If not why not ..

Well on Saturday we had the 10 year anniversary party of my Frisbee club Klopstock. I was asked if I could maybe throw on a few songs, but it was clear that there would be an army of people with iPod's and iPhone's standing by to also get going and I wasn't in the mood to lug all my stuff up on the hill where the party was held. So I pondered how to be able to still cue up songs and also how not to be confined to sitting behind the DJ booth. I have used Djay (that software seems a bit dead in the water, huh?) before which lets you use an USB audio device along with the standard output. So what I have done in the past was use a bluetooth USB adapter from callpod called "drone". This way I could hook up headphones view bluetooth for monitoring. However this would still require sitting next to my laptop at the DJ "booth". I came up with an alternative solution that works, well sort of, using the Airfoil app by the good folks at RogueAmoeba. Actually I came up with a hack but I got a reply for my question I send off on Friday evening by Saturday that makes it a lot less hacky.

So here is how it goes:
1. In Traktor, set your audio interface to SoundFlower 16 Ch and assign the master and monitor to different channels
2. In Airfoil, set your source to SoundFlower 16 Ch
3. Make sure you are not transmitting and select "Advanced Source Settings..." from the Edit menu.
4. Under Input Device Settings, set the left and right channels to the channels you want.
5. Click OK and start transmitting as normal.

So far so good. I can now hook up the iPhone to the PA and walk around with my laptop, cue up tracks into the playlist and set fade in fade out points. Due to the latency of 1-2 seconds its impossible to do any real DJing though, well I guess it should be possible but will have a hard time interacting with the audience. To me this seems needlessly high and maybe there is some way to fiddle with this, but I did not get it any lower even with an adhoc network.

I see opportunity here though. It would be nice if NI would come out with an iPhone app that would allow me to browse my playlist and cue up tracks, essentially turning the entire setup around. This way I could walk around with just my iPhone and make sure the music keeps on playing, but whenever I feel like it I could return to the DJ booth and really DJ properly. So in a way I am asking for a combination of Airfoil and iTM DJ with the addition of a real track browser.