lundi, novembre 06, 2006

Traktor, headphones, writing

Here's my day, in brief:

  • Sleep in (a little) and then stagger off to work.
  • Make a detour to a MacWay shop to pick up my order of replacement foam sleeves for my Shure e2c in-ear headphones. These head/earphones are great: they deliver great sound and they block outside noise, which means I can enjoy my music at more reasonable volume levels.
  • While I'm there, I finally buy an iMic for my laptop/Traktor setup (see below).
  • Go to work. I was supposed to get the day off today because I had been busy on Friday helping an injured student (which is usually my day off), but I had an appointment with someone else, so I showed up for a couple of hours (one of which was spent drinking wine in the break room).
  • Head home, work on paper for conference (coming along, but still not there).
  • Play with Traktor for a bit, and finally succeed in creating an aggregate audio device with Mac OSX's Audio Midi Setup program. Essentially, this allows me to "marry" the iMic that I had bought to my Powerbook's internal audio setup (Core Audio), so that I can have a Master Out and a Cue/Headphone Out. This is important for a mixing setup, since it allows a DJ to preaudition tracks and get them into alignment before adding them to the mix for the audience to hear. It is possible to mix without a headphone line, but it's a bit line flying blind.

2 commentaires:

taj a dit…

Okay, even though you've already gotten things set up to route your audio, here's a suggestion to expand your sonic palette with, say, the drum kits and virtual instruments in Garageband (that is, if you haven't already stumbled on it):

www.cycling74.com/products/soundflower

Granted, this is what I use with the combination of Digital Performer and a MOTU box, but it should work with anything using CoreAudio.

Anonyme a dit…

HOTT! Thanks, Travis! I probably wouldn't use it for a Traktor setup (i.e. mixing digital tracks), but I bet it would be awesome to line up Ableton Live with other Apps.