Key Of Grey

February 24th, 2010 – A couple months ago, I reviewed the Vestax Spin which is paired with Algoriddim’s djay softare. As I got used to using the Spin and djay, I got a little more bold and started diving into the more advanced techniques I could get out of both.

Because the Spin has a limited amount of buttons, I mapped an additional Korg NanoPad. This allows me to use all of the common features of djay that previously needed to be accessed by keyboard. As I got into the software more, there were a few issues that I encountered. For one, I didn’t like that I had to manually save my cuepoints. Once I set them, I expected djay to automatically save them with the track. It turns out that you actually have to manually save them in the Table menu. Not a huge deal, but irritating nonetheless.

Another thing I had a problem with was the BPM detection. In all fairness, many of the BPM detection software titles I tried also had difficulty with the same tracks that djay did, but sometimes djay would get it right, although at half the BPM the actual track was at.

Well 3.1 fixes many of the little bugs that annoyed me. Cuepoints are now auto-saved, the BPM detection algorithm has been improved, and you can half or double the BPM of the track (accessible by the Table menu) if djay gets it wrong. Some of the other improvements in 3.1 are:

• Quantized cue-point setting
• High precision auto-sync (I prefer not to use the sync feature, but I’m sure this makes some people happy)
• Auto-loop shifting when juggling cue-points
• New MIDI pitch bending controls (perfect for the NanoPad’s touchpad)
• Fixed the freezing issue with the Spin (I never had a problem with freezing, although I did have some latency when accessing files on my external hard drive. This occurs with iTunes too, so it’s not a djay issue)

For the full list of fixes and new features, check out the 3.1 release notes.