Sound Check — Geoff Carter: This PlayR nearly replicates club scene for DJ fantasy

Friday, Sept. 15, 2000 | 9:22 a.m.

Geoff Carter's music column appear Fridays. Reach him at carter@ vegas.com.

I should have gotten a DJ to test the Magix PlayR Deluxe for me. It's been so long since I've fiddled with a real DJ's mixer that I might as well be describing space shuttle docking procedures with the knowledge acquired from watching "Space Cowboys." And even when I did work the wheels of steel (as the kids say), I really wasn't that good at it.

Hence the PlayR Deluxe -- a near-complete DJ mixer for your PC. I say "near complete" because it's missing certain key elements of the club DJ experience: complete darkness, idiots staring over your shoulder trying to see what you're playing, suspicious-looking white tablets floating in your bottled water, women women women. Aside from those notable omissions, the PlayR Deluxe is as close to the clubland experience as your all-thumbs columnist is going to get.

It's close enough. The PlayR Deluxe is as good as its name and better -- a CD and MP3 player that allows the user to mix tracks, match beats, overlay samples and do wacky things with echo and reverb. The interface is easy to use, almost too easy: Any feckless dweeb who's ever used Windows could, conceivably, make DJ-quality mixes without even cracking open the software's 144-page instruction manual.

The user is presented with a mixer, two "turntables," an equalizer, pitch control and a box of sonic tweaks ranging from muddy distortion to a cold metallic echo. Just taking a single song and running it through the ringer is all kinds of fun: I spent literally an hour noodling with Olivia Newton John's maudlin "Xanadu" ballad "Magic," alternately placing the perky Australian songstress under a mountain of fuzzy feedback or inside a metal exoskeleton.

Then there's the mixing. I could take that same Livvy track and loop it for an hour, using the PlayR Deluxe's uncanny sync option, or I could use the pitch adjust and line them up manually as the real DJs do. (I could do these things -- and did do them. Oh, the shame.)

The software comes bundled with some complimentary drum loops and samples, which allow you to add layers to existing songs or build your own. I gave the 99-beat-per-minute "Magic" the occasional klaxon, alternating with some guy advising Olivia to "shake it down." A single click records the whole mess for posterity. The mind reels.

PlayR Deluxe is not perfect. The software runs sluggishly on my four-year-old Pentium -- I had to test it on the stronger machine at the office -- and it won't load on my laptop at all, which dashes cold water on my fantasy of playing DJ at some unsuspecting friend's party armed only with my ThinkPad and a few discs of MP3s.

But these are quibbles. PlayR Deluxe is a tremendous amount of fun to play with, and adds an exciting new dimension to collecting and playing digital music. The would-be DJs at Magix should be proud. Even if the software is still a few updates away from Full Metal Xanadu, I still feel as if I've docked the shuttle every time I do something new and terrifying to "Magic." I'm a space cowboy!