heironymouscoward's Journal: MDPA/4 - Update

So we went and built a prototype. Beautifully simple: a Technics turntable, two optical mice, a Linux notebook and Sweep, an OSS package that lets you mix and scratch digital audio in realtime.

The two mice track the rotation speed/direction of the turntable, and the angle of the arm. With this one can calculate exactly where the music should be playing.

It did not, I have to admit, quite work. And then the cousin of a friend told us about 'FinalScratch', a commercial product that does exactly what we were trying to do, with a simple and elegant solution: special vinyls that hold a sound pattern which can be decoded into an absolute position.

And than I explained this to my DJ friend who said, "yeah, but if you can't see where the tracks stop and start, it's no use".

Moral: even a great idea is unlikely to be original, and even a great implementation of a great idea is unlikely to be entirely useful.

How about...

[loucura!]

Covering the platters with tri-colour leds in a spiral pattern, and as the song gets spun up into memory, have it light a set number of leds. So each track is visible to the DJ, and yet it's able to play different length tracks.

Re:How about...

[loucura!]

err, a set number of leds based on the length of the song. Say one led per second or something.