“Snap” is a cool feature that was introduced in Windows 7 which allows you to take any window and organize it to half your display’s size either vertically or horizontally. Why would anyone want to do this you ask? For me personally, copy/pasting files in Finder is a weekly task. Doing this with two windows (one for source, one for destination) makes the task way easier.

OSX by default has no way to snap two windows to 50% of your display though. Irradiated Software has a solution called Cinch for OSX. It does exactly what you’d expect and want and for a measly $7!

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.

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…

As I mentioned in a previous article, there are several ways to share 1 external drive between a Mac and PC, however this article deals with just 1, NTFS. Why? Well, NTFS is a superior file system to FAT32 allowing the creation of larger files as well as some security improvements which I won’t get into.

There are currently 2 ways that I know of to read/write to NTFS from your Mac.

1. MacFUSE + NTFS-3g

Download and install the latest MacFUSE .dmg. Once it’s installed, reading/writing to NTFS is pretty much automatic and you shouldn’t have to mess with anything.

That is unless you don’t properly remove your NTFS drive from Windows. In

2. Snow Leopard supports it natively (if you turn it on)

I have not tried this as I am accustomed to the older MacFUSE / NTFS-3g method above. Apparently to do this, you must uninstall NTFS-3g.

Again, I haven’t tried this method, but here’s some detailed instructions on how to do it…
http://www.macosxhints.com/article.php?story=20090913140023382
http://forums.macrumors.com/showthread.php?t=785376

Having problems mounting a NTFS drive?

I have experienced a situation where OSX shows you the following error message (if you have MacFUSE installed):

The problem I encountered wouldn’t let me do the mount -t ntfs-3g -o force. Terminal kept shooting back proper usage options. I was lost until I found an article on the very simple “ntfsfix” command. You see, the reason why your NTFS drive doesn’t mount automatically is b/c you didn’t unmount it properly from Windows (like me, you probably just yanked the USB cable). At any rate the fix is quite simple. Fire up Terminal and type the following:


sudo /usr/local/bin/ntfsfix /dev/disk1s1


The result will look something like this:


Mounting volume… FAILED
Attempting to correct errors…
Processing $MFT and $MFTMirr…
Reading $MFT… OK
Reading $MFTMirr… OK
Comparing $MFTMirr to $MFT… OK
Processing of $MFT and $MFTMirr completed successfully.
Setting required flags on partition… OK
Going to empty the journal ($LogFile)… OK
NTFS volume version is 3.1.
NTFS partition /dev/disk1s1 was processed successfully.


All you have to do now is reboot your machine and voila! Your NTFS drive should appear in Finder.

Many people have been curious how DVS (digital vinyl systems) such as Traktor and Serato stack up to each with regard to scratching. Qbert chimes in with a brief comparison video…

His basic summary is that he likes both, but prefers Traktor.

He demonstrates how Serato can’t handle slow scratches as well and the sound quality isn’t quite as good as Traktor. We all know that Serato is big in the United States and Traktor is huge in Europe. All that might be changing with cats like Craze, Klever and Qbert touting Traktor. What do you guys think?