Which DJ Software Is Best?

DJ software first hit the market in 1998. Over the years, three major players have emerged. DJ software is a computer program that allows a DJ to organize large amounts of music files, mix and manipulate their sound, as well as connect usb controllers that emulate the feel of scratching a vinyl record. These programs have thousands of features, but I’m going to hit the main points.

Virtual DJ

Virtual DJ 7 Cost: $299

Virtual DJ’s best feature is usability. While it may look a bit confusing right out of the box, it doesn’t take long to master it.

Organization of music is incredible. You can create virtual folders to store music, instead of physically moving your files around. You can search your entire database by bpm range, artist, or key of the song, great for on-the-fly music selecting.

Virtual DJ calculates the bpm and key of your songs automatically, although this does take some time to complete if you have a large library. Beat matching is made easy with a visual display showing you whether the beats of one channel are matching the beats of the other channel.

Virtual DJ not only mixes audio, but also video. ContentUnlimited is a subscription service through Virtual DJ that allows you to sign up and download music, karaoke, or music videos instantly to the software. Almost any song you name, you’ll find the song, karaoke, and video.

While Virtual DJ looks great as is, you can choose from many skins to give your screen a custom look and feel.

Here’s some guy on Youtube giving a tutorial of Virtual DJ 7:

Traktor

Traktor Pro 2 Cost: $89

Traktor Pro 2 has a lot of the same features as Virtual DJ. The most obvious difference is the way it looks. Traktor has garnered a reputation of looking more professional, while Virtual DJ might look a bit more amateurish out of the box.

Features include seamless looping, effects, automatic beat-gridding of tracks, advanced beat detection, key detection, and a 4-channel mixer.

Traktor has just a few more tricks than Virtual DJ, which only the seasoned DJ pro would notice. Traktor has its own line of Traktor controllers that work with the software, while Virtual DJ has the widest range of compatibility with third-party controllers.

A unique feature of Traktor is Crate Flick. This feature allows you to ‘flick’ through your collection of tracks similar to how you would flick through a crate of records.

And here’s a walkthrough of Traktor Pro 2:

MixMeister Fusion

MixMeister Fusion + Video Cost: $399.95

Mixmeister is a completely different breed of DJ software. Mixmeister caters to the studio production DJ who is more concerned with the perfect mix of music, rather than with on-the-fly features.

Mixmeister Studio allows you to create some amazing DJ mixes, comb through them again and again adjusting effects and adding drops to your delight until your mix is perfect. You can easily share your mix online or burn to a disk.

Fusion and Fusion + Video are for the live performance DJs, but the core software takes a page out of the Pro Tools book, giving it a completely different look than any other DJ software on the market.

Here’s a Youtube video tutorial of the program. It’s the best I could find in English.