Djay Pro AI for iPad now has touchless gesture controls
There's more reason to care when you're waving your hands in the air.
When it comes to motion tracking and music, you can follow the breadcrumbs including Max Mathews, Imogen Heap, Beat Saber, a growing research and Kickstarter crowd, and now potentially you. If you’re a DJ using djay Pro AI on an iPad Pro running iOS 14 (utilizing Apple’s Vision Framework) today’s the day you join the party.
An update to Algoriddim’s djay software is now available, and while it includes various new tweaks, the most notable is a touchless Gesture Control interface. You’ll still need your hands for track selection, volume and occasionally the fader, but you can trigger automatic transitions, filter sweeps, scratching and loops with the motion of your hands… placed carefully over an iPad Pro in a well-lit area. So, essentially an environment unlike most DJ booths, but you have to start somewhere.
We haven’t had a chance to go hands-on hands-above, but a performance video on YouTube from DJ Ravine gives you a pretty good visual walkthrough of the gesture control possibilities. It looks like fun, but I’m curious to see how it works in the real world outside of controlled environments. That said, this seems like a great addition to Algoriddim’s quiver of updates that continue to arrive in tandem with Apple’s technological advancements.
The possibilities are wide open, but luckily the Gesture Control tools are kept to a respectable minimum. To trigger the control interface you need to place two hands over the iPad’s camera area where you’ll see on-screen tracking markers to match your hands. There are three feature icons which you can select by hovering over them and clenching your fist to ‘grab’ them.
Enabling the FX tool lets you sift through your filter options and create sweeps within the parameter target zone using a closed fist and an extended finger, similar to the touchpad experience. Opening the clenched hand releases the filter.
Similarly, you can loop segments from a track or scratch with similar hand movements. And if you’d like the AI to take control of the fader, a clap will trigger an automatic transition between tracks. While all this is happening, you can also take advantage of the Neural Mix tools for dropping out audio elements of a track on-the-fly — if you have a free hand, that is.
One of the cool things here is that you don’t need any new hardware, but you gain an interface. This is assuming you have a djay Pro AI subscription ($7 per month) and an iPad Pro (11-inch, 12.9-inch 3rd gen or later, or iPad Air 4th gen or later) running iOS 14. The core djay for iOS app is free in the App Store, but extremely limited.
For those who don’t have the right software and equipment for Gesture Control (or ‘Air DJing’ as they’ve thrown out there), but do have a djay Pro AI subscription, other updates include enhanced MIDI control and easy access to your files stored on Dropbox or Google Drive. You can also keep a visualizer window open next to your virtual decks and choose to stream live photos, TIDAL music videos or your own camera roll videos.
