User Review
IDJC - Internet DJ Console
By Daniel Bemis
I'll start off by saying you shouldn't let the word "internet" in the name make you think this won't work for transmitter stations. True, it has some functions that are tailored for streamcasting, but there is a lot here that is useful for any sort of station. While IDJC is not as fancy looking as some DJ software, it's clean, robust and has some capabilities that can be useful, especially to folks on a budget who'd rather not sound "less than full featured".
Price: It is open-source software, and it is free.
Where can I get it: Internet DJ Console home page or, if you're running Ubuntu or one of the other flavours of Linux with an easy to use repository, that's even easier. There's useful info on what things are and how to set stuff on the website, tough, so it's worth a visit in either case.
Operating System: I run it under Ubuntu "Natty Narwhal" which also happens to be open source and free. (Are you seeing a pattern here?)
Hardware: Well, like a lot of things, I'm sure it runs better on better machines. But I run it on a Dual core 64 machine with 4 gigs or ram and it works great, without a hitch. I also use two soundcards with it, the one that came on the computer motherboard and an inexpensive SBLive! Soundcard. So it obviously doesn't take a super machine and a lot of special hardware to use it.
Okay, looking at the main screen, you can see most of what you use to run the software right there. You can have two playlists up at a time (they can be quite large playlists), and you can pan between them, call up a separate player for jingles if you like, switch microphones in and out, keep an eye on your levels, and most other things you'd pretty much expect. If you want to set up Skype for phone capability, it has an integrated handler for a Skype phonepatch. You can adjust the response for the crossfader to your liking, and so on. The playlist also has some functions you can access via a right-click of the mouse to do various things.
This piece of software has enough features that I really can't go into them all in detail in a short review. It also has a lot of features I don't know well or have much use for, though some of you might. I don't claim that I use it all to it's fullest potentials, I use it as a basic part 15 broadcast workhorse.
It can play music and other sound files direct from your folders or from a MySQL database if you happen to have one or feel like setting one up. I don't use the database options, so for me it's just drag and drop to build and adjust playlists.
On the air, it's pretty simple to use, as you can probably see. Let the playlist run until you want to talk, then switch it from "play all" to "cue up" and it'll do a nice smooth stop at the end of the current song so you can say your piece. If you like to talk into the intros and etc, that's no problem either. That's pretty much it for the basic panel. But there's quite a bit more behind that "preferences" button.
On the first tab of the box you see after hitting the preferences button, well, a lot of it is stream related. But some of it is darn interesting for regular radio, like the controls for the normalization. It can normalize on the fly, and you can adjust the "boost, threshold, rise and fall" the normalization will use on audio files being played from the playlists. If you know what those parameters are and how to tweak them, it is seriously sweet for getting the normalization to sound the way you like. If you don't know, you could leave it alone, or just mess with it a bit and see what you can come up with. It has a convenient button to reset to defaults, and that's always nice.
There's also some options for how the track is handled and etc, but they're pretty easy to figure out, so we'll move on to the next tab.
Next page©2011 HobbyBroadcaster.net - All rights reserved This article may not be copied or reproduced in whole or in part without the expressed written permission of HobbyBroadcaster.net. Additional restrictions for reproduction are outlined within the terms of use for this site which may be viewed using the link below.
