Parallel ports, especially, are a dying breed today, so the chances of being able to use this controller and software in the future fade as PC technology moves on. The software and hardware is now 15 years old, and it shows: the controller connects using a serial port (when did you last see a PC with one of those?) and the software has…wait for it…a dongle! Yes, just like in the bad old days, it has a device which plugs into the parallel port on the PC, and if it’s not found, the software won’t run. So why has the failure of my old workshop machine reminded me of this? Because, once upon a time, it was my media PC, and it ran the DJ software. The hardware is a solidly-built control panel which connects to the PC, on which runs some software which does all the audio processing. At the time I found a product from a German company which did exactly what I wanted: it was a combination of hardware and software called BPM Studio which meant I could use MP3 files as if they were a professional CD player: cueing them, pitch-shifting, mixing and so on. In those days it was still fairly unusual to have music in MP3 format – the iPod wasn’t released until late 2001 – never mind being able to actually DJ with it. I was an early adopter of computer-based DJ technology.
Back in the halcyon days of the late 90s and early 2000s, I used to DJ a bit. The recent demise of my old workshop PC has spurred me into action.
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