Is Disco Dead? It’s Alive And Well On Your Mac.

I thought disco was dead. Honestly. That’s what I thought. My bell bottoms and wide lapel sport jackets long ago hit the yard sale circuit.

What now, baby boomer, or son of baby boomer? You can disco or DJ on your Mac until the cows come home.

It’s not that I don’t pay attention to all the cool new applications for your Mac. There’s plenty to review.

Besides, my musical needs seem to be satisfied by my portable DJ, the ubiquitous jukebox known as the iPod. What else could anyone want?

Apparently, there’s still DJ work to go around, and disco isn’t dead. They just call it something besides disco, right?

For the Mac, there’s a number of great applications that do double duty as fun and DJ work; the human jukebox, so to speak.

Of those I’ve reviewed this past week, my favorite is CuePhase. Why? Simplicity. As a previous generation disco dude, simple is better. I require more time for my hair.

CuePhase lets you list music from iTunes, re-arrange it, and then, as it plays, it provides a smooth transition between songs. What else do you need?

Remarkably, today’s DJ’s require more, more, more. How do you like it, how do you like it?

Disco DJ is similar, but has a lot more goodies than just a playlist that segues between songs. This is “live” mixing on your Mac.

It’s a dual audio player with all the old features from yesteryear—cue, pitch bend, fastforward, scratch, beat detection, and, my favorite—headphone cueing.

Disco DJ also lets you use your Mac’s microphone (or any other mic input to your Mac) so you can do voice overs. Squeals, grunts, and screeches allowed.

Even more expensive and with fewer features is the newer presetDJ. Sans any kind of cool new age color scheme, it’s basically drag and drop music, re-arrange, then play.

presetDJ bills itself and ultra simple as “the most simple and useable dj-solution available for Mac OS X. Easy to use, no useless features, no mindless hardware clone.  Drag files from the Finder, arrange them, play them.“

Mindless? Disco? Say it ain’t so.

Jukebox and DJ applications are not the same and not created equal. There’s a healthy list of others than lean one way or the other.

That includes viewTunes Jukebox which looks like, well, like nothing you probably have on your Mac. What Jukebox does differently than iTunes I don’t know.

The more expensive SilverJuke can actually look like a jukebox on your Mac. Not that there’s anything wrong with that.

DJ software is different and usually loaded with features that can re-arrange songs quickly, and manipulate the sound output. So it is with DynamDJ from Tim Lenertz. It’s more colorful, too. See? I understand the disco mind. It’s all about color and glitter.

Ultramixer brings digital DJ’ing to the Mac via skins, dual mixers, little knobby dials, and the traditional left-right channel. What’s a good DJ application good for these days? Private party, restaurants, hair studios, or medical surgeries.

Honest. That’s a stated use for UltraMixer.

Most of these applications will play MP3s, WMA, WAVs, AAC, or CDs in real time, which is another way of saying, “You get to click the buttons to make things happen.“ After all, that’s just like a real DJ, right?

Ready for the Comments section? When was the last time you went to a disco? Name two songs that were played there? iPod or no iPod?

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