Feeling a little like Bart Simpson badgering Homer from the back seat of the car, we seem to have been driving towards Virtual DJ 8 for the longest time. No we’re not there yet, but Atomix have issued yet another rapid update to what hopefully will soon become their legacy version. Virtual DJ 7.3 continues to get the bugs fixes, but also gets some new features, which I guess are thrown in to keep people happy while they wait.
Atomix sent his, which is not so much a press release as a statement of intent:
As we said before, VirtualDJ 8 is still under beta-testing, and we’ll keep it that way until we’re confident that we nailed every single one of the numerous small bugs that are the unavoidable byproducts of a complete rewrite.
VirtualDJ 7 is a rock-solid piece of software, that is used daily by dozen of millions of DJs around the world without a glitch, and we strongly believe that VirtualDJ 8 should have the same stability. The new features in v8, no matter how groundbreaking, do not justify a loss in stability. So we’ll continue to whip the new development team until v8 is perfect
And as we promised, in the meantime, we’ll continue to release improvements on the v7.x series, and port back some of the new features that had been developed for v8.
So here comes VirtualDJ version 7.3:
The focus on this new update is mainly the sound quality.We’ve improved the audio engine, using 32-bit internal processing, we added an automatic Limiter, an optional new Parametric Equalizer with customizable frequencies, and in general ported back from v8 some new improvements that make VirtualDJ sound better.
VirtualDJ 8 will sound even better, but 7.3 is already a noticeable improvement over the previous versions.
We also ported back from v8 the multi-word search engine.
If you search for “Guetta Love”, the search engine will now show all the results that contain both the word “Guetta” in one of the fields and the word “Love” in the same or any other field. (unlike v7.2 and previous, where it would have shown only files matching the exact string “Guetta{space}Love”).
If you want to search for an exact string with spaces, just include it between double-quotes when you type it in the search field.And as usual we added native support for the latest and newest controllers that will hit the market soon, and we fixed a few small bugs that had been reported.
As always, version 7.3 is free for all registered Broadcaster/Pro Basic/Pro Full users.
VirtualDJ 7.3 (11 November 2012)
- improved sound engine quality
- new automatic Limiter
- new optional Parametric Equalizer
- improved reactivity on controlers jogwheels
- new multi-field search
- fixed loop goes mute bug
- fixed colorwave on VBR songs
- fixed reverting to default skin if selected skin is missing
- fixed high CPU usage for colored scratchWave on near-silent parts
- fixed crash with Typhoon’s ASIO driver
- fixed touchwheel_touch can get stuck when changing jog_mode
- fixed database entries duplicated for songs with accents when switching between Mac and PC
- fixed video_transition on 4 decks
- fixed device_side on 4 decks
- fixed cloudList icons on skins with custom icons
- new config options VolumeFader, Limiter, Param Eq, Output Headroom
- new registry hack JogScratchLatency to improve latency of midi/hid jogwheels
- action video_delay can do on/off
- new action get_limiter
A parametric equaliser? Auto limiting? The last update saw coloured waveforms too. But don’t get too excited – the new EQ isn’t quite Protools or Logic, but does allow you to type in your own 3 band EQ frequencies. And it works too. Atomix are so pleased with the new audio engine that they challenged me to compare it to their competitors with studio monitors.
I do hope that Atomix leave something new for us in VDJ8, or else it’s going to be a bit of a damp squib. Well probably not, but knowing what the attention span if of DJs, as well as the hoops manufacturers have to jump through just to impress these days, I would suggest slowing foen on the updates and leave things in the VDJ8 pot.
So log in to your VDJ account and grab the free upgrade.