final scratch
我在上星期收到这份资料， 对不起各位， 未时间翻译，请见谅
FYI: Here is an excerpt from an article that was published in the New York Times last Thursday October 25, 2001 and The International Herald Tribune last Friday October 26, 2001:
The Latest Mix for DJs: Vinyl and Digital
By Bill Werde New York Times Service
New York - On a recent Wednesday night at Centro-Fly, a trendy Manhattan dance club, Richie Hawtin was using two turntables to play the latest and best techno, a crisply syncopated hybrid of dark, electronic drum rhythms and metallic high-hat and snare effects.
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Like so many other celebrity disk jockeys on the international circuit, Mr. Hawtin was mixing records to imprint his style on the night's music: he played two records simultaneously to blend the drum kick of one song with the melody of another, waited about 45 seconds before replacing the drum sounds with a new album of more pronounced bass sounds, and manipulated audio effects equipment to further tweak what clubgoers were hearing. So it went for hours, Mr. Hawtin adding and subtracting sounds and the crowd of about 600 dancing and cheering when they heard a mix they liked. The scene was typical of nightclubs across the globe; the records Mr. Hawtin was placing on his turntable were anything but. Mr. Hawtin uses new technology called Final Scratch from N2IT Development BV, a Dutch company (to be manufactured and distributed under license by Stanton Magnetics, Inc of Hollywood, Fla.). The vinyl records he places on the turntables may look like normal albums, but they work as conduits for the 900 or so digital files he has stored on his laptop computer. If Mr. Hawtin places the stylus on the three-minute mark of the Final Scratch vinyl, the technology interprets that as a signal to play at the three-minute mark of the digital file he has selected.
Final Scratch is not the only music or technology company looking to help disk jockeys embrace digital music. A variety of software programs allow DJs to use laptop computers to mix digital files without turntables and include perks such as sonic filters, synthesizer emulators and samplers that can add well-laced loops of additional music or vocal snippets. Traditional audio companies are making equipment that allows DJs to mix and edit digital files from compact disks. All of this gives DJs new freedoms, both pragmatic and creative.
Before the onset of home studios and CD burners, disk jockeys who wanted to play a new track would have to secure studio time, then make a dubplate, a vinyl pressing that costs about $50 and provides 15 or 20 plays before deteriorating. CD burners allowed them to make a track at home, then play it on a club's CD player that night, but DJs cannot manipulate the music as they can with vinyl.
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Conceived at a hacker convention in Amsterdam when some programmers saw a D.J. run out of records after an hour or so, Final Scratch allows the mixing and scratching of virtually all formats of digital music to within a millisecond of precision. And as those at Centro-Fly could attest after hearing Mr. Hawtin's mix, it is impressive when put to the test of an enormous sound system.
Mr. Hawtin says the best part about Final Scratch is that it is all contained on his laptop. "I don't travel with a CD burner, and if you start burning a lot of CD's, you run into an organizational challenge," he explained. Mr. Hawtin's 900 files are stored within the Final Scratch software, broken down by subgenres and easily cross-referenced by a variety of search categories.
With his frequent travel, having his whole set available on his laptop creates time, in a matter of speaking. "In May, I flew to England on a Saturday," he said, "played a gig, flew back Sunday morning and had a gig that night in Detroit. I had eight hours there and back. I went through all my records, sorted out what I wanted to play in Detroit, what I wanted to play in London, picked a couple of tracks, re-edited them to create some special versions and played them that night."
Mr. Hawtin is quick to praise the freedom and spontaneity granted by the digital realm. "This lets us evaluate what's happening in the world as quickly as possible now," he said. "I can take a snippet of some news or a popular record and throw it in the mix in a completely different way."
At the same time, it is important to him that Final Scratch works through standard turntables. "It gives me the advantage of a physicality that not only I understand, but the crowd understands," he said. "People understand what a D.J. does now. It's just like how people became accustomed to freaking out when someone did something cool with a guitar. We don't lose that, but it opens these floodgates to a whole new potential."
Some of the greatest potential revolves around much more mundane issues than digital revolutions may inspire. Mr. Hawtin carries two crates of records to his D.J. sessions, each holding about 100 albums. "I'll be down to one crate by the end of the year," Mr. Hawtin said. "The only reason I'm carrying as much music as I am now is that there is a time lag between when I get a record and when I can digitize it. I have plenty of room in my laptop for tracks I may only play once a year, but that one time I play it, it will make the night."
Reducing the number of albums may turn out to be the greatest advantage of all. "Do you have any idea," Mr. Hawtin said with a laugh, "how much a crate of records weighs?"