Instead of having you read through a wall of text about it, I prepared a video-review where I walk through most of its features.

If you don’t like to see me looking out of the window during the first minute of the video here is also a short summary of it.

How does it work?

Since Trakor Pro doesn’t offer a plugin-interface EMULATOR has to use some tricks. It communicates with Traktor via MIDI. A virtual MIDI-device is good enough. That is a driver which fakes an actual MIDI device. Since Windows has no built-in way to create a such a device EMULATOR comes with the free LoopBe1 MIDI driver.
A lot of Traktor’s functions can’t be accessed like this. Therefore EMULATOR displays parts of Traktor’s original user interface like the waveforms and filebrowser through it. So its truly an overlay for Traktor.

The Good and the bad bits

Pros:

• Clean interface with vibrant colors
• As tight as possible integrated with Traktor Pro
• Use of Windows 7 built-in multi-touch capabilites

Cons

• No multi-touch gestures used
• No innovative controls used. *Where are X-Y-meters which work very well on touchscreens?*
• Only two decks are supported
• The layout of the controls is not optimal *e.g. it takes too many taps to be able to use FX*
• Due to relying on Windows 7 Input API, the latency is pretty high *however this is very difficult to solve*
• no way to customize the layout
• The only supported screen-resolution is 1280 x 800
• High price for the software *249 USD for a plain overlay is rip-off if you take into consideration that you can get Traktor Pro for as low as 200 USD*

Conclusion

Despite the sleek style-factor of a transparent multitouch-screen Emulator doesn’t have much to offer a DJ would want. I’d prefer my old-school buttons, knobs and faders any day over something which does exactly the same minus tactile feedback. To use the potential of multi-touch interfaces developers have to think outside of the box. Up until now the best way to control a DJ software was using external controllers. Now that you can interact directly with the user interface there are a lot of new possibilities to get our head around. For example how about adding an XY-meter which also controls a Z-value if you slide two fingers on it?

If you have interesting ideas for ways to interact with a touchscreen let me know about it! I may be cooking up something myself.

If you want me to make a tutorial on how to do the performance then leave a comment.
Wenn ihr wollt, dass ich ein Tutorial über die Performance mache, dann hinterlasst einen Kommentar!

We’ve got a new decade, the blog’s got a new design (I’ll post about that soon) and there’s a new mix as well. This time again with a lot of genres wildly mixed (even a bit dubstep) so this is probably not your average driving-in-the-sun-easy-listen. Its made to dance your ass off.

Hedgehog – In The Mix Vol. 16 by Hedgehog

The timelimit of YouTube-videos has been removed recently, therefore I also uploaded the set there to see how it is received. To add some creativity its first minute is a cool stop-motion video.

Don’t forget to tell me what you liked / didn’t liked in the comments.

Now that every village-radio-station is hitting Barbra Streisand all the time I thought it was about time to beat the (almost) dead horse. After bringing you an original-version like edit of the tune (which I took offline now) in July, long before the official release, I did a little bit more this time.

I incorporated the vocals of the the song “Hallo Bimmelbahn” by the German band Nighttrain in the remix. Thats the song from which Barbra Streisand orginates from. Although my English speaking readers might not be too fond of it, the Germans may like the Alexander Marcus-like style and play it out to bring some variety to the dancefloor.

That’s it:

Duck Sauce – Barbra Streisand (Hedgehog’s Bimmelbahn Remix) by Hedgehog

and once again on YouTube:

about the blog

After making posts of everything which is floating my mind I noticed there are three or four main topics emerged from it (stuff for DJs, my music, technical stuff and my own tools). A designer is currently working on a fresh look for this grumpy piece. I’ll make her consider this separation. Most readers care about one of the topics (or less) only.

Everyone who is interested may now register on this page for a free workshop in DJing, Remixing and live-performing using Ableton Live. There will also be mostly afterparties (at least in Germany). I’m not sure whether they’ll charge entry fee from participants to these, but looking at names like Fairmont, Ellen Allien and Nathan Falke, it’s definitely worth a stay. There are usually also some nice giveaways. I hope just not key-holders because I already got like five of them from Rane.

The workshops will take place in:

• 10-26-2010 New York City, NY
• 10-28-2010 Los Angeleles, CA
• 11-02-2010 Boston, MA
• 11-04-2010 San Francisco, CA
• 11-09-2010 Seattle, WA
• 10-31-2010 Wien
• 11-10-2010 Miami, FL
• 11-16-2010 Montreal
• 11-18-2010 Chicago, IL
• 11-25-2010 Berlin
• 11-28-2010 Dresden
• 12-11-2010 München
• 02-26-2011 Aachen

In Germany the after-parties are hosted by De:bug:

I’ll be in Berlin. If you plan to go there as well, feel free to hook me up.