djay: Video Review and Giveaway
Way back in April of 2007, I reviewed djay v1.2 for MacApper. Since then, djay has hit v2.0 and received many improvements, and new features. Among these improvements include a new interface, live undo/redo, and an improved audio engine.
If you looked at djay when it was still at v1.2 and found it wasn’t for you, I recommend you take a second look. You can tell that a lot of work has went into improving this application. Make sure to watch the review and look for the giveaway at the end of this post. UPDATE: A new video has been uploaded, which fixes the problem with the sound.
The fine folks at algoriddim have graciously decided to give away 3 licenses of djay along with this review. If you would like to be eligible to be chosen in the draw, just comment on this post with one feature you would like to see integrated into djay. If you do not get chosen in the draw, or would like to support the developers with a purchase, you can pick up djay for $49.99 USD from Algoriddim.
Winners will be chosen Friday, April 4th.
It would be great if djay could also use a folder as source (instead of just supporting music in my iTunes library).
I often DJ with several external hard drives full of music. The current version of djay would require me to import all of it into iTunes; so it would be great if djay could directly access music in folders and on drives.
Great application and great review! Thank you!
A feature I would love to see is the ability of advancing or of moving back a little bit in the song with keyboard. If that’s possible, I can map my PowerMate *like* a vinyl player and make sort of scratch. It would be really cool for me. And the “backspin” & “forwardspin” option in each table menu change too many the song position.
I hope you’ll understand my features request, english isn’t my main language and I’ve some difficulties to explain what I want.
Thank you!
Seems fairly easy to use,
what about plugins ? Or options to create their own transitions for example ?
And last question, is that posible to have to different audio output ? one for each tract ?
+1 for folder sources and what I would really love to see is support for audio/video mixing – that’s something more for v3, but hey, many other apps are taking this path already!
Is it just me or is the audio int he video you posted really screwed up? For the last third of the video it just sounds like a CD skipping.
This is a sexy, sexy program but the one thing that really bugged me about it was I couldn’t skip to a specific point in a song. A progress bar like the one in iTunes would be perfect.
How about tablet scratching? Scratching ‘for real’ with my wacom would be awesomeness!
I’ts not just you Dermah (#5). The audio of the file is screwed up for me too.
This is truly an awesome app… been playing with it for the last 20 minutes and am converted!
One thing i would like to see though is two finger scroll implemented onto each deck to “scratch” and ff or rw in a track a la grabbing the record and dragging it…
@Dermah and Flec65: Huh, that must have happened during compression. Sorry about that, I’ll try and get it fixed.
i like Djay for the features it already has, but it would be nice to see some more hotkeys integrated with the interface (ie: if you hold the mouse over a certain button, it’ll tell you the hotkey for what it does so you won’t need to pull out another menu in order to know what a function does via keyboard)
I agree that it would be much better if a folder (USB drive, etc.) could be used as the source.
Jason
Audio Units as plugins would be cool and very Mac.
The ability to see the totality of your performance as blocks that you can move would be perfect for getting a mixtape right.
I would say more use of the touchpad in the “scratching”, etc. Simply awesome app though.
I’d like to see hotkeys to cue jump points in the song. It would make it easier to cut quickly between different points.
Two features are crucial to any dj app IMHO
#1. Beat matching/beat analysis
#2. Analyzing songs and finding their key so you can match them up with other songs automatically…and create mixes on the fly.
If you could make your own effects like you can do in GarageBand that would be amazing! Looks really neat anyway…
I have to agree with Olivier: within a couple of hours of using my brand-new Griffin PowerMate, I thought, “Wouldn’t it be completely awesome if I could “scratch” MP3s like vinyl records using the PowerMate as the input?” Sadly, I have not yet found softwarwe that allows this, and it would be amazing if djay included “scratch forward” and “scratch back” commands in their next release so that i could map them to my PowerMate. (People who don’t have PowerMates would “scratch” by quickly pressing two keys, the “scratch forward” and “scratch back” keys, back and forth quickly.)
This application is very cool.
I was looking a long time for an application like this, but I didn’t find a good one. I was looking for a nice application, that works with the iTunes library without copying, and that works very fast and has an GUI that is very but very modern.
I just started the demo, and the flip effect in the licence is just the first moment of … yes, this is maybe the application i’m looking for.
djay opens in a second and I saw direct a list of my songs. It is just 2 love. You see your songs in a nice table, sometimes a little bit too small to see enough information (name, artis can be large). The search function is just like you expect, a very cool live searcher.
Im not a proffesional, but I really love this application… I run the demo now for a few minutes and I have fun… a lot of fun!
With the mixer, you can switch very smooth from to another disk. Very cool. I discover just more and more features like pressing the number (1 – 2) that result in a auto mix-slider… Very cool!
djay has very cool features, like the speed, inverse, gain (very use-full) , pitch, echo, reverb etc… You can’t believe how much I’m impressed of this application. I thought it is just another DJ-tool with a few cool aspects but no good integration. Djay is just the best, it has everything that I need!
A negative point is maybe the preferences, Cross-faders can maybe be indicated with a better icon (graphic), the devices-icon is pixelate, not so sharp transparency with little but ugly borders on the icon.
I miss also a little table to hold the songs for a few moments. For example, someone ask you to play a song, you search the song and you add the song to the queue-table. Maybe it is already in the application, but I didn’t find it. I know, you can mark songs, but that isn’t very use-full if you work with more playlists etc.
I just discovered the Bonjour integration, very nice idea!
I just love this application! It rocks! Good Job!
one thing that would be cool:
be able to “save” some mixes… if you make a really good mix/ have a good set one night, be able to save whatever you did in some way…
This may have come a ‘lil late, how about a direct import to iTunes, or upload it to YouTube, or another music sharing site?
@Shawn: Nope, there is still today, tomorrow and Thursday to comment. Friday the winners will be chosen.
Ohhhh ok! I just realised that there are alot more features in here than I first thought. I just found out that you can scratch directly on the records and you can change position in the song by moving the needle head. Features like that are cool but I had no idea they existed. There needs to be a tutorial to show people around the interface because it is so different to everything i’ve seen before.
This is kind of far-fetched, but it would be really cool if you could scratch by tilting your macbook/mbp.
Auto-Playlists and BPM analysis please!
Played around with the demo just the other day when I was looking for something better than itunes for djaying but didn’t find it especially impressive, and for me not worth $50.
I’d recommend trying native instruments free beatport sync, which is a watered down version of their traktor dj software. At least I found it more to my liking with the way it handled playlists and such; you can browse both folders and itunes to add files to your collection and it analyses BPM.
http://www.native-instruments.com/index.php?id=beatportsync