The next revolution of DJing continues unabated, with iPad DJ apps taking shape nicely, and are now offering a truly viable alternative the more traditional laptop. Yes, I said traditional as laptops have been in use for a over a decade now. And coming at you just in time for your New Year’s party is the latest release of Mixvibes’ Cross DJ 1.6 for iPad, and with it comes the killer feature of sample pads.
First the words from Mixvibes:
Cross DJ for iPad Greatest Update: 12Pad Sampler
Top your mix with 72 awesome samples and record your own with the iPad integrated microphone. Get ready for New Year’s Eve party!
Intuitive sampler
- 12 pads, 6 on each side.
- Tap one pad to immediately trigger the sound.
- Create beats from scratch or simply pepper your mix with cool sounds.
12 builtin sample banks
- 12 included banks: Dance, Dubstep, HipHop, Space, Synth, Vocals & more…
- A total of 72 samples to boost your mix.
- Create and save your custom sample bank, tailored for your next party.
Record your own samples from the iPad microphone
- 1 tap recording through the iPad’s integrated microphone.
- Edit your samples: rename them or move them around.
- Save your custom sample banks.
Exclusive New Year’s Eve sample banks
- Happy New Year in many languages: English, Spanish, Italian, Japanese…
- Party sounds: Count down, Horns & more)
Best of it all, the sampler is free on iPad. No inapp purchase, no new app to buy.
Get it now: http://appstore.com/crossdj
Adding samples was a no-brainer for Mixvibes. It’s a standard feature in all DJ software, and having the ability to throw one-shots out at your audience (like the included ubiquitous airhorn) is a real draw.
The Cross DJ implementation while not as complete, isn’t unlike the algoriddim djay one, right down to the icon you press to engage sample mode. You get 12 pads on screen, and can load in whole packs from a dropdown menu, and also edit the sets to build your own. I would like to see colour being editable too.
The future for tablets
The tablet wars are really hotting up now. Djay had a clear run for a good while , but with Cross DJ and DJ Player all getting MIDI support for external controllers, it’s looking like the market is developing nicely. And with the promise of DVS support coming, things are looking good for the wider tablet market.
You’ll note that I left Traktor DJ out of this so far. It’s my feeling that Traktor DJ will only ever work with NI hardware, thus reinforcing NI’s developing Apple-esque approach of their own software being targeted to their own hardware. You can of course still grab Traktor DJ and use it just like the aforementioned apps on its own. But it’s fair to say that like laptops before them, tablets are best used with some sort of controller.
2014 certainly looks promising for iOS and now thanks to Mixvibes for Android tablets too. I feel we’ll see a lot of the more basic and very similar DJ apps fall by the wayside as the big boys chuck out their own offerings. We’re still waiting for Serato and Virtual DJ to come out with fully fledged apps, and it would be folly to think that they didn’t already have some sort of working prototypes by now.