Djay Pro Pc Review
The new Algoriddim djay Pro app for Windows 10, with its support for Microsoft's Surface Dial and the new Surface Studio all-in-one PC, fulfills those needs. The app has been available for iOS. Djay Pro 2 is a Mac-only app (djay Pro was just released in Windows earlier this year), and it can be downloaded from the App Store or on the Algoriddim website. A 15-day free trial is also available if you just want to try it out. Once downloaded, it’s just a matter of installing it on your computer.
Music
Powerful DJ software comes to the Windows 10 app store. Algoriddim djay Pro offers beat and key matching, excellent effects, and support for the Microsoft Surface Dial.
DJs are tactile people. They want to feel the scratch and turn the knobs. The new Algoriddim djay Pro app for Windows 10, with its support for Microsoft's Surface Dial and the new Surface Studio all-in-one PC, fulfills those needs. The app has been available for iOS and macOS for several years, but the Surface Studio is uniquely suited to djay Pro, providing both the visual and tactile interfaces that bring this very cool software's capabilities to the fore.
Getting Up and Running
The only way to get the Dial-compatible app is as a $49.99 Windows Store purchase. You can get plenty of other DJ apps there, and most are $4.99 or less. But djay Pro is on a far different plane, as its name suggest. It's suitable for professional DJs, and is priced more along the lines of Serato, a popular competitor, which starts at $50 and goes up to $300 for its entire squadron of effects and tools. Djay, too, can cost more than the initial price, as it offers in-app filter effect purchases.
In order to get the Surface Dial support, Algoriddim had to launch the software on the Windows Store, and that's really not such a bad thing, since it makes updating and installing on multiple PCs simpler. The Windows Store also offers better security by running apps in a sandbox. The app is a 190MB download, which isn't bad for a rich media app.
I tested the app on a Surface Studio, as well as on an Asus Zen AiO Pro Z240IC, and a Surface Book running Windows 10 Creators Update. Of course, the Asus all-in-one didn't support on-screen use of the Surface Dial.
Setting up an external audio device such as a MIDI controller or speaker takes a couple more steps, but is still pretty simple. You can set Exclusive mode for this, meaning other sound sources won't be able to interrupt, and you can choose External mixer mode split output.
Music-Making Interface
At the top of the program window are the two virtual turntables. You get two or four decks, and two video decks. You can view them in either waveform or disc modes. There are two disc views, one that resembles a realistic Technics turntable, and one a simple geometric disk. The waveforms can display either horizontally across the app window or vertically scrolling up. The waveforms are very colorful, and help you determine loud points in a song as well as see where the beats are. And the colors are more than just pretty: Different colors represent different musical events. For example, red represents bass notes, and blue is for high pitches.
Along the bottom of the screen are your song sources. As soon as you open the app, you'll see music listed as potential scratch fodder along the bottom of the window. You can access Windows Media Player playlists, find any music files in on-disk folders, and even search for songs. But who uses local music files anymore? Luckily, buttons let you switch the song list to your Spotify or iTunes libraries. It doesn't let you add your Groove or SoundCloud libraries, though competitor edjing 5 does the latter seamlessly. To get your iTunes Library to show up in djay Pro, you open iTunes' applications setting and enable XML sharing. And to hook up your Spotify tunage, you need a Premium account.
Sending a song to one of the decks is a simple matter of right-clicking and choosing which deck to send it to, tapping the song entry and then choosing to send it to the deck from the overflow menu. That's actually four taps, which is a lot in the heat of spinning for a party or club. You can also simply drag the track to the deck's song thumbnail. Competitor edjing 5 takes an approach that requires fewer taps: Just tap on the deck now playing button, and your song list drops down from which a single tap gets it onto the deck. The song-count link offers to analyze your music, but the mixing and effects work whether you go through this ahead of time or in real time.
One of the best things about djay Pro is how easy it makes matching key and tempo between tracks. It's not something that all DJ software can do, and in my testing, I didn't hear any sound degradation, though lowering or raising the key of a vocal track too much can make the singer sound unnatural. One thing I didn't find in the very rich app was pitch bending; it seems you can do this with external controllers, but not in the software. That said, you can power down the virtual turntable to grind the music to a halt or scratch to speed up.
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Scratching With the Surface Dial
Algorridim claims that djay Pro is the first app with zone-aware support for the Surface Dial. What this means is that its function is different depending where it is. If you place it over Deck 1, for example, you can control filter effects on the track playing there, and if you put it over Deck 2, you'd apply the effect to that track. Without changing any settings, you can place the Dial on the library area to browse through your song list.
Pressing down on the dial for a second opens its circular menu of app functions. The choices are Looping, Filter FX, Scratch, Seek, Crossfader, Media Library, and Next Track. You can switch between different crossfader curves in Settings, including Default, Constant Power, Linear, and Cut. You can set loops from a tiny 16th of a beat to 32 beats. The smaller ones make a fun spasmodic effect, and the longer ones are useful for musical elements.
I'd like even more zone awareness, however: I wish you could set different functions for the two (or four) decks, and that the dial would automatically control the mix when you placed it over the mixing bar in the middle. What really works well, though, is when you combine the very sensitive touch input on the Surface Studio with using the Dial. And you probably want to avoid slamming the heavy Dial down on the glass screen too much.
Without a Surface Dial, the controls are still very touch-friendly and capable. You can swipe up on a dial to raise its setting or down to lower it, and double-tapping or right-clicking resets it to zero. Hitting the space bar once starts the song. Hitting it again grinds playback to a halt, just as though the turntable were slowing to a stop.
Extra DJ Features
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Djay Pro's automix feature lets you add songs to a playlist to have them automatically played in sequence, with transitions you set ahead of time. Djay lets you choose Standard, Backspin, Echo, Brake, Reverse, and Random transitions. You can also create up to eight cue points per track. This let you cut quickly to spots in the track.
You also get a standard set of effects—flanger, echo, phaser, and many more—that you can apply with dials to the virtual turntables. For a $9.99 in-app purchase, you can add Sugar Bytes advanced effects, such as Modulate, Warp, and Slice.
The app offers pads for hitting preset sound samples, such as drums, grunts, sirens, and foghorns. You get the Essentials pack with the app, which includes Snoop Dogg, Milk & Sugar, and Dubstep sets, and you can record your own, too. There's no built-in drum machine in the software, but you could use a looping track for this. I found that there was a very slight lag when tapping the pad for a drum beat, so you may want to invest in an external pad. Using the mouse with the pads produced a more immediate sound, though that's not as satisfying as hitting a pad.
I didn't test the software with hardware controllers aside from the Surface Studio with the Surface Dial, but it boasts plug-and-play support for over fifty popular MIDI controllers.
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Since you're an artist, you surely want to save your creations for posterity, and djay Pro lets you record them. Recordings are saved as high-quality WAV files, and the feature worked perfectly in my testing. One thing missing in the app that's in the Apple versions is video mixing, so veejays must hold off till that's added.
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Most DJs are not going to purchase a Surface Studio, and it's not the most portable device. But you don't need a Surface Studio to run djay Pro—the app works well on any Windows 10 tablet or laptop, such as the Surface Book. You just lose the on-screen dial capability. A Macbook Pro can easily cost more than $3,000, and doesn't offer the touch-screen and dial capabilities, not to mention stunning high-res display of the Surface Studio. With its scratching, effects, samples, and Spotify integration, the djay Pro app is certainly a good place to start for both budding and experienced DJs, and even those just looking to have fun with mixing tunes for your own enjoyment.