In the last 7 years or so, we have seen the switch in DJs tools of choice. Like any industry , this is inevitable, but in an industry as huge and bitchy as the music industry, these changes have provoked certain arguements. All DJs, if they have any style or quality will admit that vinyl is the best way to listen to music, but unless you are a "superstar DJ" and get given tracks by artists and record labels, then DJ vinyl is a costly activity. So came along CD decks. Which incorporated "beat matching" technology and therefore provoked arguments of technicality and cheating. Almost all computers nowadays have a CD writers and almost everyone has there music stored digitally and can burn it CD. The former making DJing a lot easier and the latter a lot easier.

3 x DMC champion DJ Craze then teamed up with a certain technology company and produced Final Scatch. A digital deck that links to your computer, pressing a digital file to a vinyl almost instantly. While Final Scratch dominated the industry for a long while and with a very high premium attached, others have followed suit and it is now readily accessable to bedroom DJs and the rest.

Apple are now set to get involved in this DJing evolution, with the introduction of virtual decks and mixer. On July 10th, the US Patent & Trademark Office published a major Apple patent application pertaining to a system and method of managing, manipulating and editing media objects on a touch sensitive advice. According to a blog post on the Macintosh News Network, the patent "illustrates an embodiment of the invention for manipulating the replay and recording of audio or musical files", and will enable DJs to display and mix a pair of virtual records (graphical representations of digital music files) on a pair of virtual turntables:

"Like a pair of physical turntables, the [styli] can be graphical icon indications of a playback queue, the position of which can be varied by touching the queue on a touch sensitive display screen and dragging the icon to the desired position on the graphical record. The moving of the stylus would cause a jump in the playback point of the corresponding song, as on a physical turntable.

"Also like a pair of physical turn tables start/stop buttons can be touched by one or more fingers to toggle the start or stop/pause of the song reprotuction. Speed variants bars can be linearly adjusted to control the playback speed of the songs. Windows can graphically reproduce the frequency representation of the reproduced songs, while window can display the frequency representation of the actual output of the music application, which can be simply one of the songs being reproduced, or a mixed /combination of the songs. Mixing/pan bar can be manipulated to modulate or demodulate the two songs being reproduced.

"During song reproduction, the records can be manipulated similar to a physical record. For instance, rapid back and forth movement of a record can cause the sound effect of a record "scratching", as disc jockeys often do on physical turntables.