Choice is good, and VirtualDJ 2020 offers a huge amount without over-facing. You can of course still use last week’s default in “old” mode, or load in whatever unpleasant retina scorching skin you have used for the last decade. And because there’s just so much, there’s a search box to help you find things that it may be able to do.įor me and painting a broad stroke, it feels better and definitely more elegant and professional. Under “options and tweaks” you get a ridiculous amount of control over what VirtualDJ does. One unrelated thing to point out - the preferences are insane. But you can change colour scheme (shades of grey and even a daylight mode), waveform appearance, jogwheel display etc etc - it’s all there. Well… once you’re out out of starter mode that is. VirtualDJ 2020 offers full control over just about anything you could hope for. Inside each level there’s also an abundance of options within these new default skins too. It’s generally more subdued, and reminiscent what might happen if you put Algoriddim djay and Traktor Pro in an interface blender. The red/blue deck 1 and 2 metaphor is more subtle too. VirtualDJ 2020 is a natural progression from the last default interface - it’s flatter for a start, with the skeuomorphic shaded buttons finally being ditched. But needless to say that it has changed considerably over the years. I’m not about to trawl through old screenshots to show every iteration of the evolution of the default VirtualDJ interface. This is obviously new territory for VirtualDJ 2020, and I’m sure these small issues will be ironed out soon enough. And vertical waveforms only appear in performance mode, but stay when you switch to pro mode. But there’s no four deck view in performance mode unless you select in pro mode first. You have to go to the Pro skin, and from the options dropdown select 4 decks. For example, there’s no real 4 deck view by default. Given that this is a beta, there are a few wrinkles to iron out though. I like this as it’s almost a training wheels approach, where you can progress through the VirtualDJ experience without the fully daunting bells and whistles approach. PERFORMANCE: This pulls back the plethora of available features in the decks a tad, and gives more of the screen over to the library. PRO: The new flatter VirtualDJ 2020 becomes apparent, with more advanced control (including custom buttons) over effects and what you see in the players. This layout delivers the main features you’ll find on controllers. STARTER: Stripped back with an instant gratification vibe.ĮSSENTIALS: You’ve got the basic down - now it’s time to step up. But I suspect that most people draw their conclusions from the first impressions of opening VirtualDJ for the first time.įirstly, there’s a new approach to the DJ community, with default skins being tailored to where you see yourself and skill level as a DJ. This means that you can tweak the interface into anything from a minimalist barren landscape, right up to a truly headache inducing graphical nightmare. VirtualDJ is unusual in the pack of major players in that it has a skinning engine. They also talk of not holding back big features for landmark releases too. So It’s not a rebuild or some form of reimagining - it’s still the VirtualDJ that oh so many have come to know and love, but with perhaps a different approach to the DJ community. For them, 2020 is a fresh way of thinking about VirtualDJ and where it sits in the somewhat volatile DJ software landscape. I don’t know if this will change in the final release, but it does reflect the vibe I got from Atomix regarding this release. But the application is still called VirtualDJ 8, and the preferences show that this is v8.4 b5308. To be clear - I’m running the beta version of the VirtualDJ 2020 download. I’m sure I could write reams of words dissecting the reasons for this, but it’s a thing and is something that Atomix is addressing directly in the release of VirtualDJ 2020. And the user base is massive, if you give the numbers pushed out by owners Atomix as being a real representation of the true number of active users that is.īut despite all of this, the VirtualDJ brand is perceived poorly in comparison to the pro trinity of Traktor Pro, Serato DJ Pro, and rekordbox. It really does - you should look at the feature list and dig around inside the preferences to see the power. It’s been around since the dawn of digital DJing, and has all the features and then some needed by more or less every style of DJ. VirtualDJ is quite the conundrum in the DJ software world.
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