DJ-1800 - 3.2.2

DJ-1800 is a somewhat nice application, but have perfomance problems as do competitor Disco. Both DJ-1800 2.2.1 and Disco 2.8.9 gave Audio dropouts both when I loaded the second track to play and in Disco also when I momentarily switched applications. How's that for a nice first encounter? This was on a 400Mhz Powerbook G4 that otherwise run Traktor DJ Studio 2.6.2 as well as Traktor Beatport 1.0 very well. In addition Traktor *sounds better*. It has its own audio engine which helps. AFAIK both Disco and DJ-1800 rely on Quicktime. I have QT 7 on Mac OS X 10.3.9
 
Both Disco and DJ-1800 should be compared to the free Traktor Beatport application (you'll need to register, which is free) as well as the professional Traktor Dj Studio suite. Both Traktor versions outperforms DJ-1800, though DJ-1800 have more features. I haven't tried Traktor Beatport on G3 hardware though, nor have I tried Traktor DJ Studio 3.
Even the free Traktor Beatport have keyboard shortcuts, which really helps. Where are these in Disco and DJ-1800? Big plus for Hardware support in DJ-1800 though!!!
 
DJ-1800 has a few pluses over Disco as you can precue in many decks (Traktor Beatport also only have 2 decks) and better performance IMHO even on older hardware. But in an audio application, audio dropouts are unforgiveable. This Traktor DJ Studio also had before version 2.6 and I told them the same thing back then. Native Instruments listened. Traktor rules!
If you can't afford the real Traktor, even second hand, do yourself a favour and check out Traktor Beatport as well as the alternatives. Use what works for you! For G3 hardware DJ-1800 may work best, but on a G4 Traktor Beatport should convince. There are also a number of new features in DJ-1800 2.2.x that may tip the scale for you, so make sure you check them all before you decide.
Real-time apps are hard work, but if you can't outcreate a free application you might as well develop something else. I suggest both developers (of Disco and DJ-1800) try and improve their apps beyond Traktor Beatport. It sets a standard any DJ app should meet or exceed. Right now, it seems DJ-1800 could very well do that in a future incarnation. But the audio dropouts just have to go. It'd be better to have the interface freeze rather than the music.

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... :)

Hi,

Just wanted to say that the features mentioned below (precise pitch adjustment via keyboard, and multi-channel output devices) are included in v2.1, just released :-)

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!!).

for the German localisation.