Amiga is Back: DJing with Two CDJ-Style “Turntables"

[Scottie]

Eat your heart out, Traktor. Take that, CDJs. The dream of the 90s is alive, again, with new Amiga software.

Akira Kei shares the project, which he and hoffman co-created and have dubbed the PT-1210 MK1. It mimics some CDJ-style features, but uses MOD files – a clever music format that employs samples and sequence data for truly portable, interactive music. This isn’t just a nerdy hack. It’s actually a full-blown DJ tool that could make its way through a party – provided that party’s musical tastes trended slightly retro.

And since it runs on stock Amiga machines, you might pay more to have a service person even look at your MacBook Pro than this entire rig will cost.

Watch:

Basically it’s a Protracker MOD “deck” software, that is, it “simulates” the functionality of a Pioneer CDJ turntable but applies it to modules, and also adds niceties possible thanks to the MOD format (like channel muting).

It runs on basically any Amiga with an ECS chipset, that is anything form late A500s trough to the newest 68k based shit. Coded in pure assembler by my buddy h0ffman (I’m in charge of UI and testing, we both came up with teh concept)

It all started here with this discussion (Me pushing the issue and many people saying “that’s impossible” ):

http://eab.abime.net/showthread.php?t=66243

We’ve been working on it for a year and I just made a demo of our latest version.

Features:

[*]Channel mute

[*]Extensive loop options

[*]“Reloop FX” – setting loop points inside the pattern

[*]Slip mode – playhead continues even as the music loops

[*]Pitch bend

[*]Time stretching

[*]Forward/rewind advance through patterns

So, where can you find the software? It’ll be free, in demoscene spirit. And you should keep your demoscene calendar open. “We hope to release in March at the Revision 2014 demoparty,” says Akira, “but we’ll have a demo 14-16 Feb. in Datastorm 2014 in Sweden.” Of course, for those not able to make those parties, we may have to do a little how-to for Amiga users.

If Traktor or Ableton Live added MOD support, I would… be very entertained. And, not to get in the way of the retro stylings here, but I’d love to see this running on Android / iOS. (Those platforms do already have some nice MOD players.)

But of course, you won’t get nearly the cred if you show up with a couple of iPads as you will with a couple of Amigas. Akira notes:

This is basically the single most interesting audio tool to come out for the Amiga in many, many years. We think it will be a game changer and draw interest to the platform.

Original Article: http://createdigitalmusic.com/2013/12/a ... ze-friends . Check it out, couple of recorded video mixes using this at the end of the piece.

[Kodiak]

Many, many, many, many hours were spent on my Amiga in my younger days. Mods were my first introduction to electronic music. My last ever Music assignment in grade 12 was a song I'd written in Octamed. The teacher didn't know how to mark it as they were expecting a more tradition kind of recording. This was in 1995, things were very different back then.