Paul van dyk uses a powerbook


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As we all know for quite some time PVD uses a powerbook in all his gigs, but theres an article in this month's Wired magazine that sheds more light into this.

The Freewheelin' DJ

When Paul Van Dyk goes on the road, he leaves his collection of vinyl and CDs at home. The popular Berlin-based techno DJ has gone entirely digital: He carries 1,000 select songs with him on a 60-gig PowerBook G4 that runs a hardware-software tool called FinalScratch. He says he didn't like FinalScratch at first because it was designed mainly for mixing MP3s and other compressed audio files. "I'm a sound freak," he admits - the quality wasn't high enough for him. So Van Dyk stores his tunes as uncompressed AIFF files instead, and for added refinement, he gives every track an extra smoothing for the dance floor. "Everything I play goes through the mastering setup of my studio," he explains, "so everything you hear sounds even better than the original record." Here's a peek inside his sound system.

Paul Van Dyk's All-Digital Setup

1. Van Dyk scratches songs using a FinalScratch dummy record that looks and spins like a regular 12-inch. "It's just like playing a real record," he says.

2. The dummy record is placed on a deck connected to the Scratch Amp, which tells the PowerBook what part of the song to play and how to play it.

3. The computer sends the music signal back to the Scratch Amp, which translates it from digital to analog and feeds it out to the club's sound system.

4. Using a CD player, Van Dyk can play a song into FinalScratch's memory buffer, then mix up to three iterations of that same song into each other.

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That's awsome. A lot of DJ's are going high tech now. I love it; sticking with vinyl roots while mixing in new-age technology. (Y)

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Yeck Yeck Yeck. Gimme vinyl any day. :D

But it is Vinyl, that's what's great about it.

Amon Tobin uses a similar setup. I saw him live and noticed he never changed records during the set, so I talked to him about it after the show and he uses FS. Sounded excellent to me :D

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