According to the Numark support forum, it will be possible in the near future.

Apparently it is possible now to control CD-ROM drives with it. But this is something discovered by users and neither intended nor recommended by Numark.

**EDIT**




I misunderstood this. The firmware upgrade will be for controlling USB CD-ROM drives and not the drawer units from twin CD players.

any update on when this will be released though.........

... does add another dimension to the player ?

It is still under development and will be announced on the Numark forum.

Should be fairly soon.

When its remembered that the Numark D2 (d-squared) only has USB 1.1 (1.5mbits/sec = 192kbp/sec) transfers, as opposed to USB 2.0 (12mbits/sec = 1.5mb/sec) and that audio coming off of a single speed UNpitched (0.00%) needs 1.2mbit/sec - some performance issues come to mind.

Instantly, I doubt that 2 x cd-rom drives could be managed at once on the d2 - let alone play audio from one cd-rom drive and cue the 2nd cd-rom drive.

Similar issues come to mind with one usb source , such as a hard drive is already playing. Add +pitch control (data coming in faster) and the peformance maths get worse.

Still, maybe if they (numark) limit the pitch % range(s) available on the cd-rom drive, and or/on the hard-drive pitch % when a cd-rom is detected...or, if they launch their own cd-rom drive specifically for the task, with certain additional elements on-board - then some, if not all of these transfer speed issues might be resolvable.

I bow to your superior knowledge on this.

However, you doubted that the D2 would be able to incorporate decent pitch lock but the Numark team managed it.

We'll, the word "decent" is the bit that I'd sructinise there. I've heard it running and seen some other data on it and D2s key adjust when time-stretching (eg: when doing minus pitch ranges) is quite tainted.

The other option was that Numarks D2 had key adjust HARDWARE in it all along, right from day 1, but they software disabled it at launch for some reason - eg: perhaps conflicted with some other feature, until that other features routines got re-written on an earlier update, permitting the hardware key adjust to be switched back on.

Sounds interesting.
I think it's amazing when the third parties 'get that little bit more' out of a system.

As suggested, if the pitch feature is reduced, could always stretch the source recordings 'plus or minus' to compensate!!

Well I've found it to be fine, although I haven't used it to extremes in either + or - .

Of course it's not as well specified as the Denon but for my purposes it works well and costs a lot less.

Here's your answer, courtesy of Rob Voisey of Numark, who heads the D2 development team and was once with D&M

"USB 2.0 Low Speed is 1.5Mbps, Full Speed is 12Mbps and High Speed is 480Mbps. D2 is Full Speed specifically because that's all that's needed to play two uncompressed PCM tracks at maximum tempo. Although it's hardly relevant, I'll also correct the statement about connecting multiple drives. Each USB port has its own controller (there is no hub in the player) so full bandwidth is independently available to each port.

CD playback works fine (and is in Beta right now). Playing from two different CD drives at the same time is no problem, and likewise for any other combination of optical, flash and magnetic media.

Key Lock is implemented entirely in software - it's really not an intensive algorithm, probably around 25 times less intensive than normal pitch shifting (which requires a resampler, for which we have a DSP). I believe the quality of keylock on D2 is comparable with other products that use time slicing, that being the vast majority of hardware players and also many PC packages (such as MixMeister, which is famous for its time stretching). The rule of thumb is that tempo shifting beyond about 10% can evoke audible artefacts. We have some incremental enhancements planned which will get keylock as good as a time slice implementation can get, by identifying measures and synchronising slices around the beats. Firmware 1.09 has increased slice density which improves quality when stretching pure tones such as vocals or classical guitar."

Hope that clears it up for you.

Those artefacts are the tainting to which I was refering to above on the D2.




Depending on genres played, and as mobile DJs I would say that most of the music that most of us play contains vocals, Numarks 1.09 firmware to try to improve vocals during Key Adjusting is fairly important. However, attempting to acheive this by increasing slice density could have an impact on processor usage. Whether or not that impact will be noticed remains will be another "wait and see" test. Similarly, "identifying measures and synchronising slices around the beats" sounds like it relies on auto-bpm detection - which isn't a strong point for any DJ manufacturer across the board. But, I wish Numark well with it - they're a great bunch.

This is an incredible moment in time for the move away from Make-do and Windows based methods of playing tunes from hard drives, to proper hard drives controllers for all companies involved.

An exciting time, during which a lot can, and no doubt will change - hopefully (from the users point of view) without undue compromise.