Using Beatmania controller on a PC

[randombs]

it's the old one for the playstation, i'm just asking before i go out to buy it.

anyway, has anyone had any luck using one on a PC, and if so, can the turntable be used with any regular PC DJ software?

i'm not interested in playing beatmania itself, although once i have the controller i'll probably end up getting it.

thanks in advance. sorry for being so vague

[phillai]

I'm gonna try my DJ Pro Beatmania controller to see if it works on the Beatmania games in Mame...

[Magnakai]

This is all hypothetical, but you should be able to hook it up and use a third party program to translate the controller movements into MIDI.
You could then use it as a controller for something like Ableton, Traktor, etc.
Quite a fun idea actually. I have the old, old one from the PAL Beatmania release.
Might be worth getting a PS-USB adapter and giving it a go.

[randombs]

well i got the beatmania controller (for free, in fact)

tried it on the pc using my xbox magicbox and xbcd, and it wouldn't work - would flicker all the buttons and keep turning on and off. but for that brief period i managed to ascertain that spinning the turntable translates to up and down on the dpad.

maybe i'd have more luck trying a proper ps2-usb adapter...

[Magnakai]

Here you go, this should help a bit:

http://www.ableton.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=55664

The site with Rejoice as linked to in that post is down, so get it from here:

http://www.dioramadesign.net/blog/rejoice-midi-software/

[randombs]

cheers for those links! had a read and sounds interesting, even if i don't get the beatmania pad working, i'm sure i could find a use for that...

[Magnakai]

No problem! The Ableton forum's a pretty neat place.
I wonder if you could use the turntable as a continuous midi controller, like a knob... I'm guessing that if you keep spinning it, it'll be like pressing up or down over and over again, which is a weird behaviour. I can't think of anything useful for it right now, but maybe there's something useful there.

Actually, you could assign it to the scrub thingy in Ableton Live, and then actually use it to scrub through the tracks! Ooh! That sounds like fun!