Time is flying…another Friday is here and we come bearing treats. Obviously most of you have heard the new Cee-Lo “Fuck You” anthem by now, but have you heard the fresh EMYD bmore refix? Those two gems plus 11 more are on the new Floor Bangers Vol 112 (a must have for your party weekend). Feral Party Kids have done it again with some serious club heat (check for the Nas remix).

J. Cole “Blow Up” has just arrived and it’s already being very well received. Chaundon (from Justus League) has a new joint “Ya’ll Don’t Want It”. One of our personal favs this week is 100 Akres who mash and flip New Edition, but not in a way you’d think. Very slick.

Twista has teamed up with Chris Brown for “Make a Movie”. Diggy Simmons (son of Rev Run) has teamed up with Pharrell and Lupe on “Oh Yeah” and it’s not bad. Hit up the site for more treats.
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Finally we have more details since our post last month about NI Traktor Kontrol S4! First, it will be shipping this winter for a price of $999 US ($899 EUR). It is a fully integrated system where software and hardware are “fused in perfect harmony”.

Here are some of the highlights…

-4 channel mixer with 2 high-res jog wheels
-full support for looping, effects and browsing
-sample support which allow for live loop recording from external or internal sources
-2 customizable FX units with 28 performance effects
-stereo RCA and 1/4″ outputs
-2 phono/line RCA inputs
-1 mic 1/4″ input
-footswitch
-midi in/out
-headphone output

Be sure to check out Shiftee’s demo below!!

[NI Kontrol S4 | DJ Shiftee demo video]

It’s no secret that the future of DJing will be in software on multi-touch devices like the iPad or Light Table. Most of you will recall The ATTIGO touch turntable by Scott Hobbs as well as countless other iPhone/iPad DJ apps.

The main problem I see with previous incarnations of this concept is twofold…

1. They don’t have haptic feedback (so pushing a button feels like pushing a button).
2. They have cumbersome user interfaces and poor usability.
3. Several rely on making metaphors to traditional DJ gear that make little sense in the digital sphere.

The ATTIGO was the first serious quality attempt at multi-touch DJing. Gerg Werk has taken this concept a step further implementing VERY clever gesture support on his Light Table. His idea is to map everything a traditional DJ rig can do with simple gestures such as 4 finger swipe for volume, 1 finger tap for BPM, 1/2/3 finger swipes for hi/mid/lo eq, pinch for looping and many more. The result is a simple, easy to use digital DJ setup.

Watch his video demo for more info.

DMC champ DJ Shiftee put together a nice lil tutorial for how he uses Traktor, Maschine and the X1 with 4 decks for some dubsteppy goodness.

Be sure to watch his performance video.

Native Instruments just sent us the following video which seems to suggest that Traktor now has samplers and a new full featured midi controller. We are trying to dig up more details, but NI isn’t saying much (we hear mid August is when all the details will officially emerge).

Here’s what I can tell from the video…

1) Traktor has sampler support coming soon.
2) New controller has two platters, channel faders and a cross fader and seems to be one large integrated unit that seems to offer control of 4 decks.

From what we all know about the X1, I am sure NI will tightly integrate this controller with Traktor Pro (effects, cue points, etc…), but it’s likely they will offer support for using the controller with other software such as Serato.

We will have to wait until mid August for the full details, for now, check out the video below…