As a professional musician, I’ve done just about all there is. That even includes DJing. I’ve done it all. I’ve DJed at raves, goth bars, and even two strip clubs. It’s not my ideal form of performing, but the payday is usually pretty nice. When I was offered the chance to check out DJ World Studio for the iPad for the iPad, it was very hard to resist.
This app really delivers! Everything you would need is provided. You have two turntables to give you a view that you’re used to, along with cross faders, and every button and knob you’ll ever want to play with effects on the track you’re loading.
I was honestly concerned about how I would cue up tracks without having a separate line-out for headphones and speakers. The developers really took care of this. At least with every track I tried with it, it was able to discern where the measures fell, and provided me with lines marking them as the track played by. An added bonus to this, is that the app also gives you the tempo, and allows you to auto-sync the tempos at the push of a button. While cuing up a track, you can nudge the record to help you sync the tracks manually, or do it with the push of a button, if you’re not looking for a specific part of the song.
The tracks take a moment to load, but there is a progress bar around the record and you can have access to playback as they load. The dots around the record give you a heads-up as to what percentage of the track has already played. Little cues like these are a god-send to a DJ.
My only complaints about the app thus far are that first, there are no instructions (that I could find). I had to learn everything about it through trial and error. In other words, experiment with it as much as you can before taking it to a gig! Second, there doesn’t appear to be a way to use tracks that are just sitting on your iPad. I had to manually add them to the app through iTunes. Even this isn’t perfect, as a large number of the songs I added never showed up inside the app. I’m not sure why, as other songs had no issuses. None of the missing songs were from iTunes, with their DRM. All the tracks I tried to load were ripped directly from CDs.
In Conclusion
If you’re a DJ looking for an ultra-portable way to entertain, you can’t go wrong with DJ World Studio. It combines the best things about DJing with records and the best things of DJing with CDs and removes most of the hassles you’ll have with either. Just before posting the review I got word from the guys at Little Worlds Studio that DJ World Studio will be on sale this weekend March 26th through March 28th for just $9.99 instead of the usual $19.99!
