Filed under: Audio, Windows, Macintosh, Commercial
VirtualDJ - mixing music with your eyes
by Joey Celis Jul 10th 2008 at 5:00PM
VirtualDJ is one of many mixing applications out on the market today. But what separates it from the rest is that it combines some nice features to help beginners as well as pros get the most out of their mix.
The greatest feature we like about VirtualDJ is that it displays the actual waveform of the music. This allows you to see the musical beats, giving the user greater accuracy when mixing two songs together. Also you can see breaks in the music, which gives you some key points to where you might want to mix in another song.
In addition, VirtualDJ also tries to figure out the tempo of each song and gives you indicators along the bottom edge of the waveform that act like visual aids to help you mix. And if you just can't get both songs playing in tempo, it also provides you with a sync button that will stretch the new song to fit the tempo of the current song.
We did notice that the accuracy of the tempo matching feature depends largely in part to the type of music. Your standard disco style beat gives more accurate results than one with more a more complicated drum pattern as it tend to throw off the system.
Other notable features include a built in sampler so that you can make loops on the fly, audio effects, scratching via the virtual turntables and cue points. These cue points are saved to a VirtualDJ file, so that each time you load up a specific song you can go directly to the cue point saving time in locating certain parts in the music.
VirtualDJ is available for both Windows and Mac operating systems and should be seriously consider for those wanting to dabble in electronic mixing.
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Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)
koan said 6:12PM on 7-10-2008
I've tried many many mixing softwares so I can share my experience. Even if VirtualDJ is very popular now (thanks to some bundles with USB audio cards or decks) my absolutely fave are Traktor for mixing live and MixMeister to create mixed CDs at home. Really, they beat all the others by far.
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Carlos said 7:58PM on 7-10-2008
cool
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Sheynk said 2:47AM on 7-11-2008
Traktor eats this for lunch ... it is a MUCH better piece of software.
Serato and Ableton are also great options depending on the kind of music you mix and your mixing style
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dominicneagle said 7:23AM on 7-11-2008
All this software mixing is great, but you cant beat good old vinyl/CD decks.
I've got a couple CDJ-400's and I usually hook them up to the PC and use Adobe Soundbooth to record my mixes. All in all they're fantastic, and you get that proper "feel" to mixing that you just dont get with software.
Although the software is just a tad cheaper...
:D
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yman said 3:18AM on 10-22-2008
What i like at Virtual Dj is that the vinyl controls will let you scratch like on a real turntable, except that with the beatlock engine your scratches will never end out of the beat. I got it from here: Virtual Dj
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yman said 3:19AM on 10-22-2008
The corect url is: http://www.rosoftdownload.com/download/Windows/Virtual-DJ
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olsi said 6:25PM on 10-29-2008
thnx
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200913179 said 3:11PM on 5-31-2009
Virtualdj is great. Im using it to rock the crowds in my hood. But f only the was one where i can play atleast 5 tracks at the same time
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