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A rugged, organized USB digital music controller with CBR and VBR MP3 compatibility.
The Cortex HDC-500 is a USB equipped combination of brains and brawn that can handle a beating and your beats while controlling your digital music. Knowing that the DJ environment can sometimes be a bumpy one, the Cortex engineers placed the brains of this digital music controller inside a fine steel frame with ABS plastics and ensured the buttons, faders, and jog wheel are tough enough to handle the abuse of nightly use.
So you know about the "hard" part of this piece of hardware, but what about the "ware"? Well, first off the HDC-500 can play all your MP3s, whether they be CBR or VBR at any bitrate up to 320kps, with two high-speed USB ports (one front, one rear) and internal support for recognizing multiple storage devices like iPods or external CD/DVD drives. It can also handle store-bought CDs, or your own MP3 and WAV music files via a USB CD/DVD-ROM drive. Once you've got your music collection together, utilizing the free, downloadable Cortex database software and an optional USB keyboard, you can search through even the most massive libraries of music within seconds by artist, title, genre, album, keyword, phrase and even BPM, much the way you would on a portable music player. The radiant 4-line, 80-character LCD display makes this easy to do whether at home or in the confines of a dimly lit DJ booth. And the frame accurate searching means you'll get pinpoint search, cue and playback at all times. Savable user configurations are also a convenient benefit.
Once you've got the music going, the playback screen displays detailed track information such as artist, track title, pitch, time elapsed/remaining, file format (MP3 or WAV), genre, track length and waveform display. When you have two separate devices supplying tunes, a simple click of the Info button for a corresponding side (front or rear) will cause the ID3 tag information for that particular song to pop up. You can play your tunes in single, continuous, or shuffle mode, with customizable fade-ins and outs, with no fear of digital file corruption from sudden accidental shutdown with the HDC-500's exclusive protection feature. You can also create seamless loops. During playback, the Jog Wheel provides lightning fast forward or rewind, and in Select Mode allows you to search, edit, and cue up your favorite tracks. In Scratch Effect Mode, it's super sensitivity offers realistic "vinyl" scratching of your CDs and MP3s. Lastly, there is a pitch fader for a smoother transition, a pitch button for quick bursts of fine tuning, and the jog wheel for a more casually adjustment, all three options which give you a range of 8%, 16%, and 24%.
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