Paul Van Dyk - unbelievable article!!
"Wired" magazine, Feb 2004 The freewheelin' DJ, by Adrienne Day
When Paul Van Dyk goes on the road, he leaves his collection of vinyl and CD's at home. The popular Berlin-based techno Dj has gone entirely digital: He carries 1,000 select songs with him on a 60 gb Powerbook G4 that runs a harware-software tool called FinalScratch. He says he didn't like FinalScratch at first because it was designed mainly for mixing MP3's and other compressed audio files. "I'm a sound freak, "he admits - the quality wasn't high enough for him. So Van Dyk stores his tunes as uncompressed AIFF files instead, and for added refinement, he gives every track an extra smoothing for the dance floor. "Everything I play goes through the mastering setup of my studio," he explains,"so everything you hear sounds even better than the original record." Here is a peek inside his sound system:
PVD scratches songs using a FinalScratch dummy record that looks and spins like a regular 12". "It's just like playing a real record," he says.
The dummy record is placed on a deck connected to the scratch amp, which tells the Powerbook what part of the song to play and how to play it.
The computer sends the music signal back to the scratch amp, which translates it from digital to analog and feeds it out to the club's sound system.
Using a CD player, PVD can play a song into FinalScratch's memory buffer, then mix up to 3 iterations of that same song into each other.
Amazing article...I would never have guessed that he did this.

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