Turntable MIDI Controller With Waveform

This is a MIDI controller turntable with waveform preview.

You can scratch your music and waveform with this turntable using your mouse. Although this uses the mouse it was built with the intention of using some sort of hand tracking like leap motion.

First there are a few steps involved to make this work as controller for your favorite dj software. You can certainly use your built in mic and scratch your waveform but it works better if you route your system audio into Vuo.

To route your system audio into Vuo I use Existential Audio Black Hole rather than building the program from source you can download the binary here: installer. I opted for the later option and choose just the 2 channel installer.

Once you have installed Existential Audio Black Hole open your systems Audio MIDI Setup. Find this by hitting apple or command and space bar then type Audio MIDI and your spotlight should pop it up. Make a multi-output device by clicking the plus button. Choose to add Black Hole it should look something like this.

Disregard the Soundflower drivers that show up in my multi-output set up, they are not being used. Now you can select the multi-output in your sound preferences. Once you select this multi-output as your driver it will send what ever sound is playing on your system to black hole and to your speakers so you can hear it at the same time.

While in Audio MIDI Setup we also need to turn on our system MIDI bus. Choose window MIDI Studio or Command #2. Make sure you turn on your IAC bus and it is checked off to be online.

Now you have all the components ready to run the turntable in Vuo. The last thing to set up is your dj software. This will vary depending on what software you use but any MIDI capable software should work. Im using Djay software in this example. This is how I have the MIDI configured for IAC bus 1.

Notice how I have the type of CC controller set to rotary absolute with very low speed and set to very smooth. If you don’t see MIDI CC #100 in your dj softwares MIDI mapping setup you might first need to send from Vuo. So run the composition and just scratch once with it and it should then send a MIDI signal for your software to learn. If not manually select MIDI CC #100.

Thats it you should be all set up to scratch. Inside the Vuo composition you can set the published port BPM to sync the rotating graphics to your track. Feel free to add auto BPM detection here if you don’t want to manually enter the BPM. Then select your audio device Black Hole from the audio device menu and should then see a waveform emerge around the turntable if you have audio playing like the picture below.

turntableBlackHole.vuo (28.1 KB)

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Any questions feel free to ask in the comments.

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