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Test system - Mac OS X 10.4.9 and D² Director firmware v1.03.
Media is officially on its last legs. Most people's music collections existing in the digital domain in one form or other, and new and exciting ways are popping up all the time to enable them to stay there as well. It all started with CDs, moved onto control vinyl based solutions and now seems to be increasingly going the way of plugging MIDI controllers straight into your computer.
But there is another way - one that doesn't require fighting with a computer while you play and eliminates the weakest link from your hardware setup. In a nutshell, think replacing CD drives in regular decks and adding USB ports for external devices and you've got it. But it's not quite as easy as that - there has to be a way to manage the files effectively and it's this that makes these units technological light years ahead of their media based predecessors.
The Basics
The Numark D² Director (yes for some reason it's squared again) follows the basic dual head DJ metaphor but puts the modern technology spin on it. It's all about USB and how to use it with your files. And like the HDX before it, a rather nice keyboard is supplied to speed up your user experience. But let's go through the unit itself.
The D² Director is a conventional rackmount unit, but is equally at home on a tabletop (if a little less stable). At first look, it's clearly broken up into 3 sections - deck/screen/deck - but despite having a huge 4" x 3" screen, the controls are kept to a very logical minimum.
Quality wise, the D² Director does have a very nice feel to it. Heavyweight and solid with now familiar Numark look, it's a very tactile experience from the smooth jog wheel to the silver rubber buttons. Everything has a cool matt finish, bar the big screen and the contrast just adds to the quality feel and the red and blue LEDs.
It's has that whole matt and gloss varnish thing going on, although the matt is far from scuff resistant and will possibly look shabby quite quickly. Everything feels solid but the D² Director suffers the same lightweight pitch faders that most manufacturers seem to like putting into units these days.
The Screen
Being a first generation device of its kind, the screen is limited to 4 levels of grey but does feature an adjustable contrast. Broadly broken up into one third deck controls and two thirds track management, the screen displays as much information as you need without feeling like you're missing out on anything.
On screen, you'll find pitch (or pitch range when you press the pitch button), the play mode, BPM, play indicator, time indicator (played or remaining), a progress bar and the track name. Below that, track information is displayed, be it extra tags for each deck or the profile view.
It would be easy to use the screen to show each and every parameter in some sort of "look at what we can do" way, but thankfully Numark have avoided putting anything on screen that doesn't need to be there.
On-screen navigation is handled by the set of small buttons beneath the screen itself. They do require a good press to make your selection stick but sometimes you may find yourself with the same track in the crate twice because you think it hasn't done it the first time. In terms of moving around the screen, the "PUSH SELECT" button handles library navigation and searching. It's more than useable doing this, but the best way is with the supplied keyboard.
The Controls
There's a certain minimalism going on here, that belies what it is actually capable of. If you take each "deck" on it's own, there's almost too few controls based on what the D² Director can do. This is because much of the work is done on screen, in software or via the rather nice feeling keyboard.
Starting with the platter - it feels very solid and smooth under your fingers for a light handed non-scratching hand but can be grounded if you press hard enough - and offers 3 modes:
Pitch bend - just like any other jog wheel equipped unit, the little wheel allows temporary pitch shift. I can't find any info anywhere as to how much but my testing shows around +/- 20%.
Search - engage and spin to quickly scan through your file instead of spinning the jog wheel for days. It seems to be velocity sensitive as small movements step slowly through the track, but if you spin fast enough, a whole track can be got through in a second.
Scratch - be QBert at the press of this button. Or not as the case may be. Scratch mode alleges to allow you to scratch, which it kind of does but it's pretty awful in its execution. Aside from the fact that there's a very noticeable latency issue, when you release the jog wheel you have to match the speed of the music or it will grind to a halt and then pick up again. And if you keep your hand static on the wheel, it kicks in after something like 0.5 seconds. Backspins are poor as well, acting more like a reverse +50% and then a quick spin down.
I'm probably labouring this scratch point a little but it's just a warning for anyone wanting proper platter style performance from these wheels. You'll be disappointed.
Powering the D² Director is kind of cool. You're treated to quite a light show as it powers up, taking like 5 seconds to get up to speed. But a neat trick is the power down - you can't just press the button accidentally, killing your set mid flow - you have to press the power button for a few seconds before the D² Director goes to sleep. Nice touch.
Let's Play
Below the jog wheel... no lower - that's looping (more later)... are the play modes. Play/Stutter, pause and cue. It's all pretty standard stuff on gear these days but let's quickly cover them off:
Play/Stutter: Pressing this starts the track. Pressing again makes it jump to the last set cue point. Hitting it repeatedly makes you sound like you're stuck 80's sampler hell. So don't do that.
Pause: Stops the track. Pressing for a second takes you right back to the beginning.
Cue: Takes you back to the last cue point and pauses the track. Also acts like a temporary stutter, but you nee to keep it pressed. If you move the jog wheel, it redefines the cue point.
NOTE: There are no saved cue points. So if you're someone who likes to prepare tracks with cue points for later use, you're out of luck here.
All that's left for basic play is the pitch control. The D² Director has 5 pitch ranges - 0, 6, 12, 25 and -100/+25% with a 0.1% pitch resolution. These 3" pitch faders are nice and smooth with a reassuring centre click. They just feel a bit loose on a side to side movement, like they'll break off in your hand.
Looping
Back to looping. Again, pretty standard Numark stuff here - press loop in at the start of the loop, loop out to define the end of it. The D² Director stays in the loop until you hit loop out again. But you can jump back in again simply by hitting the reloop button. You can also define cue points with the loop buttons to quickly allow you to jump to the start or end of the loop.
Unlike other Numark units, there appears to be no loop editing or bar based breakdowns, although the D² Director does have the same Beatkeeper technology found in other Numark decks.
Modes
Rounding off with the modes - you can set certain parameters for each deck. This starts with track loading - comprising of manual, automatic, continuous and cyclic. Manual allows you to load up a track, play it and when done, it returns to the start. Automatic loads up the next track and cues to the start. Continuous plays that next track and cyclic simples works its way through your tracks and cycles back to the beginning - a never ending playlist for those looooong toilet breaks. So you don't have keep checking, the mode for each deck is indicated onscreen.
You can also show how time is displayed, either as elapsed or remaining. Numark have also managed to build in some fader start parameters here instead of just an on/off switch. You can set it to off, or get the fader to either pause at the current tracks play point or to pause at the set cue point and restart from that position. Sorry people - I have no fader start enabled mixer to check this out.
Round The Back
Move along - there's nothing to see here, except 2 USB ports, Line out and fader starts for the channels. Oh and a couple of huge rubber feet. When I say feet, I mean legs. And that's it, but did you really expect more?
So while this can be used as a tabletop device, it's most likely to be used in a coffin or mounted in a rack - which makes putting 2 extra USB ports at the back a little inconvenient. That said, the D² Director does have a USB port on the face. But be warned - using a USB pen drive in the top USB port is likely to see you giving it a serious physical bashing and/or get beer poured into it. I recommend getting a powered USB hub and plugging your devices into that instead. It's certainly easier if you need to plug something in sharpish as well.
The D² Director does everything you would expect from a dual head device - that goes without saying, but the whole point of this device is handling digital files instead of feeding CDs into the belly of the machine. So let's look in detail at how this works.
The Brain
This is where it gets interesting. You'd reasonably expect that any DJ manufacturer can knock out a unit by now where everything is more or less right. They've all been doing it for a while now and indeed the mechanical aspect of the D² Director works well. But now we're faced with the dilemma of having no actual media to insert - you know, 1 track on a lump of vinyl or maybe a few tracks on a CD.
Now you get to try and figure out how the hell to work with a drive full of tracks on a wide range of digital media. You also have to remember that being a self contained unit, there's big multi-coloured laptop screen where you can see huge lists of tracks - ooooh no. On this sort of device, you've got a 4" x 3" window in the brain of the D² Director so it has to work intuitively as no amount of hardware loveliness will compensate for a dodgy user interface. So it's a matter of working out how best to replicate the user experience of working with a record bag or CD case and at the same time, making it smooth and workable on a tiny window.
A Quick Glossary
It was pointed out to me by Numark that the first draft of this review contained a fair ammount of assumed knowledge about disk and file formats. The D² Director is in part probably aimed at people not necessarily savvy with such terms so here's a quick rundown of a few terms used.
HFS+
The standard disk format for Mac based devices such as iPods and hard drives
NTFS
The current hard disk format in Windows based computers
FAT32
The old format for Windows based computers
DRM
Digital Rights Management is the method of protection employed by manufacturers to protect audio files from being freely passed around. For example, music from the iTunes store employs DRM so that the tracks can only be used on one computer and iPod.
MP3
The de facto standard for music files in the digital world. It works by compressing teh source audio using lossy methods i.e. the quality is dependent on the file size and vice versa.
AAC
Advanced Audio Coding is a format that offers better quality but at the same file size as MP3, or smaller file size but at the same quality. Used by Apple and others as their format for iPods.
WAV
Waveform audio format is an uncompressed audio format, most frequently associated with PCs.
ID3 Tags
MP3 files can store extra information about the file that the filename alone cannot do. Information such as year, genre, BPM etc can be included as well as over 80 other differemt types - and you can define your own as well. WAV files cannot easily hold tag info, hence the popularity of MP3 in our information hungry world.
Be Prepared
Much of the success of your D² Director experience will be in preparing your music collection. While it can work with random files in no fixed order, the best route is to properly tag your files - not something I'd want to do with my comparatively meagre collection.
But
it is perfectly possibly to just plug and go with a whole range of USB devices and spin successfully, provided you have a solid knowledge of your scattered collection. You'll only be able to access your music by navigating the folder structure and picking your music by file name only and will loose all the options to search by tags. So to get the best from the D² Director, it really does pay to invest the time in tagging and creating a library for each device.
Formats
Before we dig into how you use your music, let's look at what formats the D² Director can use. Obviously, it supports the industry standard MP3 - both constant and variable bit rates. With media being as cheap as it is these days, there's little point in trying to keep your MP3s tiny so for best practice, keep them at 256bps. The D² Director also reads ID3 tags, ideally v2 tags as it makes using your music a lot easier as extra tags are included - such as BPM - which is a searchable option. AAC is a supported format (including the tags) but not DRM protected files - no surprise there really. And finally WAV comes in with the only lossless format, but without tags so you'll only see the filename in your library.
As far as storage formats goes, it seems to be pretty much any writeable USB device from pen drives, all manner of compact flash/SD type devices right up to big disks including iPods and Mac HFS+ partitions. It's worth noting that the D² Director can't write directly to HFS+ and (I'm told) NTFS formatted devices so this will effect how owners use this unit. More on that below.
And unlike it's competitors, the D² Director doesn't appear to support external CD/DVD drives. There's no mention of them in the manual so it might be worth bearing that in mind if that's a route you want to take. Can't think why you would if you're buying a digital audio deck but worth noting nonetheless.
The Library
The library is a key factor to using the D² Director successfully and there are a couple of ways to make them. The simplest but less complete way is just to plug the device in and let it make the library for you. The D² Director will check the device for a library and give you the choice of building one for you (or updating it if it has changed since you last plugged it in) or to just use file names. As mentioned before, just using files means no searching of tags thus losing much of the functionality of this device but it is the quickest and nastiest way to use your music. Be warned though - some devices can't have their library created on the D² Director because of read only status namely NTFS and HFS+ hard drives. In these cases, you'll have to use the next process.
By far the best way (and I can't stress this enough) is to use the Librarian application supplied by Numark. This runs on Windows and OS X (although still beta on Mac) and does the arduous task of indexing, profiling and making seek tables for each track on the storage device.
Making a library consists of an index of all the tracks and their location as well as a profile and seek table for each track. These files are in an invisible folder and thankfully take up very little room.
You can make a library for any folder on a device but once the library is made, you need to move the content to the top level of the device. So it's probably best to dedicate devices purely to music, rather than constantly having to juggle data around.
It's worth mentioning that iPods can't be used directly with the D² Director with any degree of practicality without a library file on them as generally, you don't have access to the files directly. Sure - you can navigate to the iPod's internal file structure, but you won't see recognisable track names.
As a test I made made a library on my 30gig iPod (around 20gigs of music) on my G4 Powerbook and it took 12 hours - yes, a full 12 hours so expect a wait the first time you make a library on your device. However, using the D² Director to make the same library on my iPod was something like 45 minutes as if doesn't make profiles. If you're just adding some tracks, the Librarian thankfully just does an update, but that was still 30 minutes for 52 tracks. 50gigs worth of music on an HFS+ drive working on a 2.33Ghz Macbook Pro still took 8 hours.
If you look on the right hand screen shot, you'll see a very short scroll bar. This is because the Librarian reports fully on tracks that it's had trouble with just so that you're not wondering why complete folders of music haven't appeared in your library. Fix the problem, reindex and you're done.
Browsing and Searching
Having a library full of indexed and tagged tracks is all well and good, but what about trawling through 10,000 tracks in a hurry? Well the D² Director has a comprehensive browsing facility based around the ID3 tags that in an ideal world, you'll have sorted out properly.
You can browse on the following: Track title, Album title, Artist name, genre, BPM range, year, playlist and filenames or just scroll through all your tracks. To help you in your quest to find your music, you can use the supplied keyboard or use the push/select knob to scroll through the list. Or keeping it pressed brings up cool alpha selector, giving you quick access to your selection beginning with that letter.
You can also do wildcard searches on track, artist and album title. Seems limited but in reality, that's how we tend to remember out music anyway. The search operates around a "contains" string so the results could be lengthy, especially if searching for short words such as "DJ". The search is where the keyboard comes in especially useful, as entering a string with the push select button is a real pain.
The Profiles
The D² Director lacks any kind of running waveform display but sort of makes up for it with profiles. Using the Librarian app, each track is analysed to identify changes in "energy" - probably differences in volume, upto 4 levels (the maximum of the display).
In testing, I found the profiles to be largely ineffective. The differences in "energy" just aren't enough to be of any use. In the above example, the top wave form is "No Way Back" by Adonis - classic 4-4 beat house, whereas the bottom track is Art Blakey's "Time Off" - quality Jazz with lots of ups and downs in volume. Bearing in mind that the majority of potential users for the D² Director will be purveyors of popular music, this makes the profiling seem more of a gimmick that of any use. It's worth a try, but not doing it will save you plenty of time.
The Crate
Having made your collection way more accessible, it's time to start using it. It is quite possible to load tracks up one at a time from the libraries on your devices, but the D² Director has an internal "crate". You can use this to build your own quickly accessible collection of tracks rather than having to manually load each track from your library.
The crate displays tracks only by track name only, which can be quite limiting. But hitting info displays all the tag info you need.
The tracks you add to the crate are stored in the library that they came from, rather than storing anything on the D² Director itself. The tracks are flagged in the library so that the next time you connect up a particular drive, the D² Director remembers that some tracks were in the crate and asks you what you want to do with those tracks. Equally, when you eject a device, you're asked what to do with the tracks in the crate.
The tracks are added in the same way as from the library to each deck and is invokes by pressing "Library" to find the tracks you want to add. Once in the crate, you can load up track directly into the decks but rather usefully, rather than having to unload (or pull as Numark call it) a track from a deck, you can select a track from the crate and simply select swap - instant change with the new track right at the beginning.
One thing to note - if you want doubles, you need to add the track into the crate twice, or load the file directly into the second deck.
Playlists
As well as utilising its own methods of track organisation, the D² Director also makes use of playlists - just like you'd have in iTunes or other popular formats. Generally speaking, these are in .m3u or .pls formats and reside , or you can create your own on the D² Director. These playlists can contain anything you like and gives you a quick route into adding lumps of music to your crate in one go, be it by artist, genre or just simply compiling lists such as "wedding_cheese.m3u" or "cliche_hiphop_but_guaranteed_jumpjump_crowdpleasers.m3u" - however you wish to organise parts of your collection. The good thing with playlists is that you still only need the track once on the storage device.
In Use
It's hard to find anything wrong with the D² Director at all for standard back and forth mixing. Provided you've taken the time to tag and create libraries for your devices, everything will go well. Unlike it's competitors (Cortex and Denon), Numark make great use of the single screen to work with both decks, so there's no clipping of tags or filenames on the screen. And because of the simplicity of the D² Director, there's not much in the way of screen acreage taken up with status reports on all the other bells and whistles.
The addition of the keyboard makes such a difference to using the D² Director. Seeing as most of your DJing time will be spent finding track to play, the keyboard is a great time saver instead of having to do everything with the push/select button.
Being an all digital device, you might expect to be concerned about sound quality. The GIGO (garbage in garbage out) principle does apply, but Numark appear to have totally nailed digital output. Back when the CDX first came out, I gushed about the sound quality compared to vinyl, but the D² Director's sound is awesome, showing zero abreacting - even when doing the slowest of drags.
I found the D² Director to be a great device for rocking a party - simple, clean and working perfectly for a few 1 hour sets in the lab where I pushed tracks in and out to test stability and useability. It didn't crash or lock once and was incredibly simple to use - once I'd got my head round the library/crate concept and how to get the best from the USB devices.
Stood in front of my mixer and controlling my music from a keyboard does feel odd at first but you soon get used to the joy of not having to sift through hundreds of vinyls or thousands of CDs.
The future is bright for the D² Director as if anything doesn't work right now, or perhaps could work better, then it can be easily updated with firmware releases. This one is v1.03.
Summing Up
On the face of it, the D² Director is a very simple device. At it's most basic level, it's an extremely simple MP3 player - play, pause, cue, pitch control and a loop - that's it. But the real clever stuff happens when you start to use your digital music, and it's in this area more than anywhere else where preparation will reap the benefits of the D² Director and using digital files in preference to media. As the unit is simple, the main screen is given over to file management which after all is what this is all about, and it does it extremely well, especially with the bundled keyboard.
It's not a very crowded market right now with Cortex bringing out units that sit spec wise either side of the D² Director, and Denon's DN-HD2500 sitting at the top of the tree in terms of specification and price. But the D² Director does easily hold it's own in this market. The key to the success of these units will be ease of use, and Numark clearly have got a good grip on what works for today's technology led DJs.
Ratings
Build Quality - 8.5/10
Overall, the D² Director is solid and has a good quality feel. I'm concerned that the matt finish will look worn and marked very quickly and also the pitch faders let the unit down.
Sound Quality - 9/10
This is on the whole down to the encoding of your music, but with 256kps, it's indistinguishable from uncompressed audio, with slow drags on the jog wheel staying rock solid.
Features and Implementation - 8.5/10
Mechanically, it's as basic as it gets and works very well. The real winner is the file handling and loading. For a first crack at making an interface for digital file management, Numark have made a great product, although not as plug and play as I'd like yet. But read the manual or fail at the first hurdle.
Value for Money - 8/10
Hmmm... what price do you put on not having to carry vinyl or media everywhere? How much is your back worth? Being such a new market, it's hard to judge but this seems to be around the price I'd expect to pay, especially coming with a keyboard.
Pros: Simplicity - sound quality - excellent user interface
Cons: Could look shabby quickly - "scratch" performance
Bottom Line
Purely digital units are with us, and for someone looking to rock parties of all kinds, the D² Director is a solid introduction to this new market.
Big thanks to Numark UK for the D² Director loan