The XDJ-XZ, Pioneer DJ’s most recent all-in-one release, has created mixed emotions for a lot of DJs. It’s got those full-sized platters, jog displays, and four channel mixer – but it’s lacking more than two standalone channels (two channels are for external inputs – which includes Rekordbox DJ on a computer).
Today the news is that there’s some pretty in-depth support coming for the XDJ-XZ in an upcoming update Virtual DJ 2020. This is especially wild considering that Serato DJ had announced support for the device in November of last year , but still hasn’t finished the integration.
Software integration in a major way
The XDJ-XZ support in the soon-to-launch Virtual DJ update is significant, too. It’s looking less like basic MIDI control, and more like a full hardware integration. The feature set – as outlined on the support manual – includes:
- Virtual DJ’s waveforms appearing on the touch screen
- Jogwheel displays that include waveforms and album art, as well as BPM, time, pitch, deck number, etc
- Four deck support
- Full use of the soundcard – including all decks, the sampler, FX send/return, record in
The mixer section acts as normal – so all of the audio is routed through the four decks and able to be effected by the Color and Beat FX as normal. It looks like exactly what you’d expect the behavior to be, and that’s great.
A public beta for this new version of Virtual DJ 2020 is expected in the next week – watch this thread for updates. If you’re interetsted in getting an XDJ-XZ, we’ve got units available in the DJTT store here.
The Future Of The XZ
This type of software support for the XDJ-XZ breaths some welcome new life into this hardware launch. It delivers the DDJ-1000 and NXS2 experiences for software users, which is nothing to undersell. It would be amazing to see other companies (hello, NI?) have anything close to Atomix (the developers behind VDJ) and Serato’s excitement for supporting new hardware.
That said, it’s always going to be hard to look at this unit and not think about what could have been. Making a four-deck XDJ has been the dream since the first XDJ-RX launched, and this unit could have included four built-in standalone decks, but Pioneer DJ decided not to do that.
