HIRE: Pioneer CDJ2000 Media Player

The CDJ has for the most part been the main culprit in the murder of turntables in clubs, They turned into expensive (and unstable), drinks holders, or some where to put your CD wallet, they looked almost downtrodden as these new black boxes called CDJ’s got to sit on elevated platforms above them.

Now as long as CD’s were the main medium of choice for DJs Pioneer pretty much had the market sewn up. There are other players out there of course, and most of them do a great job, but once DJ’s around the world decided what they wanted, that was that. There’s no club worth it’s salt that doesn’t have CDJ’s whether it be 800’s,1000’s. Mk1’s 2’s or 3’s!

In the last couple of years though there has been a change of direction. Enter the world of laptop DJing. People initially changed from Vinyl to CD’s because they were sick of dragging their record bags around and the fact that you could buy nearly 10 MP3’s for the price of one vinyl or get them for free if you were that way inclined, but then came the age of the laptop DJ. They thought the idea of carrying a wallet of CDs was just way too stressful! Now we have a bunch of DJ’s with thousands of tunes straight from the web tucked away in their laptop ready to be played without the need to burn loads of CD’s. All of a sudden CDJ’s have just been relegated to being very expensive controllers for laptops!

That was until the CDJ 2000 and it’s baby brother the 900 came on the scene! This is by far one of the shrewdest updates of a DJ product I’ve ever seen. Rather than holding on vainly to their CD past (No Pun intended) they have in essence reinvented the wheel with the CDJ 2000. They don’t even call it a CD player anymore, it now has the forward thinking title of “Multi Player”. And this is exactly what it is. Want to play all your tunes from a USB stick no probs, or mp3 CD all good! You want to control Traktor and Sertato that’s sweet as well! This unit sends out Midi and is recognised as a sound card by your computer! I mean they’ve thought of everything. The great thing about this machine is that no matter what you play from this point on, you will be using the CDJ 2000 to do it. You will associate the feeling of the platter and pitch slider with djing, it’s fundamental to how you DJ. The way a CDJ feels is in my opinion one of the main reasons we use them in the first place. What’s great for Pioneer is that feeling will be associated with DJing right across the board whether it be on CD, USB or Laptop!

A very useful and clever addition to the CDJ family is record box application. Once again we see Pioneer accepting that laptop based music is here to stay and rather than staying stagnant they have embraced it with open arms. With Rekord box you can sort your tunes, sync directly from itunes, set cue points and loop points, edit all MP3 tags, and even set up a tempo grid so the looping will be seamless.

This is very useful in preparing your tracks before sets. You save it to your memory stick and then bounce to the club, you load up your tracks from the USB stick and all your loop points and cue points are all there as if by magic. what’s even more awesome is that you can call up cue points from other tunes! Triggering them like samples!

I really get the feeling that the team at Pioneer need to congratulate themselves for this amazing update. Every time I use one of these machines I am constantly being amazed at what it can do. I am convinced that the CDJ 2000 has put it’s foot firmly in the future, and will be there long before you!