mspinky.com

[autogen]

Hi,

My vinyl and software just turned up this afternoon and after some initial strange behaviour with degraded audio on playback I have it set up so I can scratch fairly consistently and audio quality sounds pretty good.

Edit: After playing with the input levels some more and fine tuning the Signal Power Threshold and Cutoff Sharpness it sounds perfect. Hats off to Down Low Pinkstah, this is everything I imagined and more. Having so much fun scratching the elements of my live set...

However, I'm using a basic Shure cartridge at the moment because I'm waiting to purchase some replacement styli for my Ortofon cartridges. This seems to be tracking less reliably than I am used to, so I was wondering how I would go about creating an audio file to emulate a skipless scratch record.

I assume if I create a file of a certain duration when using the 'file loop' option it will behave like a skipless scratch record for all intents and purposes.

So has anyone done this already? And if so what duration should I make the audio file in order to achieve this behaviour, or am I barking up the wrong tree with this approach?

Cheers in advance for any tips you can share.

[dlpinkstah]

A skipless scratch record is, at least according to my understanding, a record with which a needle skip when playing the record does not disrupt the beat. This is because the beat that's recorded on the record has an exact integer number of beats per rotation of the record. Based on the nominal rate of turntable rotation of 33-1/3 RPM, it works out that your BPM must be some integer multiple of 33-1/3 in order to be "skipless". So your choices are 66-2/3, 100, 133-1/3 BPM, etc. If you also want a 4/4 time signature, then this means you're probably constrained to 4 X 33-1/3 = 133-1/3 BPM. There is exactly 1.8 seconds of playback per rotation of the vinyl when we assume perfectly synched playback at 33-1/3 RPM. So if you want to create a virtual skipless scratch record in 4/4 time, just create an audio file containing beats at exactly 133-1/3 BPM and such that the total length of the audio file is also some exact multiple of 1.8 seconds. When you play that track with Ms Pinky, it should be skipless on the vinyl. And of course you can pitch it up or down using the turntable pitch control to achieve a different BPM than 133-1/3.

[autogen]

1.8 seconds is the magic number I was looking for then. Probably should have done the maths myself, but that was never my strong point

I was actually thinking more in terms of creating a record with a collection of custom samples that feature in one of my tracks, so I can ad lib some scratches over it without too many mistakes. Same principle though, so this is exactly what I was looking for.

Thanks for the low-down down low