After the release of the AlphaTheta OMNIS-DUO I’ve been asked quite a lot of questions about it’s feature set and capabilities when it comes to standalone mixing on the go. Here I’m going to dig even further deep than in my first overview, to uncover some of its most surprising features not many reviews mention directly.
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1. Recording Your Mixes Straight Onto Your USB
With the AlphaTheta OMNIS-DUO, you can record your DJ mixes straight onto your connected USB storage device – the very same you’re playing your music from.
To do this, insert the USB flash drive containing your music in the USB-A port on the device, touch the REC button on the top bar of the main interface. In the panel that will appear, click the START option to begin recording.
The recording will start, and all of the audio coming out from your MASTER output will now be saved onto your USB flash drive in .WAV file format. To end the recording, simply press the STOP button in the very same panel.
Additionally, you can split the audio file while it’s still recording. To do this, select the Track Marks button in the same menu. You can also load up the file you’ve just recorded on one of the decks and play it live, however keep in mind that it won’t be analyzed by Rekordbox.
There are just two things to note here: you cannot record any audio to an SD card, and you cannot record audio with a Bluetooth device selected as the audio source. On average, an hour of the audio recording should take up less than 1GB of space on your USB storage device.
2. Wireless Rekordbox Link Export, CloudDirectPlay & StreamingDirectPlay
With the AlphaTheta OMNIS-DUO, you can easily access all of your tracks from your PC or your smartphone running Rekordbox DJ software, provided they are connected through the Wi-Fi connection. All this thanks to the feature called Rekordbox LINK EXPORT.
All your playlists and tracks edited and scanned in Rekordbox will be available on the device, without any need of wired data transfer. The only requirement is that both the DJ controller and the device running the Rekordbox software should be connected to the same Wi-Fi network.
Another neat feature is the support for CloudDirectPlay. After the initial configuration, you can access tracks from your cloud library while the OMNIS-DUO is connected to the internet. CloudDirectPlay now supports both Dropbox and Google Drive.
The OMNIS-DUO also supports StreamingDirectPlay with Apple Music, Beatport Streaming and TIDAL. Tracks loaded through the supported streaming services can be analyzed for BPM and beatgrid information directly on the unit. You should also note that the OMNIS-DUO supports Rekordbox Link Export over Wi-Fi, but not via USB like some other units.
3. The Touch Preview Feature
The touch preview known from the CDJ-3000 and the OPUS QUAD, is also available on the OMNIS-DUO. Ensure that your headphones are connected to the device, and enter your track library. There, simply touch and hold the waveform of the chosen track in a chosen place, and you should hear it play from that very place in your headphones.
You can do this even when another track is being played live in one of the decks. Every music file that can be played on the device (can be loaded onto a deck), can be previewed in this way!
4. Microphone EQ & Mic Talkover Settings
While on the OMNIS-DUO you don’t have access to physical knobs controlling the microphone input EQ, like on for instance the Pioneer XDJ-XZ, you can access the mic equalizer in the system settings, using the main touch display.
To do this, make sure that your microphone is connected to the device, and then tap the SETTINGS button on the main screen to get to the main menu. There, you can control the HIGH and LOW equalizer settings (HIGH and LOW EQ bands at 10 kHz and 100 Hz, adjustable within a +/-12 dB range).
Moreover, on this controller you have access to the mic talkover feature. It’s hidden underneath the ON button you can find on the left side of the front panel, right under the Mic 1 and 2 gain knobs. Press the ON button while pressing the SHIFT button to activate the mic talkover function, and press the key combination again to deactivate it.
When this feature is on, it will automatically lower the volume of the music that is coming out through the master output each time you decide to speak through the microphone. This can come in handy if you want to be heard better and you don’t want to lower the channel volume manually each time you speak to your audience.
5. Track Library Filter Option
After clicking the small funnel icon on top of the main track library view, you will be taken to the track filtering menu. You can filter your songs by their key, tempo, personal rating and their custom set color tag. There is also an option for filtering tracks by your own set tags, which can be really helpful if your music library is organized well.
All this can be done within two clicks from the main song collection view thanks to the nicely thought out interface of this menu. Not to mention that the on-screen keyboard is pretty reliable when having to search for specific tracks fast.
6. Waveform Display Type Select
Did you know that the AlphaTheta OMNIS-DUO lets you make use of 3 different waveform view modes? The available settings are as follows: the classic blue waveform you may know from the older CDJ players, the RGB waveform, and the 3-band waveform which is active by default.
Not only that, but you can also control whether you want the current playback point (the virtual playhead) to be displayed in the middle of the screen like on the image above, or farther to the left, letting you see more of the upcoming waveform view. Both of these settings are available to your right from the main settings menu in the waveform category.
7. Loading Bluetooth Audio Onto a Deck
This is the one trick you might have already heard about. On the OMNIS-DUO, you can use a Bluetooth device of your choice as an audio source in a rather unconventional way. Set the Bluetooth input to DECK and the unit keeps up to 10 minutes of playable audio, which you can then load onto either deck.
There are some limitations to this. The playable Bluetooth range is limited to 10 minutes, it isn’t analyzed like a Rekordbox-prepared track, and any pauses or stutters coming from the Bluetooth device will naturally affect what you can load onto the deck. While this certainly isn’t a feature I would use in a serious live performance context, I found it interesting nonetheless.
8. Low-Latency DJing With the AlphaTheta WAVE-EIGHT
As you probably know, regular Bluetooth audio and DJing don’t usually go great with each other because of the latency involved. The OMNIS-DUO can send its master output to a normal Bluetooth speaker, but that isn’t really what you want for accurate beatmatching.
The AlphaTheta WAVE-EIGHT gets around this in a different way. Its included transmitter connects to the OMNIS-DUO’s audio output and sends the signal to the speaker using AlphaTheta’s SonicLink wireless technology – not Bluetooth. AlphaTheta specifies around 15 ms of latency with a single WAVE-EIGHT SonicLink connection.
So while I wouldn’t call it truly “zero latency”, it’s low enough to make wireless DJing much more practical than it would be over a regular Bluetooth connection. Pretty neat! Over here you can check the current price of a brand new AlphaTheta WAVE-EIGHT.
If you’re deciding whether it’s actually worth getting one, I’ve also compared the OMNIS-DUO directly with the Denon DJ PRIME GO.