Comments on: Who actually did invent DVS?

By: Ean Golden

Ean Golden — Fri, 23 May 2008 14:58:43 +0000

Very Interesting, thanks for that background Steve. if anyone is an expert about DVS it should be you!

By: Steve West

Steve West — Fri, 23 May 2008 05:52:56 +0000

In response to the question posed by the subject of this article, the answer appears to be a team behind the original Final Scratch.

The basic DVS idea is not even that new. I have a copy of a paper published in 1996 by James Russell on using vinyl to control digital audio playback. It thoroughly explores the pros and cons of the different approaches to tracking vinyl movement, eg optical sensor with striped vinyl, magnetic pickup, sitting a “wheel” on the vinyl, and of course a quadrature tone pressed onto vinyl. He even built a prototype and did a public DJ mixing demonstration with it that year.

By: Dj Joyrider

Dj Joyrider — Thu, 22 May 2008 15:50:27 +0000

I have seen the first version run on BeOs at a camp of the ChaosComputerClub in 1999…and the guy woh programmed it was dutch…so I suppose that was N2IT

By: DC

DC — Fri, 02 May 2008 03:01:03 +0000

The N2IT FS beta kits came with the Sony VAIO laptop and ran on BeOS, and the scratch amp wasn’t the UFO/Hockey Puck we all know today.

By: N2

N2 — Fri, 02 May 2008 01:51:13 +0000

i will have to check that out. always interested in how this stuff begins.

By: Ean Golden

Ean Golden — Thu, 01 May 2008 15:06:09 +0000

skratchworx dropped this story a couple of days ago…check it for a little more info.

Just noticed it now, technically CDM got the story out first. They wrote it on the 28th, when we wrote our article as well after seeing the CDM post. But since we publish on Mon and wed it got posted on the 30th. There is a lot of interesting info about the history of DVS in the original CDM post.

By: djs

djs — Thu, 01 May 2008 06:03:44 +0000

I had the first available version of N2IT’s Final Scratch- Simple and brilliant for it’s time. Itran on a stripped Debian Kernal and ony supported a very limited number of laptops. (At first, optimized for and only officially supported on the Sony VAIO.) There were two seperate applications, one for live performance and one for organizing you music collection and playlists (Crates). No bells or whistles, just straight up vinyl emulation and rock solid for a 1.0 version of a brand new concept. Drive partitioning and dealing with the Linux install was difficult at best for the average consumer- I think it alone prevented the concept from catching on for quite some time. After every gig I played with it for the 1st year I had a small crowd that would stay after the club had closed asking questions and wanting a demo of how DVS worked. Stanton’s first version followed by NI 1st attempt at a windows version were disasters by comparison to N2ITs. I ended up always going back to my original install for live performance until the 3rd maintenance release of NI FS1.5. Provided you got the system up and running with your hardware- it never failed. In my book N2IT gets all the credit for breaking ground this market.

By: nem0nic

nem0nic — Thu, 01 May 2008 04:38:09 +0000

my money’s still on RZA.

RZA had NOTHING to do with the invention of DVS. If you look at the patent for the thing he’s talking about, you can see that it’s more akin to the Tascam TTM1 (except it’s optical). That and he only says he INVESTED in it (after following the bullsh*t rainbow to the DVS leprechaun at it’s end).

Cocaine is a helluva drug…