DJ Tech : TouchOSC: The Future Of DJing and Production Is Here

First there was the turntable… Then came the CDJ… Next came the controller… And now… TouchOSC!

What is TouchOSC?

"TouchOSC is a modular OSC and MIDI control surface for iPhone / iPod Touch / iPad. It supports sending and receiving Open Sound Control messages over a Wi-Fi network using the UDP protocol and supports both CoreMIDI and the Line 6 MIDI Mobilizer interfaces for sending and receiving MIDI messages."

What does this mean?

It means the future is here! You can now control your DJ software, programs like Traktor, Ableton, Logic Pro, or any other software and hardware that implement the OSC or MIDI protocols form your touch iPad/iPhone/iPad Touch/Android wirelessly. Not only can you use pre-designed templates but you can create templates yourself in the TouchOSC Editor and map them to control your software.

Now I know some of you are probably a little skeptical. When I first discovered TouchOSC I was a little skeptical and questions that needed answering:

1. Was this TouchOSC thing really going to work?
2. Would I even be able to implement TouchOSC into my setup?
3. What about latency? How responsive would it be especially since it's wireless?

After installing the TouchOSC App on my iPad and downloading all the necessary components, including the Traktor Pro 2 template of my choice, it took me about ten minutes to get it all set up. Once set up I opened Traktor Pro 2, tapped the iPad to pull a track over to the deck, tapped play, and I was in the mix.

I couldn't believe my eyes. Not only was this thing working flawlessly but latency was virtually non-existent (thanks to an ad-hoc network and coremidi). I could now kick back on the couch with my feet up and experiment with effects, launch samples, and mix with total disregard for human life, with nothing but an iPad and a laptop.

What role will TouchOSC play in the future of DJing?

Everybody already knows that things are going digital. Obviously a touch surface like an iPad can't ever replace the feel of EQ/Filter knobs, crossfader, or the decks for scratch DJs but what it can do is compliment your hardware and give you a tremendous amount of control over your software. For me specifically I will use TouchOSC to give me more individual control of the sample decks in Traktor Pro 2 as well as control over the effects (the XY pads in some of the templates are insane). Also TouchOSC makes a great sequencer for programs like Ableton.