You’re a digital DJ and you want to get controllerist on your iPad? And why not- hardly a week goes by without a new “DJ” app being released for pennies and at 6am that flight case you have to drag home can feel very, very heavy. Type ‘DJ’ into the app store you get 570 hits and this is indicative of your choices here but is dumping your controller for your iPad a realistic aspiration yet?
With The DJ have researched this issue and it’s surprisingly complicated. Did you want to use your iPad as a controller in place of your aging Vestax or were you looking for it to replace your laptop and work with your shiny new S4? Or maybe you want to do away with laptop and controller completely in favour of the ultimate portable DJ solution- your iPad on its own? Maybe you’ve even heard tell of a new controller you put your iPad inside to act as screen and software, allowing you to access the cloud and play that hot girl’s request, even if you didn’t bring it with you…
As it stands, we have worked out four configurations for DJing. We’ve ignored the more producer-end applications because, at least for now, that is a whole other ball game. We hope this gives you a head start and we’ve even given you some software recommendations or, failing that, some other blog’s software recommendations. No point reinventing the platter…
1 – The Software All-In-One
First up, your ultimate portable solution; just using your iPad and nothing else but a pair of headphones and your mojo. The top end of this market is probably DJ Player which is £30.99 from the app store. For that you get two decks and nice XY effects pads, night and day modes and some neat options like killing the bass on the appropriate deck when you load up the next tune and a see-through button which uses the iPads camera to give you, essentially, a heads-up display. As with all the all-in-ones you will either need to split the stereo output from the jack into two monos to have a cue channel, which will lose you some audio quality or, as a couple of apps are now doing, you can wirelessly runs a full stereo cue channel into your iPhone or Touch, leaving the 3.5 jack a full stereo stream to the master. You’ve still only go the iPad’s sound card though and WTDJ found serious latency issues with the wi-fi cueing solution DJ Player flog you for £5.99 so you will probably want to use a camera adapter and plug a proper sound card into the 16-pin iDevice port. A really nice app to use though and it runs on your iPhone perfectly well too, in case you need to check your playing order on the train without looking like a complete poser.
If that’s a little rich for your blood then try Touch DJ Evo, which is £2.99.
It looks like a 80’s electronic children’s game with the majority of the screen showing two massive electric blue and purple waveforms. A narrow band at each edge shows the entire track and shares space with nudge and high- and low-pass filter buttons. The neat thing about this app is that, unless you are actually loading a track, everything is on the one screen. Press the vol button and a transparent window pops up with gain, level and master. Press FX and you get and XY pad and buttons to change to next or previous effect, again, transparent and superimposed. Press EQ, and your eq pops up. And so on. At no point do you lose sight of your two tracks, everything is just superimposed and it’s just so much fun! Perfectly usable for parties and you will feel like Tron using it, but they really need to give you a better search option than scrolling through your entire library!
2 – The Remote Controller
This next option replaces your controller. However much you love your DX or S4, eventually you are going to want new buttons and that’s where a software solution might be what you are looking for. With the loss of your controller’s sound card you will still probably want an external one for audio quality and cueing but as you are using a laptop you can get one for under £90 from Numark or Traktor to sort that out (the Traktor unit even comes packed with Traktor Pro 2.0 included in the cost- insanity!).
App-wise, Virtual DJ Remote is £6.99 and is essentially a mirror of what you see on your laptop but with that all-important touchability. As with other VDJ products there is an ever-expanding choice of free skins so you can use your iPad for the mixing and your iPod touch as an FX box, for instance.
If Traktor is your software of choice, you’ve got an even greater choice than with VirtualDJ. My two faves are TrakProDJ and Touch OSC Jog-on. TrakProDJ looks like a controller and you could probably use it within about five minutes of installation but really, the future is with Hexler and the ultra-configurable Touch OSC. This looks and feels like it’s been designed for a touch screen rather than being a software copy of a controller, with finger-width control surfaces and more sliders than knobs. You can have any number of screens and any number of iDevices wirelessly connected at once and here’s the clincher- you can download free editing software to design your own buttons! You could just stick with the Jog-On layout and use it out-of-the-box perfectly happily but the how-to guide on the website is very well written for a blog selling software at £2.99 a pop so you’d be tempted to have a go at making custom layouts yourself and ironing-out those creases that only you can see.
Serato DJs are more limited, as you still need hardware connected to use Itch or Scratch Live, you can only supplement your rig with your iPad. Serato are still happy following the herd, it seems.
Finally, if you are desperate to lose your turntables and feel that using two iPads as you would 1210s, is something you want to get involved in, Inklen’s Tonetable has been around a couple of years. The scuttlebutt on the blogs scream “latency issues” so this could be the reason we’ve still not seen this out and about yet. (Or maybe it’s just a silly idea.)
3 – The Laptop Replacement
Controllers and mixers incorporating iPods are ten-a-penny and there are too many to seriously get to grips with there, plus we doubt any club DJ would be seen dead using one. iPads, on the other hand have a big, touchable screen and for £79 you can pick up the Numark iDJ live. It looks a bit rubbish but if you want to have a go at this DJ lark without serious outlay (and you don’t want to venture out of your bedroom- it does look like a toy!) you could do worse. We’re not going to linger on this configuration because the trade-offs between the inherent restrictions of an iPad and the slightness of its greater portability over a laptop make it, to us, a dead-end.
4 – The Hardware All-In-One
Finally, the holy grail. The idea of having a controller with a built-in screen and memory so you can do away with your laptop altogether in favour of a single piece of kit must have occurred to every digital DJ who ever spilt his beer over his laptop or forgot he was watching porn prior to the gig. Nobody has gone all the way with this yet, presumably due to price of combining the two pieces of kit without serious quality compromises, although honourable mention must go to the CDJ-2000 and Stanton’s gorgeous controller-porn SCS.4DJ.
Numark have done the next best thing and there’s no way the Numark iDJ Pro is not going to be a roaring success. Essentially, you slip your iPad into the controller so they become the single unit you always wanted, the iPad becoming soundcard, processor, memory and screen all for £349 plus the cost of the iPad. Numark may have a reputation for being the budget end of the market but increasingly their gear feels nice and they have a canny knack of making useful gadgets and novel configurations that the hopeful amateur can afford and at the end of the day, it’s about soundcard, sound rig and tunes, really, isn’t it? So hats off to Numark and expect a slew of copycats any day now.
Our friends at DigitalDJTips will tell you if you are looking to buy your first controller, the first thing you should be doing is deciding what software you prefer. Now it seems, you have other choices to make even before thinking about software but I hope we have given you some idea of what your options are. This is the tip of a rather large and boring iceberg so if you do have any questions about this or anything else we’ve talked about on the blog, get in touch. I’m sure we can sound like we know the answer.
I’ve written about the need and benefits of copyright before – in fact a couple of times. It’s still on ongoing debate with three broad groupings, or sides if you will – those who support copyright as it currently stands (with some minor changes to reflect new technologies), those who want some fundamental changes to loosen copyright (led by the big tech companies such as Google and Facebook who want to make money from advertising stuff whilst they give away other people’s work) and those who want to rid the world of it completely (such as Pirate Bay and their associated political groups).
