VirtualDJ - VDJ got great comments in the book "HOW TO BE A DJ", and DJWireless is featured

PRO Infinity Member since 2004

Virtual DJ

One of my personal favorite digital DJ programs is Atomic Productions’ Virtual DJ.

It’s incredibly intuitive,easy to use, yet filled with tons of killer features. Virtual DJ’s “beatlock” engine is simply the most amazing feature I’ve ever seen in any single piece of DJsoftware.

Somehow, these French genius programmers figured out not only how to count BPMs, but alsowhere the downbeat occurs. The beats are clearly illustrated in a visual waveform display at the top ofthe screen.

Another neat function is that waveforms from both decks appear in the same window indifferent colors with their beat indicators overlapping perfectly when beatlocked. Even loops can besomehow stay in synch with the song no matter how beat deaf you might be. The waveform display aloneis a powerful tool, and can be a huge aid in illustrating how beatmixing works.

The song structure visualization isn’t a waveform as it’s displayed in Traktor, but as a color bar.
The colordims to indicate a drop in volume, like during breaks. ....

Then there’s the cool dual digital turntable displays, one foreach deck, that you can actually grab with your mouse and scan, scratch, brake, or backspin with. AndVirtual DJ also has a pretty darn accurate time stretch function too.

The coolest part of this program is its custom skins. I’ve seen skins on this thing that look and operatealmost identically to hardware CD players, including Denon and Pioneer table top DJ models. You candownload a few from Virtual DJ’s website, but the real fun is finding the unauthorized skins designed byDJs who have way too much time on their hands.

Finally, you can set Virtual DJ to be a, well, virtual DJ. Wireless DJ completely blew my mind one night ata party as he seemed to randomly select about 10 different MP3 files and load them into Virtual DJ’splaylist. He clicked a button and told me to watch.

Without a single hiccup, Virtual DJ managed toperfectly beatmix each of those songs. Wireless DJ had clicked the AutoMix feature, which tells Virtual DJto match BPMs, align the phase of the downbeats, fade from one deck to another during the end break ofthe song, and equalize the resulting volumes. Obviously, the AutoMix feature only works well with songswithin the same genre, such as house, trance, or techno songs. Wireless DJ chose all trance and technofor his sneaky little demonstration.

The latest version of Virtual DJ has all kinds of sweet effects and plugins, including a really cool Karaokeplayer with vocal removing technologies, assignable sound effect buttons, and more.

Virtual DJ also seems to report information to the Internet. I’m not quite sure what information it’scommunicating, but each time I open the program, my firewall program tells me it’s trying tocommunicate with some Internet location.

I usually decline it, and everything seemed to work correctly.Wireless DJ assures me the Internet connectivity can be turned off in the program settings.

To learn more about the latest versions of Virtual DJ, bus’ on over to www.virtualdj.com.