I always liked electronic music, but I’m not a musician. In recent moths, I’ve been exploring the world of DJing. It’s a way for me to feel that I can do music without deep knowledge of musical theory. It’s a fascinating world.

Last year I bought a Pioneer DDJ-400 controller for use with my Mac mini. There is two major roadblocks in my experience so far: finding good quality tracks to mix and selecting the best DJ app. I want to draw your attention to the software side of my story.

Some well known DJ apps are Rekordbox, Serato and DJay. My understanding is that in recent years, software makers all switched to subscription models. Application like Rekordbox will “unlock” some of its features while being used with certain DJ controller models, but to get the whole thing, you have to subscribe to some plan. It’s irritating for someone like me who’s just trying to learn and experiment. But there is another problem: applications design sucks. Rekordbox and Serato are visually terrible. On the Mac, these apps really feels like aliens coming from… I don’t know… even on Windows they probably look aliens. The best looking application is Algoriddim’s Djay, by far. Problem is, the application is lacking many features. For now, my conclusion is that It appears that we cannot have both fully featured applications with a great design.