Is Apple planning a multi-touch DJ application?
Read Apple’s patent application, and let me know what you think:
[0145]FIG. 23 illustrates another embodiment of the invention for manipulating the replay and recording of audio or musical files. As shown in FIG. 23, a music application 830 can display a pair of virtual turntables 842 and 843, on which two musical records 834 and 835 are playing, the records being one of a single or a LP record. The records 834 and 835 can be graphical representations of a digital musical file (e.g., song A and song B) that are being replayed via the music application 830. In other words, the records can be graphical imprints of the musical files as if the musical files were imprinted on physical records. [0146]Like a pair of physical turntables, stylus 844 and stylus 855 can be graphical icon indications of a playback queue, the position of which can be varied by touching the queue on a touch sensitive display screen and dragging the icon to the desired position on the graphical record. The moving of the stylus would cause a jump in the playback point of the corresponding song, as on a physical turntable. [0147]Also like a pair of physical turn tables start/stop buttons 838 and 839 can be touched by one or more fingers to toggle the start or stop/pause of the song reproduction. Speed variants bars 840 and 841 can be linearly adjusted to control the playback speed of the songs. Windows 831 and 833 can graphically reproduce the frequency representation of the reproduced songs, while window 832 can display the frequency representation of the actual output of the music application 832, which can be simply one of the songs being reproduced, or a mixed/combination of the songs. Mixing/pan bar 850 can be manipulated to modulate or demodulate the two songs being reproduced. [0148]During song reproduction, the records 834 and 835 can be manipulated similar to a physical record. For instance, rapid back and forth movement of a record can cause the sound effect of a record “scratching,” as disc jockeys often do on physical turn tables.
It sure sounds like a multi-touch DJ program; but Apple may just be using patents to stake out some territory.
I’m not sure about that turntable on the left, though…..
I wonder where you saw this story? 😉
Skratchworx –
Sorry I didn’t make this clear earlier. I saw this in Google Reader via several sites, including Skratchworx & MacNN. I added a via link to make this clear.
Thanks for your feedback.
This looks like it could be pretty cool, but you’d have to have a monster laptop for this to work, and I can’t see it working as well as just having a cheap DJ control surface.