COMPUTER DJ MIXING SOFTWARE

Rating:    Price: $129.95   Website: SoftJock.Com

Rockit has been around for some time now, and has gathered quite a following among mobile jocks who do weddings and parties. It is ultra simple to use, yet has a great deal of features and can be easily customized. It has the easiest music library to work with and find music quickly, along with built in tag editing functions, etc. There are lots of skins available for Rockit, and some are simple, some more complex. It is geared directly to the wedding/party jock, and is known to be highly reliable.

For the price and performance, it can't be beat, which is why it is our Editor's Choice.

Virtual DJ

Rating:    Price: $299.00   Website: VirtualDJ.Com

Virtual DJ seems aimed to be the "jack of all trades" dj software, having audio, video and karaoke features, although by doing so, many of the features seem half finished, and quirky at times. They've released a multitude of upgrades over the last couple years, with apparently many aimed at bug fixes. Our testing has shown it can be picky about what hardware it runs well with, and in speaking with many DJs, we find that they either love it because it works well on their hardware, or they hate it because it doesn't work well on their hardware.

It tends to be geared more towards the club DJ, who likes hands on scratching, looping, etc.

OTS AV DJ

Rating:    Price: $299.95   Website: OTSAV.Com

OTS is the kind of software that develops a cult following. The users we talk to seem to go well out of their way to impress their love of it upon other people. It does excellent segueing between songs, once you have the mixes setup properly, although that can take some time and effort. Two things that keep us from giving it a better rating, are the klunky interface, which seems as old as Windows 95, and the fact that is uses a special file format that you need to import your music into, in order to take full advantage of the program.

It feels as though it is more geared towards radio type broadcasting.

Traktor Pro

Rating:    Price: $229.00   Website: Native-Instruments.Com

Traktor has been around for quite some time as well, and has a devoted following. We find its interface to be very busy, and rather daunting, and seemingly more suitable for studio than live playback. It seems heavily devoted towards the mixologist who wants to record his mixes.

We have not heard great things about their support from some of the users we've spoken with who have used it for some time. They also seem to like to bundle the software with their own hardware line.

If you like having tons of controls at your fingertips, you may like Traktor

PCDJ Dex

Rating:    Price: $199.00   Website: PCDJ.Com

Dex seems geared directly for the club DJ, and did not seem very intuitive to us during testing. The interface is very busy, and hard to quickly locate the controls. Our testing also showed it to be very resource intensive in the memory and CPU areas.

It comes with a few skins, although we did not really like any of them. We haven't found any users who use this professionally, so our review is limited to our own testing.

MixMeister Fusion

Rating:    Price: $329.95   Website: Mixmeister.Com

Fusion seems geared towards studio work, and fine tuning and recording mixes. The latest version includes MIDI controller support, VST effects, etc.

It seems to us, to have a steep learning curve, and we did not feel comfortable in using this as a live performance tool, but appears to be useful if you want to make and record some complex mixes. The price is steep as well. Most of the working DJs we spoke to who use MM products, do not use Fusion, and rely on older versions of the MixMeister line.