Gadgetell | Tech News, Reviews, and Interesting Things

If you own any iPod short of a Shuffle, you know you’ve played around with the click-wheel at least once or twice, and pretended to be a scratch DJ (If you blew off your ears with the volume control, believe me when I say I feel your pain.) Well, it turns out someone has taken this idea, ran with it, and made it work. A student from IAMAS Japan, Shosei Oishi, has come up with an interesting little software he calls iScratch. iScratch is based on a re-written version of the iPod’s pre-installed open source audio play program from Podzilla, and uses motions made on the touch-wheel to scratch audio files. Oishi has designed it to work with both Podzilla GUI installation and Linux OS Kernel.

So far, Oishi’s brain child is only in its beta stage, and he plans to put up downloads for it on his school webpage. However long that takes may be too long, seeing how it’s quickly gaining popularity across the pond. Oishi has already exhibited iScratch at the past Takeaway Festival in London; and will be displaying as one of the main exhibits at the upcoming Cybersonica Festival in London this May.