Digital DJing On Your Computer

I used to DJ and promote nights in London. It had it's highs and lows but through it all I always had a passion for music.

Everybody loves music, of one style or another.
There are also many DJs out there of varying degrees - some great, some crap.

Many people want to DJ but just can't afford to buy all the vinyl, including me. If I had the money, hell, I'd be out there every week grabbing new tunes! But, alas, my present lifestyle doesn't allow for that.

An alternative to being a vinyl DJ is mixing from your computer, be that a notebook or a desktop computer.
The only problem is, there is a lot of DJing software out there. So which one do you choose?
I have tried quite a few, so I will give you my opinion on them here.

Virtual DJ - This was the closest - visually - to a set of decks and a mixer. It also gave you a couple of turtables that you could use to spin up the tunes, backspin and hold a beat. Unforunately, I found it woefully ineaccurate at finding the beatpoints and also very hard to keep the tracks in sync, even when they should be. Eventually, regardless of the effects available, I gave up on VDJ.

Traktor - This was close to Virtual DJ visually. However, I found this really screwed up my music collection the very first time I used it, so this really did put me off. I tried to use it but found it too clunky and not nearly as responsive as I hoped it would be.

Reason -  Too complicated. This is for producing tunes, not for mixing.

Ableton Live -  Ableton is very similar to a lot of producing programs, like Reason and Cool Edit Pro's multi-track function. It can be used to DJ live, sometimes to great effect (search for DJ Sasha on Wikipedia for more details.) but I couldn't really get on with it. There were just too many functions.

So, this leads me to what I use. I wanted something that allowed me to lay down tracks in a very simple way. That I could do long mixes with. That would auto-adjust speeds between tracks if necessary. And something that would allow me to produce clean and high quality mixes I could give to my mates or have the confidence to use in a bar or club.

MixMeister Pro 6, in my opinion, is the best software to use. It works so well for me. It has great functionality and isn't too busy with extra buttons, dials, faders and racks of crap you don't need.
You lay your tracks down, one after the other, in the main area and then match up the tracks in the intro and outro 'sprockets'. Once you have done this, your tracks will (most of the time) be seamlessly played one after the other. The only exception to this is if MixMeister cannot match up the beats effectively; this is rare but I found turning off the beat-matching option and doing it manually was far more accurate.
Whereas I struggled with Virtual DJ for over a year to try and get nailed, I managed to master MixMeister within a few months!
Now I'm happily creating albums that sound like they have been purchased in a music store. I post them regularly on a couple of websites and have got some great feedback from a lot of people.

I will provide more details about how to use MixMeister as soon as I can. But for now, if you want to have a look at this product (I'm not affiliated with them, by the way!) then go to their website.

http://www.mixmeister.com/