Best scratching solution for live? deckadance/vestax vci?

Taiis · Post by **Taiis** » Tue Feb 19, 2008 8:16 am

Hi,

I'd like to do some scratching with my live set, I've got MsPinky and a turntable, but it's rather bulky and I don't like the MsPinky plugin.

I saw that deckadance can be used as a VSTi, has anyone tried it with ableton - how does its scratching features work?

Has anyone tried the Vestax VCI-100 with ableton and produced any scratching results that are reasonable?

/T

Patch · Post by **Patch** » Tue Feb 19, 2008 12:52 pm

By far the best solution, is to route your mixer into ableton, and have a track dedicated to the audio from your mixer. Obviously, you will only be able to scratch sounds that you already have on vinyl...

I use Mixvibes (similar to Serato/MsPinky/Deckadance, etc, etc...) and have had Mixvibes and Live running on the same PC at the same time. The results weren't great - poor performance in both apps. The best way to do this would to have a dedicated machine for mixvibes, and route the audio from your mixer into Live on a separate machine.

chrysalis33rpm · Post by **chrysalis33rpm** » Tue Feb 19, 2008 1:02 pm

Patch, how do you rate Mixvibes as an application (stability, interface, tracking...)?

Khazul · Post by **Khazul** » Tue Feb 19, 2008 1:06 pm

I tried the deckadance demo and all Live 7.0.2 did was die horribly... so uninstalled it.

As a standalone software DJ app, cant say I was that impressed either - its track browser particularly seemed pretty useless and to my mind the whole value-add of a software Dj app is a really good tracks database as the control and everything else is generally hugely inferior with software (IMHO), better with timecoded Cds/vinyl, but it still feels a little disconnected.

I have all my mp3s tagged with bpm, key etc for easy searching in apps like tracktor - I wish live had a really good track browser that understood mp3 custom tags and could search/categorise with them etc.

Anyway - at the moment I still think Tracktor is the only decent DJ app, but no DAW integration...

Taiis · Post by **Taiis** » Tue Feb 19, 2008 1:15 pm

Thanks for all of your replies I'll try and see if I can try out mixvibes with a VCI at my local store.

Patch · Post by **Patch** » Tue Feb 19, 2008 1:15 pm

chrysalis33rpm wrote:Patch, how do you rate Mixvibes as an application (stability, interface, tracking...)?

It's very good. I've also recently tried numark CUE - using the u46DJ interface, and that was also very good. Possibly even better than Mixvibes.

Deckadance is also quite good, with the added bonus of running as a vst. I've been meaning to set up a single turntable for Deckadance as a vst within Live - it would mean using my MOTU ultralite (my Liveset sound card), as Live doesn't support multiple sound cards.

I'd recommend Mixvibes OR Numark CUE.

(If you already have an audio interface/soundcard, you could get hold of an, ahem, "evaluation" copy of Numark CUE. As long as you have some timecode vinyl, it should work fine...)

Yhtomit · Post by **Yhtomit** » Tue Feb 19, 2008 1:41 pm

Deckadance is crap
I use a dedicated laptop with an RME Multiface II, a Final Scratch record and DjDecks software to scratch.

Taiis · Post by **Taiis** » Tue Feb 19, 2008 2:02 pm

CUE looks pretty cool, I'll give it a whirl, I'll try deckadance with my MsPinky records as well.

Nathan Ramella · Post by **Nathan Ramella** » Wed Apr 09, 2008 9:21 pm

this?

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yZ2jTG7OLss

Tone Deft · Post by **Tone Deft** » Wed Apr 09, 2008 9:26 pm

this

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8L5eDMfkD8M