Touch DJ review

Ready to become a professional DJ or chuck your heavy expensive DJ equipment out the window? Hit the road withTouch DJ from Amidio, a stellar iPhone app that lets you mix MP3 files on your iPhone or iPod touch with classic functions like record scratching, plus groundbreaking new features like visual mixing and a 64 bit sonic processing engine.

The 171MB Touch DJ app is beautifully designed, with polished graphics and packed with a ton of features that will satisfy even the professional DJ. As you would expect from a twenty dollar iPhone app, Touch DJ is easy to get started with and offers enough to keep you mesmerized for hours. The onscreen touch sensitive buttons give you the ability to control volume, effect levels, equalizer levels with low, med, and high tones, and pitch adjustments. The buttons are color coded, with the left being blue and the right being pink, and the main app buttons being green. Play, pause, fast forward and rewind buttons are on the bottom and the cross-fade bar is across the top of the screen with a transparent button that displays song title info. On the top you also get a digital pitch level indicator for each track. You also have time played and time left timers for each track on the top and bottom of the screen respectively.

In the middle of the screen you have buttons for setting up cues for each track, positioning your peaks, accessing the Touch DJ menu, zooming in and out, and freezing tracks. You can tap and drag the scrolling waves to “scratch” the song being played. This works with impressive accuracy although the sound created is slightly on the digital side and doesn’t resemble a real vinyl being scratched. Use the cue buttons to set cue and loop points in your tracks, and then jump to your cue points using the back and next buttons on the bottom of the screen. You can get really creative and fine tune the loop/cue marks by tapping the +/- buttons on the opposite track while in the cue menu.

Visual mixing is a unique feature to Touch DJ and lets you visually see waveforms for both songs side by side. Touch DJ scans the song and detects kicks and beats and shows them in a different color. Using these visual frequencies you can use your finger to drag and sync the two tracks as you adjust the pitch. Another pretty awesome beat matching tool is the TempoBend button which can help you move inside the tracks to come up with perfect beat synchronization. This means you really don’t need to use headphones to match songs before you fade them together. Although there is a “Split” mixing mode, that will require you to buy a special adapter where left channel will go to the master output and right channel will go to the headphones.

Touch DJ ships preloaded with 25 dance tracks so you can start jamming away instantly, or you can upload your own music into the app. Loading your own MP3 files into Touch DJ is a bit of a chore at this time. You have to go into the settings menu and start the server. Then from a web browser you go to the local IP address on your local WiFi network running on port 8080 and you will be able to upload your files using a simple web based interface. Once done you can stop the server and go back into the Touch DJ interface where you tap the load button to see your uploaded tracks. Loading your own tracks for the first time will generate a peak file which can take anywhere from 1-3 minutes, while you wait with a spinning icon.

tap the green circle to get into the extended menu, where you can:
– Adjust global pitch for both tracks
– Change Spin speed forward and backward by tapping and holding the spin buttons
– Single tap the break button to simulate stopping a the record
– Play the 3 main samples by tapping the Sample 1, Sample 2, Sample 3 buttons. You can record your own voice samples or import .wav samples into the app from the setup menu.
– Read extended help on using the app
– Spread the word on your Facebook account, and tweet about Touch DJ and unlock up to 12 additional tracks.

The setup menu lets you adjust these settings:
– Turn off/on Split L/R mixing
– Adjust main volume
– Turn on/off normalize on load
– Change your pitch step variance to 0.1%, 0.05% or 0.02%
– Change zoom action to in or out
– Adjust the dip correction
– Pick from 3 possible crossfade curves
– Adjust Pinch sensors
– Adjust Seek Speed
– Turn Stop-proof lock on and off
– View and edit your sound samples
– Stop and start the server for uploading your own MP3 music into Touch DJ

Main mixing features of Touch DJ include:
– 2 mixing modes: visual and split (left ch->master, right->cue)
– 2x 3-band EQ
– 2x FX (LP Filter)
– 2x Vinyl spin up, spin down, break effects
– 2x Set cue, loop points
– Freeze tracks
– Onboard sampler with 3 sample slots (upload/record your own .wav samples)

With flight mode turned on, your iPhone and Touch DJ can be the only hardware you need for your next live DJ gig. Touch DJ is close to being the perfect (not being able to load from your iPod library directly, and only semi-perfect scratching support) music mixing iPhone app for both professional and aspiring DJs who want to take full advantage of the power of their iPhone and explore true mobile DJing at its finest. So get yourself a copy of Touch DJ app before your next gig or house party and impress the crowd.

Here is a video demo of the Touch DJ app on the iPhone

AppSafari review of Touch DJ was written by Joe Seifi on November 30th, 2009 and categorized under App Store, Featured, Fun, Music, Utilities. Page viewed 8633 times, 2 so far today. Need help on using these apps? Please read the Help Page.