Yes, you can “tempo shift” a digital track up or down by whatever the percentage difference is between 33/45 (which, I think, is about 36%).
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And there isn’t any loss of sound quality? I mean, how far can you go without audible change in quality? I occasionally play around with playback speed on YT videos (0.75 or 1.25 equates roughly to that sort of percentage change) and there’s a noticeable alteration in sound quality when it gets slowed down.
I think there must be a technical loss of quality if you speed a digital track up, but I don’t think it would be noticeable. Just don’t delete the OG!
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Don’t tell anyone ‘cos I don’t want to lose all my analog cred, but within a month or so, once I’ve jumped through a few technical hoops, I’m going to put RekordBox on my laptop and take another look at it. After all I have about a gazillion mp3s.
Even without RekordBox I walk around with 7,000 songs in my pocket. It’s an amazing world.
Surely, if I were playing out I’d be laptop all the way. Just not necessary in my home studio, but humping crates around was always a drag. My good friend and rival, Cheb i Sabbah, was always really good at keeping up with the tech and cutting down on the load. Was very quick to switch from vinyl to CDs - this was long before CDJs, early ‘90s, played with little portable CD players. Then he took all the discs out of their jewel cases and carried everything around in thin plastic sleeves and a nice case. Last time I saw him, about 2005, he was just using a few CD-Rs with only the tracks he wanted. And he’d been DJing since the 1960s! A fascinating person. RIP.
In memory of Cheb, I will not be a dinosaur!
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I’ve been thinking it might be time for me to join the RekordBox revolution as well.
Also, that is a nice tribute to your friend. What would you recommend as a good starting point for Cheb I Sabbath?
My comments about Cheb i Sabbah were mostly based on his time as a club DJ prior to his recording CDs as a “name” artist. He’d mostly play Zairean, other African, rai, zouk, and so on. He sold cassettes out of the booth. I have a few still. We’d hang out together in the booth and sometimes I’d sub for him. However, naturally enough, I have his albums.
Personally, I most appreciate two of his “Indian” releases. Shri Durga was his first and, at the time, was something of an astonishing breakthrough. Still a classic, it came a few years after the initial “Asian Underground” excitement of Black Star Liner, Nitin Sawhney, and such. It’s fair to say that he moved the musical field forward with the album, although it would be silly to tag it as Asian Underground. Interestingly enough, he had a massive club night later at 1015 Folsom playing almost entirely to a South Asian crowd who came up from Silicon Valley for the gig. He also told me that he never made any money from the albums, but they were good as “calling cards” and helped him get more gigs.
The other Indian title is Devotion, his last album. Some were not wowed by this, but I find it a mature and elegant piece of work. Deep. He had a real if quirky appreciation for the spirituality of the place.
His best known album is La Kahena, based on North African music of the Maghreb. I like this one a lot as well. I am particularly amused by the opening shout out to him as producer from San Francisco using his real name, Serge.
Looks like you can buy any of these for almost nothing. His representation on Spotify is near complete, including the remix albums of Shri Durga and La Kahena, although I admit I’m not very enthused by them.
I’m sure he’d be totally rekordboxed by now!
I did load rekordbox (it’s all lowercase) on to my laptop. Few more hoops to jump through to make it work even at the most basic level. Waiting for a cable. I don’t think I have enough USB connections for the full performance glory, but I’m wading through it. Still hurts my eyes! And, I gotta say, it’s quite a learning curve, digitizing a lot of my music would be a time-consuming pain, and whether I’ll be bothered to go all the way with it is uncertain.
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Thanks for the thoughtful reviews. I’ll proceed confidently.
Thank you for posting this - downloaded a bunch of them at lunchtime and had a really entertaining afternoon!
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No idea if this was big back in the day, but I’ve only just discovered this. Perfection, although NFI when it’s appropriate to drop it. Ticks all the boxes for what makes House so damn good - Deep, Soulful, Emotional.
Credit to Lars Behrenroth, heard it on one of his recorded 4 hour sets.
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Never heard that, love it
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Great track. Dead pricey Ive just noticed too 
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This is very ‘Love on a Real Train’ by Tangerine Dream!
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Stumbled across this pop-dub-house odyssey the other day - loved the Luomo stuff 20 odd years ago but this one passed me by at the time
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