Review: Pioneer SVJ-DL01 music software

With everyone and their goldfish an amateur DJ these days, it’s unsurprising that genuine musical pioneers are looking for new ways to offer a musical mix that’s fresh for increasingly fussy audiences.

For many therefore, it’s goodbye vinyl and CDs, and hello notebook computers. However, the main problem with any computer-based mixing program is that it requires a soundcard with two stereo outputs to work properly, one playing the mix and one for your headphones to cue the next track up.

Not many people have this, so for any such software to be any good, you’re going to have to shell out for the hardware.

The Pioneer SVJ-DL01 is based around the popular Pioneer CDJ CD turntables. Unfortunately, it’s nowhere near as much fun as the real machines or as powerful a piece of software as its main rival, Ableton Live 6.

For those unfamiliar, Ableton is a program that allows you to mix, remix and re-edit tracks on the fly, allowing skilled souls to create a musical blend that’s simply impossible with vinyl or CDs.

However, at twice the price of Pioneer's SVJ-DL101 software, it will put off those with just a mere interest in mixing music together.

Nevertheless, SVJ-DL101 doesn’t offer such a variety of options so feels more like some of the fun shareware packages you can download for free.

Importing music (from most formats including MP3) to mix is easy but getting them ready for your mix is fidgety.

Synching two songs so they sound in time was tricky at first but we soon improved. However, once you finally have them bouncing along nicely, there’s little you can do that you can’t with real turntables, making this feel like a gimmick rather than a tool for crafty spinners.

It also looks dull and we found it had some grating features – bad zoom tools for sound files, and flawed looping features for starters.

While it’s functional enough and will operate as a decent tutorial program to learn the theoretical basics of DJ-ing without forking out for turntables, it’s not good enough for those wanting to use their notebook computers outside of their bedroom.

The infinitely superior Ableton might be twice the price but it’s more than worth the extra investment.

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