In the spring I was invited to chill with Steve Palazzo, Jr. during his weekly radio broadcasts at Flagler's radio station, WFCF. What initially attracted us was our broad - and often eclectic - tastes in music. Steve's show was on every Saturday night from 9:30 to midnight and featured any and all tracks from the bleeding-edge: EDM to drum 'n' bass, techno to dubsteb, hip-hop mashups to what can be described no other than "glitch." All in all, Subliminal Messages was pretty darn fun.Steve played all of his shows from his MacBook Pro through a simple 3.5mm audio line, controlled only with a M-Audio X-Session Pro. He wasn't even able to use headphones and had to mix all the tracks visually with the included Torq LE software. Incredibly enough, even the dnb mixes were silky smooth.
I've gotten into the idea of DJing, both as a hobby and a source of cash. So earlier this week, when Woot! had a sale of M-Audio hardware, I just had to pick one up. And I've been having a blast.
The X-Session Pro is a pretty useful piece of hardware, especially for the beginning DJ. It doesn't require an external power source; it only requires one USB cable to be plugged in. It is compatible with most DJ software out there, including open-source Mixxx. The Torq LE software that it's provided with is more than satisfactory, though: it's got a simple layout and includes core features like automatic BPM detection and support for MP3 files.
The main purpose of the XSP is to mix tracks. It doesn't sample, it doesn't scratch, and it won't make you a sandwich. But what it does, it does well: you can mix songs and control individual volume, pitch, 3-way EQ and some useful effects.
Torq LE is great software to use for beginners. It's stripped down to what you need and is absent of clutter that you don't want. The BPM detection is pretty good, and the automatic sync feature is acceptable. I found a couple of problems with auto-sync when working with drum 'n' bass tracks, but that takes all the fun out of manual mixing anyway so it's rather inconsequential.
Performance on the application is excellent. I am running it on a dual-core Pentium IV at 3GHz (which is a couple of generations old) with 2GB RAM on Windows XP, and there's no stuttering at all. Songs that haven't been previously analyzed load in 5 seconds or less. I have just installed Torq LE on my Lenovo S10-2 and it seems to run satisfactorily on there as well; I will post a follow-up with my experiences on the netbook.
One problem noted in the design of the XSP is that of prefade cueing - listening to the upcoming track via headphones in order to beatmix it. Since the XSP only has a USB port, how is this addressed? Simple - in Torq you may select for the cue track to play on one channel (for example, the left) while the main stream plays on through the other (the right, or vice versa). An adapter is included that splits your audio output into the two channels. Then you play plug your speakers into one end of the Y-adapter and your headphones into the second part of the Y. While you will lose true stereo output to your main speakers, that's not a big loss. It's a pretty smart trick, actually.
The XSP retails for $139.99, but I got it at Woot! for much, much less. Similar deals may be found on eBay as well. If you register the product, you will not even need the CD as M-Audio will allow you to download Torq LE for free from their site (I think it's about 175MB). This was also useful for my netbook, which doesn't have an optical drive for CDs.
It's been a great buy so far, and I hope to use this in a more professional setting soon. In the very least, look for some mixes online soon!
No comments:
Post a Comment