By Gadjo Cardenas Sevilla
As a one-time DJ back in the days of vinyl, turntables and mixers- I've long wondered how to best replicate a mixing set-up on a laptop. We have thousands of MP3's from CD's we've ripped through the years which we've enjoyed on out smartphones and MP3 players but now we want to create mixes. Zulu DJ Software seemed to have the answer.
Currently available for Mac and PC, we installed Zulu DJ Software on an older ThinkPad running Windows XP. We used two USB thumbdrives to load around 4 GB of music and plugged these into the notebook.
We imported the songs into the program (songs don't get copied into the hard drive, they are simply tagged for title, artist album and time. Then you can drag any song into the virtual turntable which measure the song's BPM (Beats Per Minute). This information is important in insuring smooth transitions between songs with similar BPM's.
The concepts and basic ideals of DJ-ing and mixing are, thankfully, still relevant. You still require intimate knowledge of the music, great timing and that sixth sense that good DJ's have which tells you what songs go well together and when its time to speed up the tempo or slow it down a bit. No software is going to tell you that. Although, if you're feeling lazy, you pop in a playlist and have Zulu DJ do all the mixing and cross-fading for you. Which simply sounds like an amateur waxing on the wheels of steel.
The one thing that we can't get used to is managing everything by mouse (or in the case of the ThinkPad, by nubbin). Nothing beats the tactile feel of a record spinning under your fingers as you slow it down to catch the beat and hold that beat steady as you prepare to cue it into the next song.
With Zulu DJ on a notebook, your best bet is to time the track and fade it in at an opportune time but it is hit or miss. You can hook up a USB mixer which would be ideal if you're seriously going to invest time and energy on being a software DJ. Zulu DJ also has a number of sound effects, like reverbs and phaser sounds that add impact provided they are used sparingly. You can also loop sections of a track which is very useful in certain types of music.
The best thing about Zulu DJ and other software DJ applications is that you can carry a ton of music with you and you don't need to sour for the right song from the right album of the right artist. A task that killed a lot of time in the old days. You can search by song or artist, even better, you can match BPM off the bad and find something that will work, at least in terms of beat matching.
Zulu DJ is also fun to use. If you have a knack for mixing songs and already have a ton of MP3's this is worth the time since you can get a 14-day trial version to play with. If you want to record what you mix, consider SoundTap which is a streaming audio recorder. Zulu DJ software costs $50 for the full version but they are discounting it by 30% until August 15.
Rating: 3.5 out of 5