Cortex at BPM...

[DJ Jules]

Virtual DJ?!
I'll have you know I'm the real thing. I press buttons, not click mice.

Sorry... Virtual DJ and a MIDI controller of some kind. Then you'd have buttons and wouldn't have to look at VDJ's screens.

PS if I understood any of what you posted, I'd be able to comment.

...and that'd be why there's a hole in the market which suppliers don't seem to see (for people who want to switch to Mp3 or Hard drive based playout, but don't mess around setting up a PC, Controller, etc and/or spend a ton of money). I dunno, maybe the hole between the high end £1000+ HDC products (like the Pioneer MEP7000 / CDJ900 / CDJ2000) and the bottom £450 or less end of the market (Cortex HDC/Numark/etc) is being filled by mid-range CD decks?

Julian

[Excalibur]

Incidentally, I've had informal confirmation that Numark aren't pulling the DDS or DDS80 range of products, it's actually retailers pulling them or selling them off due to lack of demand. The word from our local supplier is that quite a few retailers bought a stack of DDS80's when they first came out and have been watching them gather dust in the store room while the much cheaper 3U DDS standalone unit is the one which has been selling, hence the heavy discounting to get shot of them before they devalue completely (After all, who wants to pay £350 for a USB CDROM drive and a tiny 80Gb HDD?). But Numark themselves are still making and selling the units.

Julian

When you can fit ones of your own choosing for about £90, with around 500Gb

It still baffles me, but then again, a lot of things do nowadays. When I got my Cortex, the retailer said they were outselling the D2 by two to one.

[DJ Jules]

When you can fit ones of your own choosing for about £90, with around 500Gb

It still baffles me, but then again, a lot of things do nowadays. When I got my Cortex, the retailer said they were outselling the D2 by two to one.

Yup, you can fit any standard IDE hard disk into the cradles, and the cradles are about £25.00. But then why pay for something proprietary when you can buy a 320Gb USB hard disk for £50 or so and then you can just plug it into a USB port on your PC to load it with music (whereas with the caddy drive you have to transfer the music to USB stick, and then use the DDS to move it to the internal HDD, and then wait an hour or two while it analyses and indexes it - DDS owners, please correct me if I'm wrong, but that's the impression I get from reading the manual?)

Julian

[rob1963]

When I got my Cortex, the retailer said they were outselling the D2 by two to one.

And yet there are LOTS more than twice the number of dodgy Cortex threads than dodgy D2 threads!

[Excalibur]

Yup, you can fit any standard IDE hard disk into the cradles, and the cradles are about £25.00. But then why pay for something proprietary when you can buy a 320Gb USB hard disk for £50 or so and then you can just plug it into a USB port on your PC to load it with music (whereas with the caddy drive you have to transfer the music to USB stick, and then use the DDS to move it to the internal HDD, and then wait an hour or two while it analyses and indexes it - DDS owners, please correct me if I'm wrong, but that's the impression I get from reading the manual?)

Julian

With my setup I use USB sticks to get them to the HD's in my cases, but I use the laptop for transferring them and indexing. Fast.
With the all in one DDS rig, would there not be an USB cable so you could do the same? Seems logical.

Rob, bog off.

[DJ Jules]

With my setup I use USB sticks to get them to the HD's in my cases, but I use the laptop for transferring them and indexing. Fast.
With the all in one DDS rig, would there not be an USB cable so you could do the same? Seems logical.

Rob, bog off.

I might have missed something in the manual (like the drawer with the HDD and CD-ROM just connects to the controller with a USB cable - i.e. to connect to the hard disk, remove USB cable from controller, connect to laptop, job done?)

At the moment I have a small portable USB hard disk which I keep separate to my Cortex indoors so I never have to mess around with the actual controller when I'm preparing. I just attach the hard disk to my laptop, copy tracks to the hard disk, create playlists using winamp or Windows Media Player (in .m3u format) and then take the hard disk with me when I go out and attach it to the player when I set up. Simples

Julian