You can adjust tempo up and down, cross-fade between tracks and even pick up the needle and move it to skip forward or back. The physics are faithful to the real thing: kill the power on a turntable and it doesn’t just stop dead. Instead, you hear the sound quickly slow to a halt.

And then the fancy, computer-only gimmicks begin. Tap Sync to auto-sync the tracks’ speeds (BPM), and tap the arrow next to the cross-fader to auto-mix between them. You can pick the type of transition — backspin, brake, reverse and others — and you’ll sound like a pro. Which brings us on to scratching.

Scratching properly is hard. It’s equally hard to do well in Djay. If you put a finger on the record and wiggle it, you’ll get that scratchy sound, but it sounds terrible. Switch to two fingers, though, and scratching gets smart, and Djay “automatically applies the rhythmic pattern of the currently playing song to your scratches in real time.” What that means is that you come on all DMC, again sounding like the pro you’re not.

There’s a whole lot more: When you open a track, for instance, the app analyzes it, shows you a waveform and works out the BPM. When you scratch (or just cue up a spot in the track), the waveform zooms in to help you get to the right spot. You can also set a cue-point and hit a button to skip back to it. You can even put a virtual piece of tape on the record to keep track of where you are.

Finally, it plays nice with iOS 4, with background audio (and auto-mixing!) and AirPlay support (this suffers from the usual two-second delay, making it impossible to use for actual mixing, although Bluetooth speakers fare better), and access to your full music library and playlists.

It’s a lot of fun, and kept me up to 2 a.m. this morning. Like I said, I’m a hopeless selector, but real DJs should get a whole lot from the app, especially as you can split the output and send one signal to the speakers and another to a pair of headphones. This is done with a stereo-to-mono adapter in the jack-socket, giving two mono outputs. I tried putting a USB sound-adapter (via the camera connection kit) into the dock-connector and it works, but kills the headphone output. It seems the iPad will only use one at a time.

Djay costs $20. Combine this with something like the block-rocking, battery-powered SuperTooth speaker and you have yourself a pretty sweet portable party.

Djay for iPad [Algoriddim]

See Also:

• Portable DJ Gadget Improves UI with Second Version
• Pacemaker DJ System: A Party in Your Pocket
• Farewell, SL-1200: Panasonic Scratches Iconic Technics Turntable …
• iPhone Turntable App Will Land You in the Nuthouse
• Ears-On With the SuperTooth Disco Bluetooth Boombox

Authors: Charlie Sorrel

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