History
The first version appeared in July 2003. VirtualDJ is the successor of AtomixMP3, which was released for the first time in September 2000. Development for AtomixMP3 stopped as soon as VirtualDJ was released as its successor. VirtualDJ was released in 5 different versions: VirtualDJ Home Edition (formerly sold at shops, now released as free edition), VirtualDJ Broadcaster (available online and in shops), VirtualDJ Pro Full (only available online), VirtualDJ Limited Edition (free with selected MIDI controllers), and VirtualDJ Pro Basic (a budget alternative to VirtualDJ Pro without MIDI control).
Video mixing
VirtualDJ offers video mixing and scratching, allowing the DJ to become a VJ.
Vinyl emulation
Vinyl emulation allows the user to physically manipulate the playback of digital audio files on a computer using the turntables as an interface, thus preserving the hands-on feel of DJing with vinyl while allowing playback of audio recordings not available in phonograph form. This allows DJs to scratch, beatmatch, and perform other turntablism that would be impossible with a conventional keyboard-and-mouse computer interface.
NetSearch
NetSearch is a feature introduced with VirtualDJ version 6.x. At the first few releases this allowed users to access music and videos from content providers on internet. The music and videos would be streamed directly to the user's decks, and no download would be allowed, except for local web cache, protected by digital rights management. From the release of VirtualDJ 6.1 in May 2010 this model was replaced by a subscription model, with Grooveshark as the content provider.
MusicGroups
MusicGroups was a feature added to VirtualDJ 6.
MusicGroup collects track histories, and publishes them on Virtualdj.com. Licensed users can make their own single-user groups, or can join a multi-user group. Each MusicGroup page includes a mini-blog, with track history, as well as top 20 played tracks, and saved tracklists. Other users can make comment to the group, and subscribe to the group.
The software analyzes track lists, and makes suggestions to what track to mix next. The suggestions are based on what other DJs around the world have played next, with a stronger weight on the MusicGroup you subscribe to. In essence a real-time track advisor based on evaluating what other DJs around the world are mixing.
Broadcast
VirtualDJ provides two ways for DJs to broadcast their mix sets to the internet. With the built in radioserver in the software a DJ can broadcast from his own computer by publishing a link generated by the software, that streams the mix played. The software can also broadcast to a webradio that runs Shoutcast or Icecast servers. VirtualDJ based webradio has been running since 2005 under the name VirtualDJ Radio.
0 comments:
Post a Comment