MIXVIBES Dj Community old forum

I'm usually working with timecode at home or when using the existing equipment in a venue, all wired up with a U-Mix 44.

At home I got two Numark NDS-400 players and they're able to play back (only) MP3s from a USB stick. I want to be easy on the lasers they're using for playing back CDs and thus tried to copy the timecode onto the USB sticks. I've ripped the timecode CDs using CDex and the best-possible MP3 settings (320kbit/s CBR and 48kHz sampling rate) and put them onto the USB stick.

When playing back the MP3-Timecode file from the stick, Cross recognizes the timecode signal when calibrating in the settings, it looks the same as it looks when playing back the CD timecode on the same player. The setting for the signal type remains at "Mixvibes CD".

But here's the funny part: The timecode seems to run backwards!

If I jump to the middle of the timecode track and let the player run in "reverse" mode, the MP3 in Cross is playing forward. If the player runs forward, the track is playing backwards.

Scratching, cueing, etc. is working correctly (but also reversed) in relative, absolute and flexible timecode mode.

Has anybody ever been able to use an MP3 timecode signal that works correctly?

I'm sure it is not the best idea to open the MP3 file in a sound editing tool and reversing it...

Haven''t heard before of anyone trying to use tc as MP3 with success on any DVS..

The Cross tc signal is a sinus signal of 1.300hz. What likely happens in the converted situation is that a different frequency is read due to losses in converting and/or a frequency that isn't equal to x*1300Hz.

There is good reason the CD's are wav files of quite some size.

So you might be lucky if a reverse file helps you out, but likely every now and then the results aren't as expected.

I have heard about people using timecode MP3s for DVS before. People who use old Technics DZ1200s like to do that so they can effectively get a CDJ with a rotating jogwheel like an NS7. They only support 128kbps MP3s too, yet people can get it to work. I had pondered getting one and trying it with Cross as I have a penchant for weird hardware...

tron wrote:I'm sure it is not the best idea to open the MP3 file in a sound editing tool and reversing it...

It'd be pretty quick to try though.

discopex wrote:

tron wrote:I'm sure it is not the best idea to open the MP3 file in a sound editing tool and reversing it...

It'd be pretty quick to try though.

Yeah, but there's also a pink noise (?) in the background containing the absolute position. Maybe I'll just generate an hour of 1300Hz mono sine wave and save that as MP3. Maybe that'll do for relative mode. :-)

It's new for me on usb stick but on cd and lp's reverse mode is due to the stereo channel the answer is reverse Left and right channel