Djay iPhone: wikki-woo or wikki-wank?

So Algoriddim’s Djay software has made the jump to my pocket. Recently pumped onto the store for the princely sum of £5.99, it promises a full 2 deck DJing application in your pocket. In fact, with a purchase of a cue splitting headphone device, you can effectively travel around with your phone or pad and plug into any soundsystem, ready to go. Needless to say, replacement of the biscuits that are iPhone standard headphones is mandatory for enjoyment.

Does it match up to the promise? 

Well, there are a few issues.

The iconic face of DJing is there for all to see, two lovingly recreated turntables with grabbable tone arms and spinnable vinyl displaying label art plucked from your onboard library of tracks. However, the purpose of software is not to mimic what we have now, it is to allow us to push on beyond the limits of our existing hardware.

Deck, or even jog wheel, control is pretty much redundant without being able to accurately monitor pressure of touch. A gentle stroke down the platter, a firm shunt forwards on the vinyl near the spindle, none of this can be tracked via a touch screen input, and a very SMALL touch screen input at that. Removing the turntables entirely instantly annihilates the iconic display from the app, the pay off would be more real estate for functionality. Waveforms taking up a band on the screen allows sub menu controls like EQ and pitch/jog controls to move across to the main screen as standard.

Take the recent CDJ2000’s that Pioneer issued, scanning through tracks is now accessed from a touch screen waveform display. It is the logical step onwards from being able to read the look of vinyl and drop the arm where you want it to be. By trying to pander to the past, Djay often sees you fighting the UI to get the results you want to achieve.

These battles continue through to beat-matching. Having come from Traktor’s thorough embarrassing of Ableton’s automatic beat-sensing, Djay is a bit of a shock. Setting up an initial cue point is vital to avoid fighting with the turntable GUI, +/- buttons on the pitch control sub-screen allow you to jog the track in a fashion similar to the early CD decks, and speed adjustments come via turntable style the pitch slider.

My experiences with beat-matching to date have been steps from Technics to Ableton Live’s .cue marker system to a brief dabble with Traktor’s frankly awesome beat detection and quantising. Having to move to a system where hands on is required yet I can’t physically grapple the track takes some considerable adjustment. This also begs the question of “why can’t we move to the Traktor method?”. Abandoning the need to be a human metronome leaves the focus on tune selection and mix strategy, THE massive plus of software mixing. Although you have to take into account that Traktor has a huge amount of hardware grunt behind it being a PC application.

What Djay is achieving in your pocket is clearly a grade above being a curio gadget application, and it is certainly the best in class on the platform. I’m certainly heading to the chill out room at lunch for more experimentation and to jot down future mix notes. I can only hope that as we push on from v1.0 of the app, we start to see a move towards a professional piece of DJ software, spearheaded by abandoning the legacy of Technics. Couple the ability to have quantised beat-matching with a mixer piece of hardware on a parallel to Akai’s Synthstation 25, then we really have a situation ready to create massive waves in the world of portable DJing.

Wikki-almost.