Warning: if you value your productivity, don't attempt to install Djay on your work computer. What's more, if you value that of your colleagues, don't let them play with it, either. This app is addictive and could eat up hours of your time.
Why? Because Djay is all about having fun with your music collection. Quite simply, it offers you the chance to mix and mash up your music in the privacy of your own user account, blending tunes on virtual turntables complete with all the audio tweaking controls that you'd expect to see a pro DJ twiddling.
You won't find a simpler, more obvious application to use. Your iTunes music library appears on the right, and you drag songs from it to the turntables. If the songs have artwork, the sleeve image appears imprinted on the record, spinning round at a virtual 45rpm.
The feature set is impressively complete. There's an Equalizer, tempo and pitch controls, and an advanced panel with three control modes, cycling through a bpm counter, cue points settings and automatic crossfading. Glance in the menus and there's even more to discover, such as a long list of audio effects that can be independently applied to each turntable.
But what is the point of creating the perfect mix if there is nobody to hear it? The makers of Djay have considered this problem and give you the chance to save your mix as a file (.aiff format) or - even better - broadcast your mix live across a Bonjour network. Network managers, beware.
For the full DJ experience, you need to be able to pre-cue songs through your headphones while another is playing or being recorded. Djay supports this, but requires a multi-channel sound card. If your Mac isn't up to that, Griffin Technology's iMic accessory is a recommended workaround.
A lot of thought has gone into the practicalities of using Djay; pretty much everything can be done with one-press keyboard shortcuts. There's quite a few of them, so it might help to make a cheat sheet while you're learning.
It's possible to scratch by dragging the spinning records up and down with a mouse, but this is tricky and the effect isn't nearly as good as the real thing.
Of course, all the visual and auditory treats mean you need plenty of Ram and a nice zippy processor. We tested on a 1.67HGHz G4 with 768MB Ram, which coped well, but lower-spec machines might struggle. Djay is a Universal Binary too and runs very happily on Intel Macs.
That said, the hardware spec is the only cost you have to worry about, because, astonishingly, this application is free. We say astonishingly because it's rare to find freeware that is quite as professionally built and feature-packed as this, not to mention so much fun to use.
It's rare to find freeware that is quite as professionally built and feature-packed as this, not to mention so much fun to use.Author: Giles Turnbull
Djay