In one week, the second BPM show will be underway, and if you want to save £4 on the ticket price, the deadline for advance sales is Monday at 10am. The busy BPM beavers have to drop them into envelopes and put them in the post so that you can get them in time. Remember - every ticket bought through skratchworx helps us grow.

Click the above banner or this link to make sure you get your tickets before the Monday deadline.

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Just about everything is in place for the previously posted BPM battle. Sponsors - check. Enormous bloody pile of booty - check. Stand with 3 sets of decks - check. Competitors - Jon1st, Rasp, Johnny1Move, Sinical, Sole1, Etch-A-Sqratch, Loop Skywalker, Furious P, Weetamix... wait a minute... there's one missing. Bugger. So it seems that there's a space for the Saturday battle. Do you think you've got what it takes to step up? I'm not just giving these prizes away you know.

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Promo distribution used to be a matter of driving round record shops with a vanful of white label vinyl. Replace the white van with the interweb and vinyl with files and you've got Serato's Whitelabel - the now out of seemingly perpetual beta distribution channel that gives Scratch Live users a veritable shedload of free promo material. Yep - it's now official.

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The BPM show is just around the corner. And what can you expect to see there? Oh I'm sure some manufacturer or other will have some sort of new hotness on display. But who cares about such tawdry things when I've organised a battle stretching across both days! And there's one place left on the Saturday event so read on if you fancy entering. But be warned - the entrants so far are all DMC level.

You can get your tickets by clicking on the BPM banner in the right hand column or click this link.

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Part of the fun of being a DJ (well vinyl ones anyway) is crate digging - the act of fruitlessly sifting through racks of crap in your local record store for the new hotness, or better still hunting down real gems in charity shops and car boot sales for not much cash. But it's not without it's darker side, which has been rather disturbingly illustrated in a set of images from Dutch artist and obvious digger Stefan Glerum.

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The DMC finals start tonight. 2 days and nights of world class turntablism get under way at the indig02 arena in the currently depressed docklands area of Landan village. Please be careful making your way through the streets to the event - take time to look up and avoid the suicidal city traders currently losing their and your shirts in the name of making what money is left in the world. Don't fret - just get thee to docklands and shout for your countrymen. Knowing London, that means the UK will probably be in the minority then.

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As I travel around forums, there's almost always a "Show your setup" thread, detailing the OCD stylings or borderline public health offence level rigs that exist in people's cellars and bedrooms. But surely Paul Oakenfold's little setup is the DJ equivalent of top trumps, essentially pwning just about everyone else everywhere.

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So the worst kept secret in recent DJ history is out. The full details of the teased and allegedly accidentally leaked Stanton "DaScratch" (sooo known as the SCS.3d from now on) are finally available for you to pour over and understand. Putting the somewhat questionable name to one side, the SCS.3d puts a fresh touchy feely spin on conventional MIDI controllers and via the archaic but still popular protocol of MIDI lets you take control of your software of choice.

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Christmas is much closer than you think. Trust me - before you know it, you'll be scratching your head to try and think of something to give that favourite DJ in your life. Sure, you could grab them some vinyl or slipmats, but no doubt you'd pick the wrong ones. But the choice for DJ watches is somewhat limited - until Flud watches came along. Check out these bad boys.

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They say that all good things come in threes, so rounding off the DJ software updates, djdecks gets updated to milestone release rather than the lesser point releases. This is more about making thing better than fixing problems.

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I need to get me some sort of software release counter graphic, because you can be damned sure that the planets align and make companies get updates out all at the same time. As sure as night follow day, you can almost guarantee that if SSL gets updated, then out comes a Traktor upgrade as well. Or vice versa. This time, Traktor and its DVS sibling Scratch gets an oh so minor upgrade, just fixing a enough bugs that can be counted on one hand.

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Serato's Scratch Live gets another final release under its belt in the shape of v1.8.2. Classed as a maintenance update, it finally embraces the world of 64 bit Vista as well as adding support for the Pioneer CDJ-400.

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Ean Golden from djtechtools is a man with an unnatural love, nay obsession with the Vestax VCI-100. This has seen him win much favour with Vestax, to the point where they even made him an outrageously sexy special edition VCI for him to peddle through his site, but not before he'd done a mod of nextlevelness on his own VCI - arcade buttons. Awesome. But now he's applied his skills and hands-on user experience to try and make the VCI-100 even better and has come up with JogGrips, which are essentially nobbly rubber disks that are stickier than my pants at NAMM.

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I've always steered clear of DVS systems - partly because my computer is an antique, partly because I don't trust computers to stay stable for more than a minute (yes, even Macs) and also because I can't abide the whole interaction with the computer rather than with my DJ gear. I know this makes me appear as some of luddite, but that's the way it is. But something has come along that seemingly scrubs one of the above caveats from the list. Stanton’s new controller in currently in beta, but looking like an answer to my quest.

UPDATE: Fresh video added!

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As suspected, that helza funky dope faceplate on the reborn A&H xone:02 didn't exactly meet with the approval of the scratchernet. Both here and on djforums.com, the general opinion was that they should stop, right now, walk away from the faceplate and leave it the hell alone. So seeing as I was at PLASA, and so were A&H, I figured that just in case they missed it, I'd share the feelings of the world with them. This I did and back came some insight into the decision.

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So... the NS7 has been uncaged, and this DJ hack spent a fair amount of time on it at PLASA 2008 yesterday. I pressed lots of buttons, scratched lots of noises and walked away very impressed. I was subsequently less impressed with my video camera though. It's been a tad iffy since Christmas, and while a gentle smack to the side of it usually kicks it into action, it generally operates at around 50% functionality, and there's no guaranteeing what will or won't work properly. Sadly the sound was very VERY bad on this clip so apologies up front for that. But read on for my thoughts.

UPDATED: Added another Youtube vid.

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The big day has come - when the Numark NS7 was coaxed from behind it's glass force field and allowed itself to be petted by the great unwashed. Yes people, not 1, but 2 NS7s were at PLASA, one of which was fully functioning and quite happy to have me abuse it on and off for a full hour. And I got video of me attempting to cut on it as well, but that won't be up until tomorrow, as will the rest of this NS7 story. There's only so much I can do from train. But read on for a new feature of the NS7...

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As expected, PLASA was a barren wasteland in the new gear department. But as dependable as always, Numark pulled a small but heavy MIDI controlling rabbit out of the hat in the shape of OMNI CONTROL - that's all caps to denote its dominance over it's weaker and pathetic sibling Total Control, which is all plastic and puny in comparison. OMNI CONTROL would clearly take Total Control in a fight.

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Something like 85% of the readership will have no idea of the weather in the UK right now. It's been bad enough for me to watch the rail news and up to yesterday afternoon, it was touch and go as to whether I would make it to PLASA. Well as you can see from above, it's a tad quiet on this late booked train but I'm on my way to see the meagre collection of nextlevelness at Earls Court. I'm aware of at least one thing you not seen before and look forward to having a dabble and reporting back later - hopefully via free wifi just like the one that this message is coming to you from now.

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So it's a biggie. Yes indeedy peeps - your humble purveyor of nextlevelness has reached the grand old age of 5 years old! And just take a look at the cake above - how awesome is that! Sadly it's just some image I found on Google rather than being in front of me and ready to stuff into my face. So feel free to send us some birthday messages, and a little something else to help build the future skratchworx as well.

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The DMC world finals are happening in just a couple of weeks, and for those of us who can't make it to the finals, live streaming from the event has been a total godsend. Sadly however, it's not happening this year.

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Some news stories keep coming around and around, and this is a perennial showtime favourite. Having first seen this some 18 months ago at Messe 2007 and then at PLASA 2007, and then one more time at Messe 2008, it seems that Allen & Heath are finally actually releasing the Pro X Fade endowed xone:02, completely with funky fresh faceplate. And when I say releasing, it's available right away apparently, although I've not tracked it down on any dealer sites yet.

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Nations have indigenous cottage industries - France makes great wine, Greece makes wonderful Olive Oil - and New Zealand apparently makes video software. Just a hop, skip and a jump away from Serato HQ is Inklen, who have unleashed a whole new Mac based video mixing solution called MixEmergency. Leaning heavily on using MIDI controllers, it also rather cheekily uses Scratch Live as an external controller too.

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While it seems bleeding obvious to almost everyone concerned that PLASA isn't the place to be seen in the DJ trade anymore, the few that actually do have some stuff to show off, or generally feel like giving the dead horse one last flogging, have requested the presence of skratchworx at the wake. So I'm finding every which way possible to make the outrageously expensive English rail tickets just that little bit cheaper. All I can say is that it had better be worth my while. And if you think I'm talking about you, then I probably am.

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The clear lines between DJ, musician and performance artist just got a little more blurred with this video. Eboman samples live audio and video and with his SenSorSuit, he dances like your dad at a wedding after a few beers and puts together a totally live set with audio samples played on the drum kit. I'm especially impressed with the pseudo scratching performed with the live video grabs.

Thanks to DJ Phat B for the heads up.

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While I wait and wait and wait for Vestax to drop a VCI-300 off on my doorstep, drool over this clip featuring the ever present Sam Gribben from Serato, and Deeznotes (hey Deez! ) showing just what the VCI/ITCH combo can do. I think I let a little bit of wee go.

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It’s not so often when Mac only DJ software comes along, but DJ-1800 is one such application. Back when I had a job and pretended to work while idly passing the time surfing versiontracker.com, DJ-1800 seemed to pop up all the time, but for whatever reason, it never made it to hard disk for any length of time, as my scratch DJ mentality simply dismissed it as worthless to my life. But now I wear the all-seeing hat, I’ve downloaded the spanking new v3.2 to see if it impressed me more than it used to.

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While new hardware might be increasingly thin on the ground these days, you can be sure that new and improved software is popping up all the time. This is great for the scene, but a royal pain in the nuts as software is actually harder to review. But I'm not complaining as new DVS on the block - Quad - has now reached v2. Rebuilt from the ground up, Quad2 now comes with a Mac version, that so far has run pretty smoothly on my seemingly vintage Powerbook.

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In recent years, the European DJs have taken the scratch scene by storm, releasing their own new flavour of battle wax with a much more frantic and glitchy style. Leader of this new school is Le Jad - an atypical DJ and producer who dances very much to the beat of his own drum. His style has found favour with battle DJs and for the last 2 years has produced world title winning sets for Netik and Rafik respectively. But he does put out his own music and battle wax, and very kindly sent them to me. I figured I'd review them here while I work on hard on getting the skratch specific site up and running.

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At DJ Show North, I picked up a leaflet that piqued my interest and confused the hell out of me all at the same time. ProDub is essentially a music licence for UK DJs, that allows them to copy music they own to different formats for use in the public arena. Just because you own the vinyl, doesn't mean you can rip it and play it at the club apparently, and that's where this licence comes in. For £250 a year, you can convert 5000 different files, be it 1 track to 5 different devices, or full CDs to MP3. Each conversion counts towards the 5000. Tish and piffle I hear you mutter - why should I shell out for such a thing you're saying. Well read on - if you use music in a public place, you may well be obliged to carry a ProDub card or not get work in the future. It might just be that the MP3 police have you in their sights.

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