Interestingly enough, the FinalScratch system does not allow cueing to different positions in the record by lifting the needle up off the record. I saw Richie Hawtin playing on one in DC and I didn't realize what it was at first. I was really perplexed because it seemed like everytime I looked up he was just at the beginning of a record: the tonearm was always very far out towards the edge of the record. Then I figured out that he was using final scratch because he was picking the tracks from a laptop nearby running a program that was basically two lists of tracks. I didn't even think the position signal was running through the audio, I thought they had a separate system magnetically measuring the record position. But it must be something like the saw tooth signal described in this discussion. I wouldn't worry too much about using the cueing of the needle on the record to move through the track. It's more useful on a real record because different sections of a track actually are visible to the naked eye on black vinyl, which jogs your memory into remembering the layout of the track. The final scratch record must have a single loop out at the edge of the record. Such a loop is called a locked-groove when put on a real record: certain styles of dance music have a convenient bpm that allows putting a complete 4 bar pattern into one seamless loop towards the end of the record (the middle). I've only encountered this in techno tracks. There can be a complete track which ends by moving into the lock groove which plays endlessly until the dj stops the record. The beat must perfectly fit one rotation of the record in the lockgroove or else the rhythm will be broken. The same constriction applies to making a lock groove of a control signal. I am convinced final scratch records have a few locked grooves of a control signal at the edge of the record. Adding positional cueing would be a nice feature but consider some of the following circumstances: -you have to put a lock groove at the end of the spiral groove anyway or else you limit the length of track that you can control to some arbitrary amount of time. -if you try to get around this by making a 30 minute track you'll find that the groove is cut smaller so that the record will wear faster and will skip much easier when you scratch it. This is why dance singles have one 6-10 minute track cut on the entire side of a 12" record; record wear is a factor for a dj playing a track many times and bigger grooves hold up longer to repeated playing. They will also sound better longer which is not really an issue here. records tend to wear by pushing towards the outside of the groove from centripedal acceleration. -if you make a 10 minute position-coded section leading into a lock groove you will have to have the standard width of the 10 minute section map to the length of the entire track being played. This means that moving the needle to the middle amounts to saying "move 50% of the way through the track" (which is pretty useful). But it's probably going to end up being easier to cue through the software. Hell it will be easier to do everything through the software. The only advantage I see a turntable controller having is for scratching effects and for dj's who don't want to carry a lot of records. And maybe for beatmatching audio files but programs are leaning towards doing that ahead of time (GDAM). As such I wouldn't worry too much about the positional thing, in favor of getting very tight velocity response for scratching and beatmatching. 8 ms will kill you in beatmatching and final scratch has to have closer than 8 ms "grip" on the audio file being controlled. ~4 ms off is audible phasing. I think it's very interesting to investigate it but it might be easier to just cut a lock-groove control signal and not bother about encoding digital signals on a record. ---jacob robbins;;;;;;;;; _________________________________________________________________ Send and receive Hotmail on your mobile device: http://mobile.msn.com