I don’t think I’ve mentioned it here before, but one of my long-time hobbies is making mixtapes. I started back in high-school with a record player and a cassette recorder, cutting songs together with the pause button. While I’m still strictly an amateur DJ, my gear has improved over the years. Instead of a cassette recorer, I now have Ableton Live; instead of records, I have thousands of mp3s; and instead of a record player, I have a Numark CDX CD turntable and and Allen & Heath Xone:02 mixer. I’m not sure if my mixes are any better than they used to be, but they’re a whole lot more fun to make.

So I’m obviously happy to see a report from DJ Scott Paradis that Numark’s long-awaited, second generation iPod DJ mixer, the iDJ2, made an appearance at NAMM last week. The original iDJ was a good concept — an all-in-one controller that let you mix music from two iPods — but lacked one of the most basic features that DJs need: pitch control. Without pitch control, it’s very difficult to match the tempo of two different songs so that the blend seamlessly. Numark’s new iDJ2 finally adds pitch control, and a whole lot more.

Among the big changes for the $600 (est. street price) iDJ2 is that it now works with one iPod instead of two. This means that two songs can be simultaneously played and controlled from just the one iPod. A screen on the iDJ2 displays track information while music is browsed and selected using controls on the mixer, not the iPod. As noted above, there are separate pitch controls for each track, and Paradis, who was able to test the prototype, says that they are quite responsive. To compliment the pitch control, Numark has also added BPM counters, which acording to Paradis, still need some work. Rounding out the new features are support of “scratching” via two small platters, and a USB port for connecting a flash drive or external hard drive for even music source options. Paradis wasn’t able to try out this last feature at Namm, so we’ll just have to wait and see whether we’ll be able to hot swap drives, or access more than one at a time. This could be a killer feature.

While all of this is good news, to be sure, I still can’t figure out why the iDJ2 is taking Numark so long to develop. It’s supposed to start shipping in the first half of 2007, but DJ-centric CD players with most of these features have been around for years. And Numark already makes a hard drive-based turntable that’s far more advanced than the iDJ2. I suspect that they may be afraid of cannibalizing sales of their higher-end DJ gear, especially within the hobbyist market. This would be a pretty short sided concern. I believe a full-featured, affordable, iPod-based DJ mixer like the iDJ2 would appeal to a much broader market than Numark’s current turntables and other gear, and could more than compensate for any loss of higher end equipment sales.

I just hope we don’t have to wait until this time next year to find out.

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