Jon Levinson

Couple of thoughts …

If you’re displeased with the quality of the AIFFs you’ve purchased – stop buying from that source. I know this is blatantly obvious, but really – trust your ears and vote with your wallet. I’ll repeat: trust your ears.

I wouldn’t place much stock into the assessment of ‘old’ music as many older recordings were mixed and engineered exceptionally well – Rudy Van Gelder anyone? but, production technics change over time and much modern music is often, not always, over compressed and you may perceive a difference in overall loudness from older songs as opposed to current songs.

I became displeased with the quality of the VBR MP3s from my eMusic subscription (obviously low quality and sometimes unlistenable.) After many complaints, they improved upon the quality of their offerings. Still not to my satisfaction, I throttled back my subscription. My solution was an iTunes Match subscription where I replaced those dodgy files with standard quality AAC files, but I’m well vested in the Apple ecosystem and have no (significant) issues with iTunes.

You may want to acquire a tack, or two, from another source or rip from a proper CD yourself. Bare in mind that not all CDs are mastered equally. It is possible, if unlikely, the source of your AIFFs was not well mastered as opposed to a another reissue of the same track. I’ve been listening to a Greatest Hits collection from a widely popular 70’s rock band and while I enjoy the material – the CD sounds awful. I think I’d rather hunt down the individual favorite tracks and buy them individually from the remastered editions … not that all remastered editions improve on the original either, but that’s a conversation onto itself. So, agin – trust your ears.

Regarding the comparison of two tracks, here’s an article from SOS on how to go about it (the article is specific to Logic Audio, but the principles can be applied to any DAW. http://www.soundonsound.com/sos/mar11/articles/logic-tech-0311.htm

• This reply was modified 9 years, 3 months ago by Jon Levinson.

These are effectively multi-media speakers and while you could use them for your stated purpose, you are better off saving up for a proper pair of Near Field Monitors. Check you the Alesis M1 series for an example.

Just out of curiosity which version of OS X 10.8 are you running? 10.8.5 being the latest… also, have you yet tried the Traktor Kontrol S4 Driver 2.5.3 for Mac? There’s so many threads on this subject at the NI Forums it’s difficult to tell what’s working for whom – some people imply the problem was ‘fixed’ in 10.8.5 and others not.

BshidoHEAT, post: 43182, member: 13775 wrote: It really depends on what your going to be doing with your controller. But I’m putting my vote in for the Denon MC3000.
I love this thing so much, I’ve taken it to several gigs and it works flawlessly everytime.

You can’t beat it’s build quality, your friends can play through it with it’s line inputs (very useful for me since my friend and I play together alot), small jogs but can scratch effectively on it. It’s fits in my gym bag and can withstand some abuse. Which happens more than one would think.

The only reason I wouldn’t get it is because other controllers are geared towards mapping ability or cue point juggling. You can do both of those on the MC3000 but it isn’t the most effective at either. What the MC3000 is great at is A->B mixing, and light cue juggling, and being a freakin’ tank, a portable one at that.

^^^ what he said… I find the cue point juggling to be okay for my needs

^^^ we have a winner!

Newportdj Drew, post: 41770, member: 244 wrote: One thing new ‘night shifters’ don’t realise is you need to make your routine as close to a daytime one as you can get. If you start work at 9pm then it is easy to reverse your day! Lets start at your wake up time. Wake at 7pm and follow a morning routine, eg the 3 s’s (shower shave), then breakfast. When midnight comes it’s lunchtime! When you finish at 4am, *and this is very important* do not go straight to bed. Stay up for a few hours Have dinner at 6-7 am. Goto bed at around 10-11 am. Sleep til 7pm.

Excellent advice – keeping a predictable routine similar to this helped me sustain my work/family life for years of working twelve hour overnight shifts.

Would have liked to hear your set – sounds like it would have been fun, but I’m probably of the age where I would recognized the songs from the 1st time around 😉

Regarding club/chart stuff – the NOW compilations are kind of cheesy, but they are a short cut to the Pop tracks lots of people expect to hear. I’ll admit to cherry picking tracks from them, only slightly embarrassed to admit it, but IMHO the mastering of the NOW CDs sound like rubbish – too harsh. I’me gravitating to using them as a guide and downloading the same tracks from the original, individual release. I would suggest you check out the Top Songs links on iTunes (for whichever Genre your interested in) or the Best Sellers links at Amazon to get a benchmark of what’s selling – assuming sales = popular. I have a wife, and a teenager, with mainstream tastes and use them as a barometer for what I may/may not be picking up on.

There are a couple of threads on this same topic… here’s one of themL

http://www.digitaldjtips.com/forum/threads/denon-mc-3000-or.8113/#post-38163

I remain please with my purchase – no problems so far