DJ Music

After yesterdays excited arrival of the Pacemaker DJ device, its time to put the player to the test, I spent the day, fiddling with the Pacemaker, DJing on the tube on the way to work, as well as sporadically through the day. It’s sturdy, and easy to use on the go, just the sort of thing it was designed for, to let a DJ, DJ Music on the go. The controls are responsive, sometimes too responsive, and navigating the DJ controls can be a bit fiddly at times, however it does it’s job well. I also tried using the pacemaker as a mp3 music player and the sound quality was pretty good, with the music quality high and maintained. Sadly, the navigation of the music is a bit fiddly and can at times be a little irritating, music is grouped on the DJ player by track name, moving the side control allows you to select track grouped by BPM, DJ, album, and music genre, I personally think it would be better to group by album as the primary navigation, especially considering I have over 2000 music tracks on the Pacemaker.

The screen resolution and quality is fantastic and is easy to read, displaying the track name, channel, time, battery, and BPM, its a full colour screen to making it great for toying around with. The buttons are responsive and easy to press, none of that stickiness, the crossfader is very interesting and needs so getting used to, but broadly speaking its pretty good, you can do some pretty interesting DJ moves on the cross fader as well, which shows the potential for a new breed of DJ. Below this is the circular touch pad that gives the Pacemaker that interesting goggle look, this has an X-Y axis on it, its ultra sensitive, and it can be a little tough to get the hang of, starting from the center of the circle, moving out in different directions gives control over different DJ effects and DJ EQs, its also used for navigating the music play list which is where it gets pretty irritating, still I suspect this has more to do with chubby fingers, or not being used to DJing in this way.

I decided to add the strap that came along with the Pacemaker, this was pretty useful, however, due to the location of the output sockets, and the on/off switch and effects cancel switch, the strap gets in the way (at least the way that I put the strap on), this however is a small annoyance.

I tried mixing several music tracks on the pacemaker, with some standard non-mixed DJ level music tracks, you need to upload the music to the Pacemaker editor and transfer the music to the Pacemaker to be able to DJ said music on the Pacemaker, this helps build the BPM, Beats per minute, of each music track, you can alter the BPM when DJing on the Pacemaker, however, interestingly the BPM changes on the playing track when you are beatmatching, considering this is more of a travel DJing product that some hardcore piece of DJ equipment, it would have been nice to have an automatic beatmatching feature, if there is one I’ve yet to find it. The effects arn’t too bad, but don’t expect anything too ground breaking, you get Echo, Reverb and Roll, but you can only use one effect at a time. EQ control is easy and quick to use, I think it applies to each channel of the Pacemaker, but I’m not totally sure.

All in all the Pacemaker Doesn’t disappoint and does its job of allowing a DJ to DJ Music on the move, with relative ease, its definitely easy to pick up, but like most of DJing its probably tough to master, the ease of certain DJ controls and the compactness of some DJ controls on the pacemaker will also probably, give some uniqueness to DJing music on a Pacemaker. Highly recommended!

(more about The pacemaker by Dj music here)

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