For Disc Jockeys As Well As Desk Jockeys

IF you’ve always longed to be a disc jockey — or at least to play one on Saturday nights — some new, highly portable D.J. gear could bring that dream much closer.

Two new devices dispense entirely with the bulky turntables and CD players of traditional D.J. equipment. Instead, the new products are so compact that aspiring jam masters can put a D.J. rig in their pocket — or at least in a backpack — and head for the party, connect to the stereo system and rock the crowd.

One of the new players, the Pacemaker (520 euros, or about $760), created by a small Swedish company, Tonium, reduces the basic D.J. equipment of dual players and mixer to a device the size of a peanut-butter-and-jelly sandwich. The Pacemaker has a 120-gigabyte hard drive, fits in the palm of the hand, runs on batteries and has a built-in mixer to layer tunes seamlessly so the music never stops.

Tonium will begin shipping Pacemakers in February, said Ola Sars, sales and marketing director for the company, which is based in Stockholm. It will focus first on customers in the European Union, Japan and South Korea, and then on the United States. American consumers will be able to order through the Web site, www.pacemaker.net, in February, he said.

The Pacemaker lets the D.J. preview one track in the headphones while another song is playing for the audience through speakers. “You can select the second song, and then mix the songs together so one song goes into the next smoothly,” said Jonas Norberg, the chief executive of Tonium.

Mr. Norberg, an engineer and professional D.J., started working on the Pacemaker in 2005, hoping to shrink the common D.J. interface of C.D. players and mixer into something a bit larger than an iPod. He and his team have been working on it ever since.

“I wanted a PlayStation Portable for music,” he said.

Interested consumers won’t have to spend $760 to experiment with the Pacemaker. Tonium invited a test group to try out Pacemaker software on their Macs and PCs. Using this software, the group has been creating desktop D.J. mixes from music stored in digital files on computers, matching beats between one track and the next for smooth transitions and adding special effects like reverberation.

The software will be offered free to the public when the Pacemaker is released, Mr. Norberg said. He hopes that people will use the software to share mixes online, turning the Pacemaker site into a type of YouTube for D.J. fans. Mixes made on the Pacemaker can be uploaded to the site, just as those made on a computer can be downloaded to Pacemaker.

Tonium plans to make the Linux-based software on the Pacemaker public, so users can innovate and share their improvements with others, Mr. Sars said. One improvement the company is already planning is software to create the effects of scratching or touching and rocking a turntable.

Another mobile D.J. device comes from Numark Inc., a longtime maker of professional D.J. equipment. Called the iDJ2 (about $600), this lightweight mixing console has been on sale since September, and is available at Guitar Center stores and other locations. The iDJ2 has a docking station for an iPod; the D.J. can start one song from it, then line up another while using the headphones and then create the mix.

D.J.’s can carry along extra songs on another iPod or on a thumb drive or another U.S.B. storage device, then plug the devices into the iDJ2.

IPods are already beginning to replace CD players. Michael Holtz, a D.J. in Minneapolis who specializes in weddings, switched from dual CD players and a mixer to the iDJ2 in September. He is not the only one to make the change.

In 2006, consumers in the United States spent about $125 million on D.J.- specific hardware, said Brian Majeski, editor of Music Trades magazine in Englewood, N.J. Some $35 million of it was on CD players. But CD player sales are probably going to shrink.

“Instead of buying expensive CD players, people are starting to migrate to hard-drive devices, in many instances substituting an iPod for a CD machine,” he said. “The Numark iDJ2s have appeal both to consumers and mobile D.J.’s. You don’t need to haul as much stuff.”

The use of the iPod, often wielded by amateurs, has raised eyebrows among some professional D.J.’s. “It’s as though their guild is being infringed upon,” Mr. Majeski said.

If the Pacemaker catches on, this invasion may accelerate. But Dan Brotman, a Manhattan-based D.J. whose Web site, www.futuremusic.com, reports on new music technology, isn’t worried. “People looked down their noses when D.J.’s brought in CD players and computers instead of turntables and vinyl records,” he said, and now it is iPods that are scorned.

Slowly, though, this new stigma will fade. “If you are rocking the house,” he said, “who cares what equipment you are using?”

E-mail: novelties@nytimes.com.

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