Here’s a neat gadget for those of you looking for an easy way to transfer your vinyl to a digital format. Ion now has a turntable with a USB interface called the iTTUSB. (It’s cooler if it starts with a lower case “i”) There are a multitude of titles available on vinyl. Some DJ’s swear by it, and often many of the best tracks are instant sellouts. Here in Vegas, I have had the pleasure of meeting several very good DJ’s, and they typically carry a wide range of media. From milk crates full of vinyl to cd’s and computers to playback, mix, and organize their media.

I’m not really into the club scene, but there have been some really cool products for this market segment in the past couple of years. Many still border on pro-sumer and offer are not a robust as pro gear, but the innovation of the product evolution for a market that is changing very rapidly is impressive.

Take the Scratch Box by Serato (and distributed by Rane) I saw this a couple of years ago at LDI. I don’t personally have any need for it, but I gotta say it it’s a great deal of fun, and in the hands of the right DJ presents a host of possibilities. Scratch Live lets one use turntables (or CD turntables) to control music playback from a PC.

The Scratch LIVE interface connects almost any computer to an ordinary pair of turntables or CD players, and the software faithfully tracks every subtle movement of the stylus on the included control records. The same movement is then instantly applied to any digital audio file in the user’s collection producing a sound and feel that is indistinguishable from vinyl.

If you pick up the needle and drop it the digital file follows. Grabbing the platter and stopping it applies the physics of the motion to the digital file. Moving the needle on the control records produces the same function through the digital file. It’s fun, and allows vinyl like control over digital files.

How about the Pioneer DVJ-X1. Allows control of DVD video in the same manner as a CD turntable. Scratch, rewind, fast-forward, sample, loop, mix digital video and audio. Yet another product that held my attention for longer than it should have.