Virtual DJ is eons old, and has a user base that others can only dream of. And in that time, it has developed some key technologies as well as its fair share of bad press. This is something that the makers, Atomix, wish to address with Virtual DJ 8. And they’re making damned sure the ghosts of the past are exorcised completely.

Scott from Virtual DJ, or SBDJ as the VDJ family will know him as, dropped by the DJWORX base camp to give us a demo of the updated features plus a few others as well. Users will note the coloured waveforms – because of the need to placate existing users gagging for v8 to come along, the prematurely released v7.1 and far better v7.2 included them as a treat for those who are having to wait a little longer than expected.

But it’s some of the other features than have me rather more interested. Some bullet points:

Points of interest

Coloured waveforms throw up some very useful benefits, such as having a much more visual way to see important parts of the playing track. But VDJ8 goes someway further than just creating BPM and adding manual cue points. It’s now possible for the software to auto add “points of interest” i.e. what it considers to be the first beat or the start of a break etc.

Cue Point Commands

I don’t know if this is new or not, but as an advanced feature, this I find to be very interesting. Having defined cue points, it’s possible to attach commands to those cue points. This is achieved via VDJScript, a programming language that allows you to automate VDJ to do things that it and MIDI otherwise couldn’t do. I’m still unsure if these auto trigger actions when reached or if they’re triggered from a button press, but I know I’m going to have fun finding out.

Resizable interface

This is a big leap forward for Virtual DJ. As you’ll see at the start of the clip, the interface is highly responsive with all parts of the interface resizing to suit. One would hope that there will be an element of control in skin creation that defines which elements scale and how.

There’s more going on that just the cherry picking I did above, and you should watch the video to get a little more insight into where Atomix are with the next big update. It’s also an admirable stance to take with not releasing before they were ready to. It would be quite easy to put something out just to keep up appearances and the loyal following happy. But it would also be commercial suicide at a time when Serato just announced their next big update aka Serato DJ, and banking on Traktor being a bugfest is ancient history.

I get the impression that there is more to come in Virtual DJ 8, but it’s not getting shown just yet. Given that the release date looks to be post March 2013, I just don’t see that bug fixing takes 6 months, especially as there’s no retail package as such. Now that Atomix has seen the future roadmap of its rivals, I’d expect some fun time ahead.