ICON iDJ First Impressions

i picked up one of these as i wanted a small, cheap controller with touch sensitive jogs. posting this info as i couldnt find too much on this controller on the interweb. it's slightly bigger than a nano or lpd8 but not by much as you can see from the photo below. the overall build quality seems much better tho - *feels* nice and solid. quite heavy for what it is - i even expected there to be some extra weight added inside but couldnt find anything when i pulled it apart not much extra space in there at all.



the pads dont seem to light up via incoming midi messages - i tried firing notes on for all notes and midi channels but nothing happened. no biggie tho as they do light up when u press them and the 'scratch on' button does stay lit up when activated.

faders seem fairly smooth (except for my right hand pitch one that doesnt work too well) but nothing special. cross fader is pretty light and should do the job ok.

plenty of pots to midi map. personally i believe using the center 6 for eq's seems better than where they are labelled. it's a pretty cramped controller but i expected that - so the pots themselves are quite small - but not too small. the only bugger one is the ones right above the jogs - way too easy to nudge the jog by accident when using those ones.

with basically 8 pads, 7 pots, 2 faders per deck + 8 pads in the center and cross fader i believe it should be quite fun to map.



the jogs seem very responsive and have a nice midi implementation, but from what i can tell not very traktor-friendly. i'm using it in raw mode tho and i *believe* it came with some software that i don't have handy right now.

nudging using the rubberised outside edge sends a different noteon when it starts moving and a noteoff when it stops - so doesnt matter how fast you move it - but seems to work ok.

the scratch on/off toggle doesn't actually send out any midi itself, it just changes the jog wheel behaviour.

in non-scratch mode it sends out a cc with value of 65 for every increment forwards and a value of 63 for every increment backwards.

in scratch mode it sends two noteon's as soon as you touch the touch sensitive top, then behaves as for non scratch mode, but also sends out a noteoff as soon as you let go and another after the jog wheel also has stopped moving.

all in all it seems like they put some thought into it. i'm just not quite sure how it can be effectively used in traktor without some software sitting between the two. i did try a few different options in traktor but couldn't make it work as i wanted. i do *believe* tho that it came with some software to sit in the middle if needed tho - if i can find that - not that i'll be using it as i'll use my own.

all in all a solid little controller with a lot of possibilites for 100quid i reckon anyway

edit: i stuck the coloured stickers on the pots - they're grey by default