Phase has announced that its wireless control pucks now work natively with rekordbox over HID, so you can ditch the RCA cables running to your mixer and connect the receiver to your laptop with a single USB cable. It’s a free update for existing owners.
If you’ve used Phase, you’ll know the appeal: the little units sit over the spindle of your turntables and spin with the platter, so you can leave your timecode records (and your needles) at home while still playing DJ software on real decks. Until now, the Rekordbox set-up meant that convenient wireless link to the receiver, then a tangle of cables from the receiver into the back of your mixer. That second part has now gone. Phase already offered single-cable HID for Serato, and it’s now brought the same thing to rekordbox.
What’s new besides losing the cables?
You can choose which of Rekordbox’s four decks each Remote controls, including decks 3 and 4, which is a nice touch. There are a handful of other additions too: battery levels show on the jog panel in Rekordbox, the Remote’s LED strip blinks as a track nears its end, there’s a quick animation when you load a new track, and an emergency internal mode to keep the music going if something drops out.
Phase also says HID cuts latency compared with a standard DVS set-up, since position data goes straight to the software rather than through analogue timecode and an interface first – a sensible claim, though one we’d want to feel on the decks before calling it.
What you’ll need
A rekordbox-enabled mixer and a rekordbox version that unlocks DVS, so you’ll need to be subscribed or have hardware that unlocks it. Then update your Phase firmware, update rekordbox to the latest version, plug in and assign your Remotes. The whole thing takes about a minute, apparently. It’s live now on Phase Essential, and Phase says the upcoming Phase Pro will support it from day one.
- If you want to make the most of Phase on turntables – scratching, open-format tricks and the rest – our Scratching for Controller DJs course and the two Jazzy Jeff courses are all part of All Access.
Phil Morse
