One DJ 1.5 review

One DJ 1.5 is a DJing application that lets you mix and remix tracks on the fly. Ostensibly, One DJ is based on the two-decks-and-mixer paradigm favoured by much of the world’s DJing software, such as Native Instruments’ Traktor Pro 2 and Mixvibes’ Cross 3. Indeed, when you first use One DJ you’re confronted with a scene that includes left and right virtual decks and a central mixer, with a track browser located in the bottom half of the screen. This adds familiarity, and if you’re used to DJing software you’ll be able to jump straight in and use One DJ straight away.

However, One DJ provides much more scope for creativity than regular Ding software and combines the spontaneity of regular DJing software such as Mixvibes Cross 3 with the advanced timeline editing of software such as Ableton Live 9. To play a track, for example, you can simply drag a track from the browser and drop it onto a virtual deck. From there, you can drag extra tracks onto the deck and stack them, one on top of the other. When you hit play, both tracks will play, and when you create a loop it’ll loop both tracks.

Even though One DJ’s decks look like regular virtual decks, they’re not. One DJ’s decks are timelines that you can control how you want. You’ll see a waveform for each track that you load, which is exactly what we want, but from there you can move one track to another part of the timeline so that it starts to play at a specific point.

One DJ arranges your tracks on a timeline, so you can set exactly when you want each part of your mix to start – click to enlarge

It’s this flexibility that allows users more freedom to create novel mixes and edits than you’d find in regular, linear DJing software. You can, for instance, split a track into different parts and from there delete the parts you don’t need and move the parts you do need to a different place on the time line. You can combine commercially available tracks with your own compositions, whether they’re basslines, drums or vocals, to create something new and have that new track play like any other simply by hitting the Play button.

To arrange tracks you must put the deck in Edit mode, and it is fairly easy move items around. However, we found that it was a bit fiddly to align items and split them accurately. Creating these edits isn’t something you’d want to do when playing live or mixing in your home studio. You’ll want to create edits beforehand and get them just right before incorporating them in your set. Thankfully, One DJ 1.5 lets you save edits as a timeline. You can then access and reload that timeline at any point by dragging it from the browser onto a deck, just like any other track.

Another neat feature of One DJ is the flexible way you can adjust the layout. If you don’t want to see the crossfader, for instance, you can get rid of it, and the same goes for a deck. You can also make a deck full-screen, which is a boon when you’re editing tracks on the deck’s timeline.

As is common with DJing software, you can apply loops and effects to tracks playing in your deck. If you have more than one track loaded in a deck then the loop and effects will be applied to all of them playing at that point. The maximum loop size is only 16 beats, and we’d prefer a 32- or 64-beat maximum. The effects consist of DJ favourites such as Delay, Filter and Bitcrusher, and are of similar quality to other mainstream DJing applications. This means they can jazz up a track if used correctly, but they don’t sound as good as the effects in more studio-oriented software such as Ableton Live 9. One DJ is a good attempt at creating a DJing platform that combines the freedom and creativity of Ableton Live 9 with the spontaneity and workflow of traditional applications such as Mixvibes Cross 3. It’s mostly successful, but it isn’t as polished as we’d like it to be. It occasionally became unresponsive, and it doesn’t have the level of precision we’d prefer.

At around £40, One DJ 1.5 is a bargain and a great buy if you’re looking for something a little different.