VirtualDJ - mixing music with your eyes

VirtualDJ is one of many mixing applications out on the market today. But what separates it from the rest is that it combines some nice features to help beginners as well as pros get the most out of their mix.

The greatest feature we like about VirtualDJ is that it displays the actual waveform of the music. This allows you to see the musical beats, giving the user greater accuracy when mixing two songs together. Also you can see breaks in the music, which gives you some key points to where you might want to mix in another song.

In addition, VirtualDJ also tries to figure out the tempo of each song and gives you indicators along the bottom edge of the waveform that act like visual aids to help you mix. And if you just can't get both songs playing in tempo, it also provides you with a sync button that will stretch the new song to fit the tempo of the current song.

We did notice that the accuracy of the tempo matching feature depends largely in part to the type of music. Your standard disco style beat gives more accurate results than one with more a more complicated drum pattern as it tend to throw off the system.

Other notable features include a built in sampler so that you can make loops on the fly, audio effects, scratching via the virtual turntables and cue points. These cue points are saved to a VirtualDJ file, so that each time you load up a specific song you can go directly to the cue point saving time in locating certain parts in the music.

VirtualDJ is available for both Windows and Mac operating systems and should be seriously consider for those wanting to dabble in electronic mixing.

Tags: commercial, dj, mixing, music