I decided to officially switch to djay pro recently because of the power of the beatgrids. I have been DJing in clubs for 20+ years, and for many years I used and taught students Serato and Traktor and Rekordbox.
As someone who has thousands of hours of experience with DJ software and a background in technical support and working for Apple, I wanted to share a couple snags and improvements that I think may make a huge difference because I want Djay Pro to win long term, especially with the recent news of NI. Sorry if these have been mentioned before, I will do my best to look for previous posts on each point:
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The fact that djay pro forces you to analyze a ton of cue points and use its own key system is a bit frustrating. If you are a brand new DJ its probably fine, but as someone who has curated thousands of songs I am now forced to go from using mixed in key which has ~85% accuracy to a program that has ~50% accuracy. Not a huge deal, but a bit annoying when you are used to your crates being in a certain order. Having a simple ability to turn this on and off, or a checkbox like serato has would be huge. I now have to go through thousands of tracks just to delete hundreds of cuepoints.
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Option to Use Key Tagged in Song instead of Analysis -
Over many years of using Serato, I have trained my brain to use the spacebar to switch between expanded library and a minimized library / performance mode. This feels intuitive to me when you are playing in a club, and in Djay Pro spacebar stops the entire track. I feel like there should be a better way to handle this, or it would be great to have the ability to turn this off as this is a disaster waiting to happen with a live club, and now I have to retrain my brain.
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Pref setting to ignore space bar with external keyboard -
On the above note, I feel like copying the way the library minimizes and maximizes to go from a performance mode to an expanded library / browsing mode could be improved a big. As someone who has a big curated collection, the very first thing I do is always remove all streaming services. When this is done the “expand library” button in the bottom right doesn’t really do much at all. I feel like the library should be much smaller or have a slider to change the size as its too big in regular view, and it seems to be a fine size for browsing when its expanded. I spend a lot of time in long house blends and having big juicy waveworms would be awesome, as they feel a bit small and squashed to me.
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Resize / hide the Library browser tree
Resizable interface elements -
I really love that the interface has tons of features, but the ability to really strip it down to barebones or just what I want and need would be huge, so making the overall interface a bit more modular and customizable would be a game changer. This will allow the performer to dial things in exactly as they want. I feel like you guys are winning as Djay Pro is as expansive/technical as Traktor is, but some improvements could be made to make it smoother for people that just want to play music and beatmatch simply like you can in Serato. In fact, I think this is why Serato has so many traditional turntablists currently, and having Qbert switch over means there is huge room to get more customers in this area.
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In the next couple months I will be buying technics 1200s to test with the Reloop Flux, a rotary mixer and DVS. Do you know if the Reloop Flux will ever get plug and play official compatibility? I think it will work, but it would be nice if it was officially supported.
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Reloop Flux Interface -
Will there ever be an option to do a lifetime license? I would easily pay a lump sum rather than have to pay a subscription fee for Djay Pro.
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Price for Lifetime License
Overall, I really think this software is great and you all could be on the cusp of taking over in a big way with all of these venture capital deals happening with the other players. For reference, I am using the new Macbook Pro M5, and I may have some more suggestions come up when I start testing the DVS portion. The djay pro team has been really awesome with working with us and listening to suggestions, so thank you!
