It feels pretty much like playing with vinyl. You can do the same thing with digital rotary controllers but you just don't get the same touch with it. You can a

It feels pretty much like playing with vinyl. You can do the same thing with digital rotary controllers but you just don't get the same touch with it. You can also do some scratch tricks with them, which doesn't work that great with digital tools (perhaps it's better now). It's a matter of preference and getting used to. If you've never tried beatmixing vinyl, it's hard to explain... try it if you get a chance, it's super fun! (would be more fun if I didn't suck so bad at it). For a low-budget hacker solution, you can just obtain the time coded vinyls, use any reasonable USB audio interface with a RIAA preamp and use xwax (open source) or Mixxx (a GUI frontend to xwax, etc) that runs fine on Linux.