlier attempt at this, and I just gave the fan that link, and told them how to find my track.

In any case, it shouldn’t take me half an hour to figure out how to link to a specific release on any digital music store, only to have it fail, and fail, and fail, and fail. It would have made more financial sense for me to just send the guy a free copy of the track instead of burning-up about $50 worth of my time trying to sell him one for a buck and half, and if the rights in the track were solely mine, I would have.

I’m no Apple fanboy, but no wonder iTunes has, and continues to win this battle. Every. Single. Day.

My Axiom 25

This morning, I came into my studio to find my trusty Axiom 25 keyboard/controller lying face down on the floor, the USB cable still plugged-in, and unfortunately, the USB connector on the back panel bent at a nice angle. For months now, I’ve been setting it on a music stand, because it’s a perfect fit, and I can angle the deck how I like it. I have no idea how or why, but apparently it became loose, and with my DJ headphones resting on top, it must have slowly twisted back overnight resulting in the back-flip to the floor.

After breakfast, I turned-on my studio PC to find that while the unit powered-up, it wasn’t generating MIDI anymore. Lovely. While I’d love to replace my old Axiom 25 with the newer version, or perhaps even upgrade to the Pro version with its great additional features, it just isn’t in-budget right now. So being the propellerhead that I am, I fetched a screwdriver to open the Axiom and investigate.

USB connector with missing leads

As expected, the USB connector is surface mounted to a circuit board inside. So I disconnected all the ribbon cables, marking each one and where it went, removed the circuit board, threw it on my workbench, and decided I couldn’t make the situation any worse by wielding a soldering iron and some desoldering braid. After removing the USB connector, I discovered that two of the four leads were severed in the “incident.” The next step was to see if I had some piece of USB hardware I could sacrifice for a repair. An old external hard disk housing rose to the occasion. I popped it open next, desoldered its USB connector. Not really surprisingly, it was a perfect fit on the Axiom circuit board. Solder x 6, and time to reassemble.

To make an already long story short, I connected it to my studio PC, fired-up a MIDI diagnostic, and voila, the Axiom was showing signs of life. A quick load of Ableton, and sure enough, I was back in business.

A hard disk enclosure sacrifices its USB connector

Now granted, using a soldering iron to replace a connector isn’t exactly a high art. Back in the day, I used to build electronic kits and do all manner of things that in this day of throwaway everything starts to feel like a lost art. So it was nice to revisit the old days for just a bit, and savoring a little victory celebration at the end was a bonus.

Now, back to work. I’m behind on my music task list this weekend as it is.

Over a year ago (October 2008), Ableton, the makers of my favorite production software (and perhaps one of the most amazing pieces of software ever developed, right up there with Adobe Photoshop) announced a strategic partnership with DJ software company Serato that promised to extend Ableton Live farther into the realm of DJ’ing.

It’s already possible to DJ with Ableton, and those who do can leverage Ableton’s primary focus (production) and blend it with live DJ’ing performances, elevating mere “DJ’ing” to a higher artform. In fact, it’s precisely what I’d like to migrate to myself in time. So the announcement was exciting to me, because I hoped it would address Ableton’s numerous shortcomings in the DJ’ing department.

In conjunction with Winter NAMM, Ableton and Serato announced their love child—called The Bridge—and I don’t think I could possibly be more disappointed.

Ableton’s announcement about The Bridge calls it, “…a powerful fusion of DJ and production tools, opening a world of opportunities for DJing, remixing, and live performance.” In my view, it’s anything but. According to the announcement (disclaimer: I’ve not used the software), it does primarily two things:

• It allows you to use Serato and timecoded media (or ITCH controller) to control the transport in Ableton Live.
• It allows you to record your Serato live performance into Ableton Live for editing and tweaking.

How can I put this nicely… Big f***ing deal. Essentially what’s been announced here is a sort of DJ-oriented, proprietary version of ReWire. ReWire has always been a kludge at best, and I haven’t actually met anyone yet who uses it regularly. Don’t get me wrong, the idea—getting two disparate pieces of software to work in unison—is a great one. But creating a communications backchannel between a pair of software applications completely overlooks the actual logistics:

• Which application must be started first? (Ableton and Serato have made this concern a non-issue with The Bridge.)
• What happens if one of the applications freezes or crashes?
• How do you physically and operationally interact with two different applications at the same time?
  • Do you really want to constantly switch focus on a single monitor computer? (Alt-Tab, Alt-Tab, Alt-Tab, Alt-Tab, Alt-Tab…)
  • What about different user interface paradigms? (Ableton is elegant, and Serato looks like something from 1992.)

I don’t personally believe that anyone truly wants, dreams and aspires to strap together multiple software applications with duct tape and string to achieve some amorphous end-result. What people really want is all the functionality in one place, and the fact they can’t have it, and the fact that they want it so badly, drives them cobble stuff together with things like ReWire… And now, with The Bridge. It’s not the desired solution; it’s accepted only because there’s no alternative offered.

Now, The Bridge is a little deeper than the two bullet points I offered above (which are the same two summarizations offered by Ableton on their web site this morning). But is this revolutionary? Useful?

1. Controlling Ableton’s tempo and playback with a controller, even a virtualized one (decks + Serato) isn’t particularly revolutionary. There are already myriad ways to control Ableton’s transport. But if you really want to do it with turntables and coded vinyl, I guess now you can.
2. Serato gets a sweet “Ableton View,” where a stripped down version of Ableton’s Session View is shown right in Serato’s UI. This basically allows you to trigger clips from Serato in your DJ set. But what problem are we trying to solve here, exactly, that isn’t already solved by just DJ’ing from Ableton in the same, relatively poor way you always could?
3. Recording your Serato DJ set into Ableton for tweaking also looks like a solution in search of a problem. It’s referred to as “the ultimate mixtape production tool.” Recording a DJ set and manipulating it later is a bit of a yawn for me. Admittedly, The Bridge also records a (very) limited number of control movements from the Serato side, so you can fix both audio issues and certain control issues after-the-fact. But if I was really looking for “the ultimate mixtape production tool,” one already exists, and it’s called MixMeister. My point is that mistakes happen in live performance, and if you want to erase them all and make everything picture-perfect, then don’t perform live in the first place.

The fact is, Ableton in its current incarnation isn’t a great tool for DJ’ing, and rubber banding it together with Serato doesn’t change that fact, nor does it address the real shortcomings, which exist primarily around metadata—not vinyl or CDJ based virtual MIDI control, not recording and tweaking DJ sets, not triggering clips during a set.

The reason people use Serato, Virtual DJ, Traktor, etc. for DJ’ing is partially for control (which Ableton does as-is), partially for beat alignment help (which Ableton does as-is), and partially for metadata management (e.g., track naming, selection, tagging, filtering, rating, etc.)—which is what Ableton doesn’t do at all.

That is the shortcoming that Ableton should be working to address, not gluing the software to Serato with a backend kludge. It strikes me rather like putting a trailer hitch on a Bugatti Veyron, hooking-up a pop-up camper, and calling the result a tour bus. Unfortunately, given whatever agreement exists between Ableton and Serato that produced The Bridge (can you say “non-compete clause?”), we’re unlikely to see Ableton do DJ’ing any better than this non-solution, anytime soon.

Ableton, I love you guys, and I love your software. But wow… What a disappointment.