I came across Create Digital Music’s discussion of Native Instruments BeatPort SYNC. It has a lot of interesting features such as:
- Two-deck mixer with manual/automatic crossfader
- Pitch control
- Time-stretching and tempo detection, for smooth crossfades even if you don’t know what you’re doing (or you’re, say, folding laundry or cleaning your studio and want the software to DJ for you — it happens)
- Rip and burn CDs
- Access external devices for browsing and backup
- iTunes library integration (no playback support for DRMed tracks, though meta-data will appear)
For me, the time-stretching function would be welcome. Currently, if I need to slow something down, I have to drag it out of iTunes into Transcribe. That works well, but being able to do it within the program would be so much easier.
Alas, I wasn’t able to test it as it loaded fine, but proceeded to try to analyze my iTunes library, which, in it’s current size, could take days to do. But, this might be a good alternative to people who need pitch and tempo controls and like the iTunes type interface (who wouldn’t??)