German audio software specialist Algoriddim has released its djay app for iPhone and iPad. Designed to turn an iOS device into a complete and portable DJ system, the app allows you to mix an iPod music library via a touch-turntable interface or can be set to mix automatically. It's intuitive, simple to use but deep enough for some serious djing.
The djay app opens to a virtual turntable with a responsive interface that shows no sign of lag while switching between the many modes and options. The software has direct access to the iPod library sorting songs by iPod playlist, artist, song, album and genre information. The search facility quickly finds music as you type and when importing tracks it takes just seconds to automatically scan for tempo and beat information. Beats per minute (BPM) are calculated on the fly with the beats themselves represented visually as a waveform along the top of the interface.
Each track is displayed as a spinning vinyl record on a turntable with album art in the center. You can touch and move the record to hear a scratching effect and spin the track forwards and backwards as another effect or to find your place on the waveform for the next transition. The software can be used in landscape orientation to display two turntables or in portrait for a larger view of one turntable.
Tools include a three band equalizer and mixer control to boost or minimize vocal, treble and bass, plus a tempo control and a sliding crossfader that enables the blending of one song into another, manually or automatically. The BPM of tracks can also be set to sync automatically to match the tempo of the current playing song. Scratching and transitions can be set to fade in and out, backspin, brake, reverse or change randomly. Specific parts of tracks can be easily looped with bounce looping from 1/16 of a beat to two beats for live remixing. Queue points can be auto saved along with all song data such as the BPM of songs and the waveform data. Original mixes are also able to be saved as AIFF files for sharing or later access.
Mixes can be streamed to Apple's AirPlay, to Apple TV or any AirPlay supported speaker dock, AV receiver and stereo system. Djay is able to split music to headphones and a speaker system via the Split Output mode for live DJing. This requires a stereo to mono splitter.
The app also takes advantage of iOS 4's multitasking ability and can be run in the background auto-mixing while surfing the net or playing games.
djay has become the main way I listen to music on my iPhone as the automix does a great job shuffling, auto syncing the tempo and mixing my playlists. It is also great fun messing around with my music, bounce looping, pitch bending, and all the other various tweaks you can perform using the software.
Algoriddim djay was recently App of the week on the App Store and is currently selling at an introductory price of 0.99c.
Watch below to see djay in action: