DJ-1800 for Mac

User Reviews

• Best app in the price range on the market.

  papa sisOctober 27, 2005

  Pros

  Really easy to use, intuitive interface and very powerful for the price. Doesn't have loads of fancy bells and whistles, but does the job it's intended for (DJing digital music) really well. Good support from the developer and the user community too.

  Cons

  BPM calculation would be nice, although I suppose it's kind of cheating.

  Summary

  ---

• DJ-1800

  Lou KashOctober 26, 2005

  Pros

  Cons

  Summary

  This review was originally posted on VersionTracker.com.<br />In fact, in its class DJ-1800 doesn't really have any competition. Some professional Mac DJ applications are much more expensive and they suffer often on "featuritis". Others are more in the "hobby-DJ" class (and also a bit cheaper) and thus lacking some essential features for pro and semi-pro DJs which you can find in DJ-1800. 2.2 is the best version ever. The playback is now very reliable (basically due to QuickTime 7 - not all of the earlier problems were the developer's fault!) and the overall performance has been highly optimized. MIDI support is a nice addition, especially if you have one of the supported DJ controllers (I don't). However if you want to control DJ-1800 with non-DJ devices like general MIDI keyboards, there are still a couple things that need to be fixed; I hope this will happen in v3.x. (I'll be posting workarounds in forums.dj1800.com/viewtopic.php?t=438) I use DJ-1800 on an iBook G3/700, and although it's slightly below the minimal system requirements, v2.2 now runs better than any version before. Of course it runs much better on my Powerbook G4/1.67, but I don't use that machine for deejaying... And finally, it's also necessary to highlight the excellent support from Dave Addey, the developer... :)

  ---

• Don't Bother Downloading

  ddsadsJune 25, 2005

  Pros

  It looks nice

  Cons

  This program produces no sound. Don't bother downloading - waste of time.

  Summary

  ---

• Works well...but a few shortcomings...

  StormchildMay 24, 2005

  Pros

  Cons

  Summary

  This review was originally posted on VersionTracker.com.<br />A nice and simple DJ app. Obviously it can't really compete with Traktor on a large scale, but it does have its advantages. It's a lot smaller, starts up MUCH faster, and its iTunes integration puts Traktor to shame. It imported my iTunes library of over 7000 songs in less than a minute. Traktor, on the other hand, took about 10 times longer just to read that information, and after all that, it won't even stay in sync with it. Traktor also fails to understand accented characters, so my collection of around 200 Björk songs was listed as "not found"; worst of all, after I manually re-added them all, Traktor went and wrecked the ID3 tags erasing all accented characters from every song name, and replacing them with spaces or question marks (it seems to randomly choose between those). Anyway...enough about Traktor. Suffice it to say that, while I think Traktor is the superior app, it's amazing how poorly it handles basic things that DJ-1800 does really well. I think NI should hire the developer(s) of DJ-1800 and learn how to do those things properly. And now for the downside...the pitch control isn't fine enough; .1% is much too coarse, and requires you to babysit the mix to keep tracks from drifting. I doubt I would ever three or four decks at once when tracks can't possibly be kept in sync without having to keep riding the pitch bends. Traktor is accurate down to .001%; this app is not even accurate to .1%, really, because there are several points in the scale where it jumps two points at once (e.g. from 0.0 to -0.2 -- what happened to -0.1?). Very much needs more precision in pitch range. On the subject of pitch, it's stupid that the pitch function is disabled on all decks by default. I can't tell you how annoying it is to keep adjusting a track's pitch, wondering why it keeps drifting, only to discover the pitch function is disabled by default -- a dumb design decision for a DJing app, whose whole purpose, really is to be able to adjust playback pitch. Finally...why do I have to have multiple audio interfaces to get more than two audio channels out? It's pretty silly that you can't use a multichannel audio interface. This shortcoming alone means I will never use this app, cause there is no proper way to get both the main output and cue output from the same device. If they think I'm going to keep unplugging the headphones from my 828 (which has separate main/headphone output channels that DJ-1800 could have easily supported), walking around the back of my computer, taking off the 1/4" adapter...they've got another thing coming! In short (after going on way too long about it), DJ-1800 has too many shortcomings to be useful to anyone serious about DJing, but everything it does do, it does quite well. It's extremely easy to use, and very straightforward. I wish NI would take some cues (pun not intended) from this apps, and learn from its superior integration with iTunes (and stop wrecking my ID3 tags and renaming my songs!!).

  ---

• Thank`s

  thömiJune 17, 2003

  Pros

  Cons

  Summary

  This review was originally posted on VersionTracker.com.<br />for the German localisation.

  ---

• cdotApril 8, 2003

  Pros

  Cons

  Summary

  This review was originally posted on VersionTracker.com.<br />This is a great app. Best software of it's kind available for the mac, leaves the competition for dead and it's only in it's beta

  ---

• Lukas MachataMarch 25, 2003

  Pros

  Cons

  Summary

  This review was originally posted on VersionTracker.com.<br />Finally a DJ software where the Form follows the Function and not vice versa. I have tried them all, from Tactile to Traktor and anything

  ---

• Fat Boss SlimMarch 25, 2003

  Pros

  Cons

  Summary

  This review was originally posted on VersionTracker.com.<br />Nice job. Simple, nice and powerfull. Need a "full screen" mode (I use 1056x792).

  ---

• Show reviewsHide reviews
• Rate it