Wanted: a DJ with a computer
Are you planning to organise a party at work or at home? Then, music will be an indispensable element. Which tools can help you? We put some of them to the test.
Which will it be?
You probably know that you can use your laptop and your MP3s to give your party its musical background. It only takes a simple cable to connect your laptop via the headphone connector to a HiFi amplifier. But which software do you use?
iTunes (http://www.apple.com/itunes) allows you to create playlists via the plus icon at the bottom left, consisting of the appropriate music for your party. The “shuffle” function (click on the arrows at the bottom) lets you play the songs in a random order, but you can play them fixed too. To do so, drag the songs to the desired place - if this doesn’t work, you should first select the column showing the track numbers. Via File you can also create a “smart” playlist based on specific criteria, for instance, a music genre. The “party shuffle” function in the left-hand menu presents a random selection of songs. Tip. iTunes is the only player where you can uncheck tracks in a playlist: this means that although they won’t be played, they will remain present in the playlist.
Windows Media Player (http://www.microsoft.com/windows/windowsmedia/) also allows you to create playlists (for example via the arrow below the Media Library) and choose a random playing order (via the arrows at the bottom). Here again, it’s possible to create an automatic playlist of songs meeting certain criteria. The big disadvantage of WMP is that the menus and the navigation are not clear at all.
Winamp (http://www.winamp.com) has the best interface. Tip. Via the Library button at the bottom you can also import all the music and playlists from iTunes. You can create playlists of songs to be played in a fixed or a random order, but unfortunately not on the basis of specific criteria.
Ease of use
Normalise. You will have noticed that one MP3 may sound louder than another. That can be very annoying. iTunes solves this relatively well, although not completely, via Edit; Preferences; Playback; Sound Check. In WMP this is done via the arrow below Play Now; Options; Crossfading and Auto Volume Levelling, but this didn’t work in our test. Winamp doesn’t have such a function. True, you can use a plug-in (see http://www.winamp.com/plugins/), but in our tests the results were far from convincing. Tip. iTunes is the only player to let you apply equalisation to each individual song: right-click in the columns at the top and select Equalizer. In this way, you can “pump up” any song you like.
Fading. At a party, the songs should fade into each other. In iTunes, this is done via Edit; Preferences,in WMP via Crossfading (see above). In Winamp, this function is hidden behind the arrows at the top in the Equalizer (which you open via Window).
Real DJ tools
Do you prefer a real DJ to a playlist? We tried three real DJ tools: they have two windows, each representing a CD deck. Zulu DJ (http://zulu-dj.en.softonic.com) is free, but there were several hitches during playback. Mixxx (http://www.mixxx.org) is free as well but isn’t easy to use. We prefer Traktor (http://www.native-instruments.com): it has lots of effects on board, for example, you can adjust the speed, etc. But prices start at £85.
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