PCDJ Red VRM |
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| Written by James Garrard - Ukslc.org Editor | ||||
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{mosreview}manufacturer=Visiosonic/product=PCDJ-Red VRM/website=www.pcdj.com/price=81-97/score=2.5{/mosreview}
Once upon a time PCDJ used to be the daddy of all pc DJing programs. Is it still the “only” option for professional DJs? PCDJ claims to make a DJs life, an easier and much more stress free one, with the words “I’m sorry I haven’t brought that CD” never having to be spoken again. Programs like PCDJ leave the DJ to concentrate on mixing and getting everybody dancing. No longer do you have to spend precious minutes searching through thousands of CDs for that obscure track that Grandma wants. PCDJ also claims to auto cross fade between songs. The auto cross fading isn’t really auto, it does cross fade between the tracks but it does it at a set time say 5 seconds before the track ends. It isn’t intelligent in the way it cross fades but who wants automation DJing is supposed to be hands-on. PC DJing programs should take away the effort of carrying masses of CDs but they shouldn’t take away the DJs main job, mixing. PCDJ uses a “Record Case” in order to store your songs, unlike OtsDJ you don’t have to convert all your mp3s to some obscure format. But with PCDJ Red VRM you do have to organize all of your songs into folders. While this may take some time, it does save a hell of a lot of time searching for songs. Once you have organized your songs into folders, which translate to groups in the Record Case then you are nearly ready to go. Its recommend that you “Gain Scan” and “BPM Scan” all tracks before using them in a live environment but many of PCDJ’s features work just perfectly without doing this. But, it does help a lot if you do it, PCDJ displays the BPM in the Record case so you can easily sort by BPM and find songs with a similar BPM. This again is another feature, which reduces the time it takes to find songs. PCDJ does require quite a powerful machine to run due to the fact that it has a very pleasing GUI (Graphical User Interface). Many of the “other” programs look ugly, but PCDJ has a very sleek and organized look. I think that it is this fact that has been the major contributor to PCDJ’s success. I managed to get PCDJ to run on a 997mhz Pentium 3 with 250mb of Ram, this pc is now pretty much bottom of the range and hence it would run on nearly all new laptops. The only problem I had was the time it took to load, I have approximately 12 thousand tracks in my library and it took about 2 minutes to load after clicking the shortcut on my desktop. I think this is due to the fact that there is a lot of groups and subgroups but still, the time it takes to load is un-acceptable. Ease of use, the program is relatively tidy and hence is quite easy to use, but I would recommend reading the manual before getting started as some things, like adding songs to the Record case are pretty tricky to do without prior knowledge. It took me about 10 minutes from downloading the program to having PCDJ up and running, bearing mind this was without any tracks loaded. The tracks load into groups relatively quickly with, 12 thousand loading within a few hours. I think the main let down is the BPM and Gain scanning, this seemed to take for ever, I left the computer running constantly for about 2 days and still all the tracks were not scanned. I have been informed that a faster computer with more RAM would increase the speed of scanning. Still this seems an awful long time to have to leave the computer running in order to get a complete Record case. PCDJ again comes into its own with the controller that you can buy for it; unfortunately at the time of writing I was unable to get hold of a controller. The controller is called the DAC-2 and I have been lead to believe that it greatly increases the functionality of PCDJ. The DAC-2 looks like a rack mount CD player with 2 small screens and a variety of buttons with which you can control PCDJ remotely. Although the controller has to stay plugged in to the computer with a USB lead it still gives you the extra functionality that a mouse and keyboard lack. None of the other programs that I have used have a dedicated controller that looks as good or has the same functionality as the DAC-2.  Another of the problems I have had with other PC DJing programs is latency; this is the delay between doing something on PCDJ and it actually coming out of the speakers. PCDJ has quite a low latency when combined with the recommended soundcard. When used with my budget sound card there was still a very low latency. Anything you change can be heard almost immediately which is something all DJs look for in a live situation. The sound that comes out of the speakers is one of decent quality provided the mp3s are ripped at a high bit rate. I did find that in a live situation I was required to EQ the sound, although there is a small EQ unit on PCDJ I found it to be quite poor and the changes to the sound was not that obvious. After a bit of tweaking you can get a very good quality sound that’s rich and warm. There are many other features that I have just begun to use, with features like on the fly looping and cue points. Points in the song that you can jump to, so in theory you could cue point the choruses in songs and have a music quiz. This is quite an interested implementation but I am unable to comment fully on them as I have only tried them out a few times and have yet to read up on them. As with all things there are down sides and this is where PCDJ really starts to loose points. First of all there is the poor loading time with a large Record case, although this isn’t a major problem it does mean that you have to start PCDJ up a good few minutes before the start of the gig. I would say that the major problem that PCDJ suffers from is stability, if we DJs are supposed to rely on technology then surely we need it to be reliable. We can’t afford to “crash” a gig, nor can we afford the music to just stop mid way. This is the main problem I had with PCDJ some mp3s it seemed to struggle with, maybe it was the way I encoded them. Make sure I encode all my mp3s with the same program and always at the same bit rate. On top of this I only use legit mp3s i.e. ones that have been ripped from the original CD. This is where I can’t understand why PCDJ randomly crashes on some songs. During the time I have been testing PCDJ updates have been released and it is now much more stable but still I find my self worrying what would happen if it were to crash during a gig. That said I did take my laptop loaded with PCDJ and all my songs to a gig and its performance was top notch, with no crashes or hangs. Despite this stability problem I would still recommend PCDJ to all bedroom DJs and the majority of mobile DJs. As soon as the PCDJ staff get the stability issues sorted then this will be one of “the best” DJing apps out there.
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