Deejay Loso
Alright, heres my initial impression of Virtual DJ 8.
Appearance:
I know it may appear boring at first glance, but the skin is very intuitive and makes complete sense how its laid out. Graphics are a HUGE improvement over the pre-school screen resolution of VDJ 7. I am a little disappointed however with the fact that you can't easily see the names of the cue points without hovering your mouse over the cue point, but i'm sure theres a skin out there that fixes this.
Compatibility w/ VDJ 7:
Installation was a breeze and all of my cue points from VDJ 7 did carry over, but here are my 2 concerns.
1) All my keyboard shortcuts and settings didn’t carry over, meaning I now have to go in and re-map some of my keyboard settings from VDJ 7. For some reason, the hot cue shortcuts on my Keyboard from VDJ 7 refuse to work now.
2) All of my cue points are about a half second off. For example, if I’ve programmed a hot cue to start right at a drop, I have to nudge the track forward a little to get to that drop timed perfectly. This means I now have to go back and reset ALL my cue points a half second later to compensate for this (Which is gonna be a real time killer and PITA if I decide to use this over Serato DJ).
Scratching/ Nudging:
VDJ 8′s nudge is WAYYY more sensitive than before. I used to nudge the jog wheel about 1/2 to 1 whole rotation to move the track forward a little but NOW, just a quarter of a rotation does the trick and it sounds 10x better when nudging with keylock on! Now heres the REAL downfall of VDJ 8. I’m a scratch DJ and I actually used to find VDJ 7 more responsive than Serato DJ, which says a lot! I’ve noticed on 2 separate controllers (a VMS 2 and DDJ-SX) that rapidly grabbing and releasing the jogwheel on VDJ 8 is FAR DIFFERENT compared to VDJ 7. It used to be very "snappy" but now It actually feels slightly less responsive and more "elastic" when scratching compared to VDJ 7. Its kind of hard to explain, but you have to do a lot more work rotating the jog wheel to bring it back to the starting point where you began your scratch when you grab and release the jogwheel quickly. Its like the software kind of hesitates when you first grab the jogwheel to process whether you're nudging the track or grabbing the track for a scratch, throwing off your scratch points. Once you've grabbed the track, it scratches effortlessly but that initial grab while the track is playing seems to be troublesome for Scratch Dj's.
Search DB:
The new search DB is nothing but FLAWLESS. Searching songs is now almost instantaneous, where as before it would kind of hesitate for .5 tenths of a second before pulling up what you searched. GREAT IMPROVEMENT!
Overall, its definitely an improvement but the kinks need to be worked out before I can fully use it.
-DJ Loso
Appearance:
I know it may appear boring at first glance, but the skin is very intuitive and makes complete sense how its laid out. Graphics are a HUGE improvement over the pre-school screen resolution of VDJ 7. I am a little disappointed however with the fact that you can't easily see the names of the cue points without hovering your mouse over the cue point, but i'm sure theres a skin out there that fixes this.
Compatibility w/ VDJ 7:
Installation was a breeze and all of my cue points from VDJ 7 did carry over, but here are my 2 concerns.
1) All my keyboard shortcuts and settings didn’t carry over, meaning I now have to go in and re-map some of my keyboard settings from VDJ 7. For some reason, the hot cue shortcuts on my Keyboard from VDJ 7 refuse to work now.
2) All of my cue points are about a half second off. For example, if I’ve programmed a hot cue to start right at a drop, I have to nudge the track forward a little to get to that drop timed perfectly. This means I now have to go back and reset ALL my cue points a half second later to compensate for this (Which is gonna be a real time killer and PITA if I decide to use this over Serato DJ).
Scratching/ Nudging:
VDJ 8′s nudge is WAYYY more sensitive than before. I used to nudge the jog wheel about 1/2 to 1 whole rotation to move the track forward a little but NOW, just a quarter of a rotation does the trick and it sounds 10x better when nudging with keylock on! Now heres the REAL downfall of VDJ 8. I’m a scratch DJ and I actually used to find VDJ 7 more responsive than Serato DJ, which says a lot! I’ve noticed on 2 separate controllers (a VMS 2 and DDJ-SX) that rapidly grabbing and releasing the jogwheel on VDJ 8 is FAR DIFFERENT compared to VDJ 7. It used to be very "snappy" but now It actually feels slightly less responsive and more "elastic" when scratching compared to VDJ 7. Its kind of hard to explain, but you have to do a lot more work rotating the jog wheel to bring it back to the starting point where you began your scratch when you grab and release the jogwheel quickly. Its like the software kind of hesitates when you first grab the jogwheel to process whether you're nudging the track or grabbing the track for a scratch, throwing off your scratch points. Once you've grabbed the track, it scratches effortlessly but that initial grab while the track is playing seems to be troublesome for Scratch Dj's.
Search DB:
The new search DB is nothing but FLAWLESS. Searching songs is now almost instantaneous, where as before it would kind of hesitate for .5 tenths of a second before pulling up what you searched. GREAT IMPROVEMENT!
Overall, its definitely an improvement but the kinks need to be worked out before I can fully use it.
-DJ Loso
Posted Fri 16 May 14 @ 2:52 pm
johntankard
Hi Loso,
I too use an SX and have noticed a slight delay when scratching, when pulling back and letting go it seems to hesitate before playing again, not long but noticeable... Hope this is an easy fix or a software setting I haven't found yet. If you release the scratch on the forward motion it does not hesitate, only when releasing on the back motion.
John.
I too use an SX and have noticed a slight delay when scratching, when pulling back and letting go it seems to hesitate before playing again, not long but noticeable... Hope this is an easy fix or a software setting I haven't found yet. If you release the scratch on the forward motion it does not hesitate, only when releasing on the back motion.
John.
Posted Fri 16 May 14 @ 3:08 pm
Deejay Loso
johntankard wrote :
Hi Loso,
I too use an SX and have noticed a slight delay when scratching, when pulling back and letting go it seems to hesitate before playing again, not long but noticeable... Hope this is an easy fix or a software setting I haven't found yet. If you release the scratch on the forward motion it does not hesitate, only when releasing on the back motion.
John.
I too use an SX and have noticed a slight delay when scratching, when pulling back and letting go it seems to hesitate before playing again, not long but noticeable... Hope this is an easy fix or a software setting I haven't found yet. If you release the scratch on the forward motion it does not hesitate, only when releasing on the back motion.
John.
Yeah, I hope they fix this! Did you encounter any of the other issues above?
Posted Fri 16 May 14 @ 3:13 pm
Support staff
This is normal in both v8 and v7 when scratching backwards. The software automatically keeps the jogwheel held when moving in reverse to allow manual backspins to be performed.
However in v8, you can now optionally disable this if you wish. Simply set touchWheelBackspin to no. This means that you will no-longer be able to perform manual backspins though.
You may also wish to try changing rampScratchTime which determines how quickly the software spins back up from the jogwheel being held. This setting more closely emulates vinyl records, which depending on the on the torque of the record deck, don't reach full speed immediately after releasing the record.
However in v8, you can now optionally disable this if you wish. Simply set touchWheelBackspin to no. This means that you will no-longer be able to perform manual backspins though.
You may also wish to try changing rampScratchTime which determines how quickly the software spins back up from the jogwheel being held. This setting more closely emulates vinyl records, which depending on the on the torque of the record deck, don't reach full speed immediately after releasing the record.
Posted Sun 18 May 14 @ 6:41 pm