UPDATE on 10/25/2016: (Do not let V-case analyze very large collections of music until you have taken precautions. The analysis files are unusually large and with 1TB of music analyzed very slowly by it on a high-end i7 quad core desktop, it filled up over 100GB of virgin RAID 0 SSD space, resulting in my C drive(s) not only having a lower lifespan now (SSD lifespan is predicated on the number of save and re-saves in the same spots), but being at 0% Remaining and slowing my system to a crawl while I scrambled to find ways of getting that crap off C drive. It wouldn't copy to the external FAT32 music drive being over 57,000 analysis files in a single folder (!!!), so I had to painstakingly put the V-case library folder from Documents onto yet another external drive that is NTFS. I then had to delete the original library folder and create a Hard Symbolic Link or "Junction" using Link Shell Extension utility, which required a special Visual C library installed first. I then dropped that junction in the Documents folder and re-opened V-case to see if it would bring up the library it'd taken days to work and stopped part way into it. V-case did open the library and is continuing another 24 hrs into analyzing the remaining third or so files. I still have no idea how the units utilize these analysis files and I suspect you must create a playlist and then transfer the files & analysis stuff with the playlist into a drive. Not what I was expecting. I don't know if these are Fourier transform waterfall plots or what the hell could make them so large and why Gemini does not either give you the option of where to save the library data or just put it in the directory where the music is. Awful experience. With three of these units, I am doing my best to give Gemini the benefit of the doubt, but this has gone from annoyance with essentially being a beta tester to a level I would now call anger. If this junk doesn't do something impressive when the analysis is done, I will dock it down another star to the minimum score possible. Patience is wearing thin.)UPDATE 2 10-26-2016: The search box in V-case filters all tracks based on each character as you type, so with enough tracks it becomes very slow. It should require you to hit enter first. It does not appear to have stored anything with the tracks themselves, the way Torq 2.0 did it. Requires you to export them. While the manual says the MDJ 1000 supports ACC, V-case is not analyzing M4A ACC files and puts an X next to them.UPDATE 10/27/2016: When attempting to Export tracks back to the drive the library is actually already in, V-case will attempt to make duplicates of the track. So that is not a solution to the library files not being saved on that drive or in the folders of the actual tracks.UPDATE 10/28/2016: I'm currently testing an unreleased firmware from Gemini : cdmpnext_update_6.1.28mk2.gciFewer skip glitches, but Link is worse. It no longer even randomly cycles through units connected through the switch with Cat 6 cable. It may choose to draw from a connected drive, it may not. The only way to force it now with this firmware is to have only one unit on USB and the others on LINK."Processing..." on and on when going into the V-case folder in my first drive with exported music on it from V-case. Not good.And... that unit appears to be frozen.There is zero documentation for V-case and minimal documentation for the players themselves.Update 11/25/2016:The skip glitch that prevented the units from even playing tracks off flash drives properly, let alone long tracks that would conk out after about 10 minutes, appears to have been mostly resolved in the latest official firmware. Hot cues and instant start are still problematic, particularly the former. There is still lag in scrolling folders, browser time-out annoyance, problems with the link (hardware design issue with audio out grounds?), general random issues reading flash drives and linking on cold start, and serious issues with reading and navigating larger drives. A "passive mode" that disables all track analysis, visual aids, and doesn't attempt to write to the flash drive has not yet been implemented. I am happy to report that HID over VDJ8 is quite good, though the zoom out function is broken on the display integration. VDJ8 with four units is a resource hog, so you may need to tune down fps and other features. In my opinion, standalone mode is still unstable, slow, and lacks the clean responsiveness and reliability needed for live extended performance.***With 6.1. 28mk2, I'm averaging about a glitch every 12 minutes per deck, and they're randomly either a sort of skip or pausing glitch like before where they no longer keep up, or they are an audible tick or click distortion but actually are still keeping time. Not too horrible, but not resolved totally. Right now I'm playing a 90 minute wav after it succeeded with the prior three shorter tracks in wav and MP3, so it might be re-buffering or something. That drive I let V-case export to that said it was "Processing..." for like an hour when I plugged it into a unit is very screwed up now. It won't even show up on my desktop to reformat. The unit it was plugged into also had to be restarted.UPDATE 1/19/2017:I'm still waiting for the MDJ-1000 to get a passive mode (no analysis, no moving waveform, no writing to the flash drive) so at least I can use them out in spite of whatever bugs are still present or sluggishness they have with the fancy features turned on. I think that should be step one.Step two, in my opinion, is either getting rid of or providing the option of removing the browser split screen and album art, which currently sometimes disappears when you're on the folder at the top of a contents list. I think that will be big. They hang up a lot in the browser and the split screen obscures filenames.After you have the option of Passive Mode and the browser can simply scroll through tracks reliably and quickly and select what you actually attempt to select, then the Link and flash drive reading issues would be on the radar. That's three. Users would at least have the most basic DJ media/CD player in one. In two, we get reliable, quick track selection and browsing... pretty important. And in three, the ability to actually use the Link feature and read all the flash drives they should be reading without resetting/rebooting or whatever they seem to be doing now.Four could then be various misc and often inter-related (I suspect) bug fixes and tweaks. I'll group these all together.*Add filename to the cycle of ID3 tags at the top when a track is playing.*The glitchy, laggy, broken-sounding hot cue triggers, and various cue bugs that still manage to annoy and interrupt work flow pre-transition even if you're not trying to do anything too fancy.*Browser track number not corresponding to the track number you select. I think this is related to the right side split screen contents often being wrong.*I think when you exit the browser, the current browser location should default back to the spot where the playing track is located.*I do not like the time out feature that automatically exits the browser, which is all the more aggravating with the browser hang ups and sluggishness.After that, five, I would strongly recommend they get that pitch resolution up if possible and add back higher pitch ranges when Link is active. I'm not sure how much higher the pitch resolution can get. They don't seem like 10 bit faders even in HID, let alone 14 bit. If pitch res can't be further improved due to the hardware on the MDJ-1000, I hope the higher pitch ranges can be added back over Link. I'm not sure how much I'd use higher ranges with such low pitch resolution at those high ranges, but it seems embarrassing if I do an open deck night with these and a feature turns off when Link is used.Long term, I would think additional refinement of the firmware could possibly improve overall responsiveness, fit & finish.I am continuing to cross my fingers that such a prioritizing takes place and these are not abandoned.UPDATE 2/24/2017:Had a go the last two days with v6.3 firmware. Got it direct from Eric.First some housekeeping. Things that have improved I may not have previously mentioned:Main cue can be set when hand is on the platter at any time now by just hitting the main cue button. No pausing required since about v6.2.Hold down Back works. Browser time-out has also been lengthened.Beat offset works. About since v6.2, I think. Hold shift and hit cue to change beat grid alignment. Not the sort of stuff I think Gemini should be focusing on right now, but the function does work now.Slip mode is now excellent. Again, another cake frosting feature rather than a necessity, but it does work.There is sort of a way to hide the BPMs… you can set it to manual, and it will default to a very wrong 130bpm at zero pitch setting.Many of the graphics glitches – flickering, red blotches, etc – seem resolved. Been gone a while.By the way, I assume the Virtual DJ HID controller and sound card ability is just as good as it was before, but I haven't tested that on this firmware yet. Once you get them configured and assigned, actual HID performance has been mostly rock solid. My concerns are with them as players.The following is the caveats I compiled based on my own efforts for those who already own the units, not me making excuses in order to compel purchases of them at this juncture, ok?-Use the default zoom on the waveform. Zooming out seems to increase issues right now.-Don't use the track search also called next track button, rather use the browser to select tracks with the encoder knob, otherwise drive reading may completely reset, especially on larger flash drives.-Be cognizant of the split screen info and top of browser track number often being wrong. Right now folder is track one. Referencing the top #/#, load one number ahead of the one you want.-Be careful with the hot cues and baby them... don't expect live perfection both in setting the hot cue and triggering them.-And be patient with the browser screen. Still slow. Still the damn split screen. Still hangs up sometimes. Moving to a new folder in particular can be an issue, so care is warranted when doing so after mixing a while.There is also no Passive Mode added yet to the options, but keeping fingers crossed. In spite of the above, while following these guidelines I was able to get about a rough 3hr set in doing just the most simple functions with quauntize & gridding off, and BPM set to manual. I still wouldn't want to use them live outside these tests at a venue and they're frustrating even to practice with just on Facebook, but this is slight, real progress.UPDATE 3/17/2017:Found another bug that might be the root of some issues with cue, hot cues, and loops.https://youtu.be/3sC_AQ6ot2sSolution for the time being appears to be to set cue, hot cues, and loops when track is actually playing and your hand is on platter. Not reliable operation if track is paused.UPDATE 4/2/2017:v6.4 firmware apparently fixes an issue I was not aware of concerning the search function. No other issues have been resolved that I can tell on it.Other observations...MDJ-1000 jog bend does not have the Pioneer CDJ dead zone when rotating slowly. That's good.MDJ-1000 jog, like the XDJ and Hanpin capacitive touch jogs, appears to be higher durability than the mechanical, spring-resistance CDJ jog. This is a trade off. You get higher durability with capacitive touch versus mechanical pressure, but a very different feel.MDJ-1000 jog needs an adjustment to lower its touch sensitivity. The Hanpins give this option, which I usually put down to minimum and this makes a big difference. The DJ Tech CDJ-101 has a knob and it can be turned down even lower than is useful. Hopefully this can be added to the MDJ options/settings.The MDJ hopefully can eventually get a track offload function as Rekordbox and Engine have. Obviously that should be lower priority than the other list of things I've previously mentioned.ORIGINAL REVIEW:Disk mechanism is surprisingly loud, but probably because it's a high-speed DVD computer disk reader. Not a problem, just an observation.Not a big fan of the separate AC to DC adapter. Pioneers, Hanpins, and Denon all use a similar cord, and the AC to DC conversion is internal. I find that convenient at the venue I DJ at because the same cables can be interchanged on hookup and we have many spares. That said, the Gemini appears to use a fairly-common 12V AC to DC brick I've seen for printers, as far as converter bricks go. It is a little bit higher amps than is commonly used, but I don't know if that's a requirement or just a big safety margin.The jog is touch sensitive and not pressure sensitive, so it feels more like the XDJ-1000 (a bizarre, high-priced unit already discontinued by Pioneer under the direction of their new owners KKR) than the CDJ1000/2000 line. It has a rubber or plastic coating to the top that feels nice, but is prone to showing abrasions and grime. By the way, the touch is extremely sensitive and there is as-yet no way to adjust this as on the Hanpins. Care must be taken when jog pitch bending to avoid accidentally triggering the top of the platter when Vinyl is on.The plastic the main body is made out of feels a little cheaper than some other models out there, and has more minor imperfections.The pitch fader feels really cheap. Maybe it's fine functionally, but the 14 bit pitch faders on Hanpins (Stanton, American Audio, DJ Tech, Akiyama, Omnitronic, Citronic, Reloop, etc) all feel superior.The buttons are quite nice and are hard, but do take a bit of force. Don't be shy. Occasionally I've tried to hit a hot cue and realized I hadn't used enough force. This is not a lack of feedback, as if the button pushes in it definitely works and that's good, but just me being accustomed to the Hanpins's requisite button forces. These will probably last longer than Hanpin tact switches, but there's an adjustment if you're coming from soft buttons.The cuing and hot cue system is mostly (unfortunately) taken from the brain-dead Pioneer DJ one, but is slightly improved -- it doesn't require like four button presses just to set a hot cue, for instance. Expect your cue button to still get drummed with on the downbeat like it was an MPC by people who don't know how to beatmatch. However durable they are, they will be the first one to go out.As with Denon and Pioneer, it has drive sharing by ethernet direct for two or with a switch or router can share four. Requiring a switch for three or four is annoying compared to Hanpin's use of simply USBs, not to mention only allowing four decks. However, you do hypothetically have the benefit of seeing from any deck every drive connected on every deck without the need for unplugging and replugging wires. In practice, this is unpredictable on the Gemini and precarious, as it both requires the decks whose drives are in use by another unit to be set to USB, provides no indication of Link drive or option to choose which unit you want to draw from, and is slow in cycling back and forth between USB and LINK. When using a 10/100 TP-Link 5-Port switch, while I could see which deck number each unit had assigned to it on that particular unit, I could neither see the other units from each other nor intentionally choose which deck's drive to access, making the deck assignment numbers pointless. You cannot apparently just plug drives into all units at the same time and hit LINK to see every drive on this little network. Instead, it just sort of randomly cycles through them when you repeatedly alternate between USB and LINK back and forth, frequently resetting back to USB after you hit LINK, and almost as frequently saying NO LINK. Worst of all, if you happen to hit LINK on the unit whose drive is being shared to all other players (which I don't think should even be possible considering the crude method in use and should be locked out like ejecting a CD during playback), you will immediately lose all playback on every player. Thus, in practice I find the physical USB of the Hanpins to be far more predictable and safe. On the subject of drives, I have thus far had no success in getting large NTFS drives to read on the MDJ-1000s.The V-Case software is extremely basic right now. It is a long way (think like the distance to Mars) from Engine and Rekordbox's ability to load tracks from a computer directly onto a deck. There is no pre-analyzing beat gridding adjustment, no changing the cue points, adding hot cues or loops. Zilch. The first version just allows you to do the simple BPM detection (and maybe key detection... not certain if these are ID3 tags it's also getting) ahead of time instead of having the deck do it for you, which the deck can either do on a track-by-track basis as they are loaded or instead running in a batch (the only way to pre-analyze prior to V-Case). I assume using your computer is faster, but then again, I personally think beat detection should be in the background and just for loops and effects. I don't want to see BPM counter, moving waveforms, or grid markers that keep me from using my ears.I wasn't planning on using the beat detection or sync anyway, but just so you know, it's wrong enough a significant amount of time to be basically useless for all but the most simple 4/4 music, and don't expect Auto Sync and grid locking to be close enough, The grids aren't in the correct spot, there is no real downbeat marker system, and the Beat Offset feature appears solely to be for manually changing the BPM rather than where the markers actually are. Doesn't matter that much to me, but it's worth saying. A more comprehensive version of V-Case could potentially fix all this, of course.Speaking of visual aids, while you can zoom out the moving waveform sufficiently that you do have to use your ears to set cues and anticipate the ends of breakdowns and the beginning of another drop, like you can zoom out on the newest Pioneers, there does not appear to be a way to hide the BPM counter like on the Hanpins. It would be nice to have the option to hide it while it is still in the background and used by the looping system, particularly since it doesn't work well anyway on the MDJ-1000 right now. At this point with slow track analysis, slow track scanning, and bad BPM detection, I was just wanting the entire BPM and waveform stuff completely gone.Strangely, once a track is loaded, the top of the display does not have the capability of showing the actual file name, just allowing you to cycle through the tags. So you can get track name, album, etc, but not the actual file name.Track scrolling is somewhat cumbersome due to the slow loading of the information on the right side of the screen, and the cut-off half screen of the file names on the left side.I have not yet located an ability to get back to the folder that the current playing track is inside after I have wandered off into some other folder looking for others. Such a Return-to-Location function would be useful.I know people have complained that Denon decks have too many buttons, but I do not like the sparse number of buttons here requiring the use of a shift button. The dual function thing in a dark environment and the possibility of hitting the wrong combo is not appealing. American Audio's deck has a vast number of such shift combo functions, but these were additional features for advanced (read that: crazy) users. That said, at least the ability to delete a hot cue or loop is much easier on the Gemini than the American Audio deck.The pitch resolution is somewhat lacking for this fader. A 14 bit fader can do about double what the MDJ currently shows when running off a thumb drive. At 16% range it only allows 0.1% increments, and this gets worse as you go up in range. The newest Hanpin firmware can do 0.05% at 16% and all the aforementioned Hanpins can do 0.1% at 100% range. The MDJ does allow 0.05% at 8%, which is what many people will probably use, but I don't think the higher ranges’ resolution is sufficient. It's essentially useless at any range beyond 16% right now.The pitch bend by jog is rate-based, is dependent on the pitch range at 4 and 8%, but maxes out at 8% available bend over 8% range. The sensitivity setting in-menu appears to be reversed, with 1 being the most sensitive and 5 being the least. The sensitivity appears to only affect the rpm at which the jog bend maxes out, rather than the range of bend available. At the 1 sensitivity, it appeared to max out at like 1/2 or 1/3 rotation per second... not good. It was so awkward it felt as if the jog pitch bend was just a simple on/off. At 3-5 setting it's usable, but still feels a little awkward, and more than just because I'm so used to the Vestax and Hanpin time-based “progressive” “ramp-up” nudge-bend now. When I use a computer occasionally with either the Hanpins or CDJ-101s as controllers, it's all rate-based, so that's not the issue. The Gemini jog bend still just isn't quite right. It doesn't allow both finesse at slow rotations & nudges and a wide bend at high rotation rates that I'm used to on better rate-based implementations, be they controllers or stand-alone players.Unlike the Hanpins, it does seem to have a unified DSP inside rather than a bunch of single-purpose ICs, and therefore the Gemini has a souncard capability. The Gemini drivers allow multiple units to run as a single device in Windows.There is a SPDIF out, unlike the DJ Tech uSolo FX and Reloop RMP-4, but it is capped at 16/44.1 even though the sound card is 24/192. Having it run up to 24/96 or even up to 24/48 when you consider the effects and key processing of DJ software would have been nice. I believe the Denon units (and probably the original CDJ2000) have the same limitation if I'm not mistaken, but those designs are from years ago.There is AIFF support (yay, tag support for lossless!) but not FLAC support. That's bad. My two $50 portable pocket players can do FLAC and at this price and with its DSP, that's inexcusable. If Gemini didn't outfit it with sufficient processing or memory to handle FLAC, that's the sort of oversight that is hard to tolerate this late in the media player game for a new design. Pretty much the next company to do a reliable DJ media player unit that has FLAC at this price point will have a winner.I had a number of glitches show up: red graphic blotches, freezes that required restarts, and high frequency ticks when starting a track not even necessarily at the beginning. I cannot mix for even an hour through a single set without tracks glitching up and skipping a beat when I'm in a perfect blend at some point. I have the latest firmware as of the date of this review. Hopefully these are just growing pains of an integrated DSP's early firmware.Firmware stability and features right now still feel like they're in beta. I would not even consider playing out with these yet over my Hanpins. If the firmware is improved considerably, I will update the review and change the rating.