Room Placement

If you are using an audio configuration with more than two speakers that are arranged in different physical locations in a room, DynamDJ allows you to give each player a virtual position in this room. The closer a player's position is to a speaker's, the louder it is played on that speaker. This function is called room placement.

DynamDJ does not require you to use specialized multi-channel audio hardware, nor do you need to arrange the speakers in any fixed manner. Instead, you may for example combine you Mac's line out audio port with a USB output device like the iMic to get a 4-channel (2x stereo) setup. It is not required to create aggregate devices in Audio MIDI Setup for such configurations, this is handled automatically by DynamDJ.
After you have connected the audio devices to your computer and arranged the speakers, configure DynamDJ for your audio setup, see the page preferences for more information about this.
Once this has been done, you can position players using this component of the main window:

The large area on the right side represents the room. Each of the circular dots in it stands for a speaker. The positions of these dots should correspond to the relative locations of the speakers, and can be set in the preferences.
The two colored squares stand for two players. You can set which player should be positioned in the room using the six "players" buttons leftside. The first four icons represent the audio file players, identified by their colors, the lower left one the audio input player and the lower right icon the Speech player. Audio output of players that are enabled for room placement is mixed in a way that it is louder on the speakers whose icons are closer to the player's icon. The colored glow around these icons gives an impression of the players' virtual sound field that is used to compute the speakers' volumes: it is more intense towards the center, the volume of each player on each speaker corresponds to the intensity of the player's virtual sound field at the speaker's position. In this example, the yellow-colored player is located close to the upper speaker, it is thus played louder on this speaker than on the left one, and it is mute on the lower speaker.
In most cases, players generate stereo audio output, player's sound fields are therefore smoothly divided along their vertical axis in a way that the left channel audio is "emitted" on their geometrical left side, and vice versa. Adjusting the balance of a player fades out one side of its sound field, which means that the player's audio output is not only limited to one channel, but its physical sound location is also restricted to one side, as one would expect in a stereo configuration.
For players that are not enabled for room placement, the left channel is played at equal volume on each speaker in the room's left half, the right channel in the room's right half.

Setting player positions

The player positions can be set by moving the player icons. This can be done in several ways, depending on which "tools" button is selected:

Move Tool: This is the default tool. If it is selected, you can simply drag the player icons around using the mouse cursor.
Line Animation: If this tool is selected, you can drag a line out of a player icon. When the mouse button is released, the player will smoothly move along this line. If you hold the option key while releasing the mouse button, you can select the animation duration, loop mode and time curve. See parameter animation for more information.
Curve Animation: This tool works like the line animation tool, with the difference that it uses a curve instead of a straight line.
Circle Arc Animation: This tool also works like the previous ones, it moves the player along a circular arc path. You can set the angle of this arc by rotating your mouse's scroll wheel while dragging. You can, for example, use this tool to make the player rotate continously along a circular path, by setting the angle to a full circle and selecting a looping animation.
Custom Path Animation: This tool allows you to draw a custom path while holding the mouse button from a player icon. Note that you should increase the animation duration for longer paths.
Attractor: With this tool, you can click on any point on the room visualization, and each player icon will move towards this point.