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DJs Spinning Those Hard Drives
Mipmap writes "Ben Kirkendoll leaves the records at home in favor of his iPods, Apple Computer's disk-based music player, which he simply plugs into an audio system's mixer. He's part of a small but growing number of DJs who have turned to MP3 music files for their accessibility and convenience..."
Needless to say, yeah, you still need skills to be a good mixer these days.
you down with mp3 yes you know me you down with mp3 yes you know me you down with ctrl-c every last pc
"Indeed, the ideal for a well-functioning democratic state is like the ideal for a gentleman's well-cut suit- it is not
I'd hate to walk into a club with a nice sound system and hear it pumping a 128 kbps mp3 encoded with Xing.
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
DJ's have been putting mp3s on CDs for a while now. It's only a natural progression for them to put the mp3s on smart media.
-- You see, there would be these conclusions that you could jump to
means you're not really a dj. you're a poser.
I hope these guys don't show up with a mp3 that has that annoying bleeps. Guess what most idiots on the dance floor would consider that a new style and might actually become a new craze just like scratch!
I probably sound like a troll but does the world really need DJ's to stand up on a platform and spin records? Almost anyone can sit at home, find songs they didn't create themselves, and edit them togother into a mix of hours of dance music. All clubs *really* need is a cd player... but then again they have to have a DJ to be trendy and popular right?
When a DJ plays mp3's instead of records, this is what you should tell him:
Boy, you've got to move!
And he can't use iPods to match up beats, alter the pitch of music or spin records back and forth for a scratching effect -- all things that professional club DJs consider essential.
The performance aspect- hinted to in the quote above- is a big part of what makes club DJ's so popular. If you've never seen one at work, it can get quite physical- they literally throw those records around the platter in an attempt to generate sounds and synchronize beats. A good DJ can elicit cheers and applause from an otherwise oblivious crowd.
The DJs with the MP3 players are acting more like radio DJs- they're programming the night with a list of songs, not cutting up raw material into a performance. There's a place for both, obviously, but one will not replace the other- similar to the way theater and movies continue to coexist.
Marc Siry || interactive media professional, motorcycle enthusiast ||
Personally I dont know the guy in question, but you dont have to be a hip-hop or Techno DJ to realize that Vinyl has a different sound, even compared to CDs, that beatmatching is something that helps if you actually want to mix and that its terribly unsexy to bop your head while staring at your iPods displays. Another problem in my eyes is capacity. An ipod has -way- too much storage room for a DJ.
--[Nothing important]--
The disadvantage is that DJs just won't look as impressive anymore - I love seeing a DJ moving sporatically and energetically to control his equipment. How boring would it be to see a DJ sitting down in front of computer, occasionally clicking something unseen on the screen? It's sort of like comparing Neil Peart playing his drum set to some dude of equal talent tapping on his triggered pads. *shrug* Just a thought.
Theres something about listening to true analog sound. As soon as you record that sound into a computer it becomes digital and loses that warm quality it had. /me waits for the comments regarding the fact that the music was made with synths and drum machines...
Listening to music on vinyl is a lot different than listening to an MP3 on a computer or portable MP3 player. You can never get the same quality of sound (of course, now we're also on the topic of comparing computer speakers to those nice ones you have plugged into your stereo downstairs).
And he can't use iPods to match up beats, alter the pitch of music or spin records back and forth for a scratching effect Eall things that professional club DJs consider essential.
I'll stick to clubs with vinyl based DJs thanks.
...so instead of saying a good dj is 'bad', we can now say he is LAME!
Ok I can't see an Ipod replacing turntables, but Stanton came with a product that really rocks.(http://www.finalscratch.com/fs2/pictures.as p) It uses the turntables as an interface for for a computer to control mp3 streaming. Now that's smart. And it runs on Linux.
"It doesn't take much talent to be a DJ anymore. You just have to have a good flow of songs"
Spinning records and beatmatching isn't hard to do. I think the skill of a dj is to be able to build up a night, play good tunes that'll make people in the crowd react.
The title made me think instantly of this
...would be if DJ's would use Ogg Vorbis instead of MP3. That'd be news, and it'd convince a lot of people about what you can do with Ogg Vorbis.
Thankfully, i've got enough Karma to last me the next century over. Anyways, for those of you griping that you that are arguing Vinyl is superior, you should see Final Scratchit is the obvious evolution of blending a turntable and a computer together. Plus, I bet you could kludge it to support whatever godforsaken audio format you love... and they said AIFF was dead.
And he can't use iPods to match up beats, alter the pitch of music or spin records back and forth for a scratching effect -- all things that professional club DJs consider essential.
So he just fades one track over the other?
Nasty.
Is there anything for Linux that provides two cue-able, independant music streams where you can alter the speed of each track, and where play starts in 0.01 of a second?
Get your own free personal location tracker
One of the students where I work is developing a system so you can control MP3's, PCM audio, Ogg streams, DivX movies etc. -- via vinyl.
:)
Everything you do to the record will directly translate to whatever digital thing is being played/run. I'm not sure how accurate it is, but he is a (and knows many) DJs so I think he's aiming to make them happy.
This is the only DJ I know, and this is only one of his projects. It seems one heck of a lot more exciting than "gee, I bought an iPod!" though, yet stuff like this is never mentioned in mainstream news like Yahoo. Then again, most people who call themselves DJs probably aren't, anyway, and couldn't make use of such technology because they wouldn't know how to spin vinyl in the first place. It's like all those "webmasters". I'm just happy that the DJing world still has some potential for innovation, even though my taste in music is completely different
MP3 is bad for the country. The Recording Industry of American Artists and the Motion Picture Academy of Artists has deemed this a threat to the country and I support these American institutions like I support apple pie and Chevrolet. Now would someone please tell me what an MP3 is?
I know of one pub in Sydney and have heard about some more night clubs which have PC's set up playing huge MP3 play lists over and over off of MP3's on removable hard drives.
DJ at home mixes music until his removable hdd is full, then takes it to the night club, swaps hdd's, goes home and does it all again to keep the mixes fresh.
War crimes, torture, lies, illegal spying... Would someone give Bush a blowjob, already, so he can be impeached?
If Apple or someone made a (software, I pressume) mod to the iPod to allow for pitch control) and they already have the jog dial, which could come inhandy), i'd buy two without a moments thought.
As I suspect lots of other people would.
Is anyone working on this?
I've been a DJ at a dance/techno club for a year and a half now, and have absolutely no vinyl :-)
:-) Also, I've found that people are more often intrigued by the use of pro CD players and want to find out how they work, rather than being put off by them because they "aren't vinyl".
:-)
:-)
:-)
While I don't use an MP3 solution directly, I use Pioneer CDJ-500's. Most of my CDs are made from well-encoded MP3's, and occasionally my own tracks.
No, you can't scratch with the old CDJ-500's, but the style of music I spin (mostly house and techno) doesn't necessitate scratching to get a good enough sound for people to have a good time and even cheer!
Club DJing is NOT all about scratching, it's about providing a great set of tunes, mixed well and mixed appropriately, that your audience that evening will enjoy... no matter what method you use to get that.
Now turntablism -- that is about scratching
Speaking of turntables and scratching, there are products out there that do a fine job of bridging the gap between traditional vinyl and the "digital DJ" world.
One is Pioneer's CDJ-1000, which allows you to scratch audio CDs with its touch sensitive jog dial. I've had the chance to play around with these, and they're awesome!! While there is obviously SOME sort of latency, it's definitely not noticeable by humans, and approaches zero
Also, Pioneer now has a professional CD player that can play MP3 CDs. I'm sure before too long they will merge the two together into a unit that will play MP3 CDs and let you scratch them intuitively like the 1000.
Perhaps the best example yet is Final Scratch. Some well-known DJs use this, including some that've used it back when it ran on BeOS. Now it runs on Linux though!
It consists of specially-encoded vinyl that you play on standard turntables, which are hooked up to a controller, which is in turn hooked up to your laptop which is presumably filled with MP3 and WAV files.
Essentially, you are able to play MP3 files WITH VINYL. I believe there is a slightly more perceptible latency than the CDJ-1000 but not so much that it's frustrating to work with.
Right now I'm happy, but if I upgrade my setup I will more than likely go with the Final Scratch solution...
Wait stop the presses! Several years ago 2 guys from the Netherlands built this gadget together with 2 pieces of vinyl which had the song-position digitally encoded on vinyl. The gadget is connected with a laptop with their software on it playing the position given by the record and even decides if it is real music or the specially encoded vinyl records. So you can scratch and do all the things DJ's like doing and you get to play mp3's. If in doubt look at: www.finalscratch.com
You know, I've been doing this for a few years.. going to parties, setting up a sound sytem, and playing high-quality mp3s for people to listen/dance to. But I'd be too embarassed to call it "DJing". I mean, yes, it's like DJing in a sense where you have to select the music to fit the mood and keep the party going, and have the songs people ask to hear.. but still. It's just fundamentally different somehow. Maybe because just about any schmoe could do it :)
than my stuff? No, they don't have two pioneer cdj-1000 and a djm-600 to mix with.
And he's making a living off of doing this? Hello? RIAA? You know where this guy is and where he works now. Hello? How about you go after the people actually profiting off of you rather than those of us doing no-profit sharing. Is anybody in there? Hello?
If you were blocking sigs, you wouldn't have to read this.
"When I was younger I felt like there was a talent to it because they were spinning records backwards and forwards and really cutting it in and overlapping songs," Parrish says. "It doesn't take much talent to be a DJ anymore. You just have to have a good flow of songs."
Basically what Parrish is saying here is: I wanted to be talented DJ but I couldn't. So I decided that there's no talent to being a DJ.
What Parrish is describing (slecting a playlist) is, as mentioned in the article, something any moron can do. The only problem is the fact that this isn't DJing. Picking a playlist is only the start of what a good DJ does. The DJ then has to mix them together in a way that sounds natural and unforced, that takes more than just matching the beats up, it's also good to make sure that the sections are matched (sections being the 32 or 64 beat repetitions in music). If they really know what they are doing then they can start to think about key mixing (ie. keeping the songs you are mixing together in the same key), a difficult trick when altering the speed of the record will put into a different key.
Then there is the fact that REAL DJs can have at least two tracks going at the same time, without making it sound awful. They don't just use this to mix from one track to another. They can also use this to add an element of one track into another, without leaving the original track.
DJs can also use their mixer to make a track sound very different to what's on the vinyl. Using EQs the DJ can emphasize or reduce the Bass Midrange and Treble, effectively cutting instruments out or bringing them to the fore. Some mixers like the Pioneer DJM-600 allow the DJ to also add effects like Echo, Flange, or Reverb. It's even got a mini-sampler built in, allowing the DJ to grab a section of a track and create something new with it. Well, partially new anyhow.
In short, if you don't think there's any artistry or talent required to be a DJ, then you simply don't understand what it is that DJs can do. I haven't even begun to cover the fact that a DJ is also required to understand, respond to, and influence the vibe of an evening.
I also haven't mentioned the idiocy of using MP3s over a commercial grade sound system. Let's just say that the ear can detect lots of frequencies and lots of frequency ranges. When speakers have the ability to playback all those frequencies clearly the ear can easily hear the difference between analogue/44.1kHz/MP3.
Conclusion: this "DJ" is an idiot and I won't be going to BQE bar for the music anytime soon. (The fact that I'm on the other side of the world is worth considering too...)
Yes, it does sound like a troll, but I'll take the bait. Maybe your trendy wine-bar in the city rocks out to some dude with 2 iPods and a bunch of music he stole through Audiogalaxy and Napster, but if you were really interested in the music and what can be done with it, take the trouble to find places that book real DJ's (not selecters) that can mix and put in the time and expense to find the music they want to play.
Real DJ'ing takes skill. This is not real DJ'ing. Don't think DJ's are redundant becaus of this guy. He might manage to fill the dancefloor at a bar mitzvah or drunken wedding, but he won't cut it in a club. Makes me wonder how many slashdotters ever go to a decent dance club
..unless it is given to them as a promo by the label or distributers, or directly from the artist.
But downloading music and then getting paid to play it out is evil. Not a cent goes to the artist.
I'm less concerned about the RIAA etc, but I really do a have a problem with this type of theft. I have been guilty in the past of downloading rare stuff that I couldn't purchase, but usually only after I've gone as far as contacting the record label or even the artist directly asking for back-copies, or offering to pay for it on CDR.
The music scene that I love is full of fed-up artists who are sick of seeing people steal their work, saying that they love the music. If you enjoy it so much, then buy it!
I don't consider myself as a good DJ, but as I have some experience in this field, I may suggest that a DJ is still necessary, even if there's a digital system (mp3's, ogg on PC or ipod, whatever...), and not only because there's a need for a 'popular and trendy DJ', but also only a 'human being' ;-) can react to the particularities of audience. For example, if you play a certain kind of music and that everyone is seeking for a place to sit, you may not play 5 others in the same style, as would a playlist-controlled system have 'done'.
So there's still a need for DJ's, unless you have a really good computerized playlist-generating system with sensors, AI and so on.
ObAbstract - i've been DJing for over 10 years, headlining festivals with up to thousands of people, and been a long time fan and admirer of really good DJs. I learned on vinyl, but have been encompassing more advanced media in recent years.
;) And if you're into vinyl-based DJs can show you the different sorts of tricks that can be achieved with these mediums.
The move onto solid state media is a good, and inevitable one. The demands on a DJ are higher than ever before, and more tools are needed for the job. Some tricks *need* preparation to be performed, if for instance you want to cut out a middle chunk of a song, or want to overlay a track with a large number of samples very close together - these simply aren't possible on a traditional dual-turntable setup.
Some very big DJs have access to vinyl-pressing facilities, so can play around with tracks and then have them available to play from a 12" - but hardly anyone can afford that. So there have to be other solutions.
There will always be people arguing that one approach is better than the other, that one needs more skill than the other. This is ridiculous - both approaches can take time and skill, to become adept enough to create a good set with the tools you have. Vinyl is (for now at least) the most tactile "interface" for playing with music, though many other dj-quality units (such as CD players) compensate for their lack of interactivity with some neat tools, such as automatic BPM counters, instant dropping, better pitch or indeed fixed-pitch tempo controls, and frame by frame shifting. These already show some benefits over vinyl in some situations. Harddrive or solid-state solutions provide further benefits, such as instant accessibility, visual wave representations (it's really nice to be given an on-screen reminder that the track goes into a break in 15 seconds time), and so forth.
The real benefit is that both approaches have their strong points, as well as limitations, so people benefit from even more variation, tricks and fun stuff in their sets. The best solution would be to have all the equipment available, but this would require all the skills across the board to use properly.
If you're interested, I've been using a laptop/mp3 player live to augment DJ sets for years now. I ususally use the mp3 player for sample queuing, the laptop for processing or playing preprocessed tracks, or queueing large numbers of samples - you want to get 15 samples right in a minute, it'll be VERY tough with a regular mp3 player. And impossible on vinyl. Add these to 2 CD players (sometimes more) and sometimes a turntable, and you have what I usually use.
I have some sets available for download, that hopefully can withstand a slashdotting
There are a bunch of mirrors for the sets available here, around the US and Europe.
Fross
I DJ with both vinyl and CD
No doubt about it, there is something special about the vinyl sound. I'm not necessarily saying it's better than CD (although I do prefer it) but it definately sounds warmer and fatter. There is something about a good needle running on a well-pressed 12" single that can't be matched by CD.
I love my CD's for other reasons - convenient, light, don't wear out, very precise players, (did I say light?), get unreleased new music before it is released on vinyl etc. But there is still something special about a diamond in a groove that means vinyl will never die for DJ's
I've looked at FS (on the web, not in person unfortunately) and it seems to me that it would be very difficult to get the latency down to acceptable levels. With vinyl, there is practically no latency - the needle jiggles about, and the output from that is amplified.
With pro CD-players, the latency is generally 0.01 seconds. This means that when you hit the cue button, it spits the beat out with less than 1/100 of a second delay. Some cheaper players are around 0.03 to 0.05 - I consider this too slow for pro use. So I would like someone to tell me what sort of latency exists in the FS solution, with it's specially encoded vinyl, decoders, laptop, mp3 player etc. I find it hard to believe that it can approach vinyl or CD.
An ipod has -way- too much storage room for a DJ.
An iPod is also much lighter than a crate of vinyl and is much harder to break in transit. I've talked to DJs who felt that they had to bodybuild just to be able to carry their collections.
Will I retire or break 10K?
though I'll be the first to admit that a club DJ with an ipod would be incredibly boring to watch, I think the idea of mp3's for a normal (non-club) DJ is a great one.. in fact, we've got a few in my area that use a laptop and professional powered speakers (usually JBL EONs) to DJ with. works pretty well, and the average listener can't really tell the difference in music quality. besides, they're not at the wedding/whatever for the music alone...
Attractive hipsters fill the high-ceilinged space with laughter and cigarette smoke, bopping their heads to the beat as they order $7 gin and tonics. They come to meet friends and hear the disc jockey spin the week's worries away.
What most don't know, however, is that this DJ's turntables are empty -- all the music comes from two10-gigabyte disk drives, each smaller than a pack of cigarettes.
Ben Kirkendoll leaves the records at home in favor of his iPods, Apple Computer's disk-based music player, which he simply plugs into an audio system's mixer.
He's part of a small but growing number of DJs who have turned to MP3 music files for their accessibility and convenience.
Some equipment manufacturers are even getting hip, offering specialized products beyond the iPod, a general usage music player. A few digital DJ systems are already available, and one due in September promises to combine MP3 technology with old-fashioned mixing capabilities.
New York ad salesman Michael Parrish, who noticed the BQE's DJ was turntables-free when he requested a song, says anyone can be a DJ now.
"When I was younger I felt like there was a talent to it because they were spinning records backwards and forwards and really cutting it in and overlapping songs," Parrish says. "It doesn't take much talent to be a DJ anymore. You just have to have a good flow of songs."
Kirkendoll, by day an artist at a New York advertising agency, acknowledges that plugging an iPod into a sound system and cueing up tracks doesn't require even a fraction of the skill needed to spin records.
And he can't use iPods to match up beats, alter the pitch of music or spin records back and forth for a scratching effect -- all things that professional club DJs consider essential.
But Kirkendoll, who calls himself "The Podiatrist," was hired for his collection of music and penchant for feeling the vibe of a crowd, not his ability to mix or scratch.
"I love that you can walk into a bar with two little gimmicks in either pocket and have over 4,000 songs to play," says Taya Pocock, booking manager at the BQE.
Part of the beauty of MP3s, Kirkendoll says, is that a regular guy with a day job and a passion for music can be a DJ without years of practicing and thousands of dollars scouring record shops for those rare must-haves.
Peer-to-peer networks and Internet download sites provide Kirkendoll with a hefty supply, though he still relies heavily on CDs from his own collection, which he converts into MP3 files.
Manufacturers are starting to recognize that DJs are obtaining more of their music from the Internet -- some legally, others not so -- or converting their CD tracks. And they're responding with products.
Pioneer is promising for September the DMP-555, an MP3 player it says will include scratch capabilities and pitch controls normally available only to conventional DJs. And Gem Sound has the MP3X-Pro mixer, which allows digitally downloaded music to be stored in the unit itself.
There are also software-based programs, such as PCDJ by Visiosonic and DJPower by DJPower International LLC, but they require a computer.
Gerald Webb, a DJ who switched from vinyl to CDs eight years ago, thinks many manufacturers have been reluctant to offer MP3 devices because they fear copyright lawsuits.
Pioneer's response is the Secure Data Card, which stores and transfers digital files for the DMP-555. The SD card allows the same song to be copied only three times and permits transfers only to computers from which a file originated.
But as for assuring the digital files were legally obtained to begin with, "there's really no way that we can regulate what our users are doing," Pioneer's Brian Buonassissi says. "They have to cover themselves."
Gem Sound takes a similar stance.
"MP3 is definitely legal," marketing manager Barry Seiden says. "There are ways to do it that are illegal. The person that's using it has to decide."
A 1998 copyright law, the Digital Millennium Copyright Act ( news - web sites), bans circumventing anti-piracy measures built into software and devices. But it does not require manufacturers to incorporate such measures.
A bill pending in the Senate would. That proposal, from by Sen. Ernest Hollings, D-S.C., would "shut down electronic DJ culture," said Siva Vaidhyanathan, a University of Wisconsin professor critical of modern copyright laws.
Further, manufacturers are increasingly placing controls on CDs so that they'll play in a CD player but can't be converted to MP3 format. That means some legally obtained music already can't be transferred to iPods and other MP3 devices. Officials from the Recording Industry Association of America ( news - web sites) refused comment for this story.
For now, the digital movement's effect on DJing is limited largely because many longtime DJs still frown on the technology.
"I think we kind of tend to stick to the tried and true stuff. Not that we don't embrace technology, it's just very new," says Brian Pember, co-founder and creative director of Groovetech, a Seattle-based Web site that broadcasts live DJ sets and deals electronic music.
He says DJs who use laptops, MP3 players and digital turntables in clubs get scoffed at by the "purists."
"You'll definitely see a lot of snickering and sneering," Pember says, "but really it's out of a sense of fear."
Wow. I downloaded (well, still downloading) the track from Convergence 8, and the first thing that hits me is a sample from Haujobb's State. Great!
Really nice playlist, too. Should you happen to move to Stockholm, Sweden, I'd love to see you at Tech Noir. :)
Leveling up builds character.
Is a hard drive really that much smarter than a cd-r?
It's easier to access multiple portions of a HD at the same time because seeking on HD is much faster than seeking on CD. This is important unless your device has a very large RAM cache to load the next song you're trying to beatmatch to.
A single CD stores 8 hours of 192 kbps Ogg audio. If your set is larger than that (one copy for each Ogg CD player), you have to carry multiple CDs and possibly swap after every song, which brings me to the next part:
Unlike a CD-R, a HD has an airtight seal between scratches and your data.
I could be talking out myWill I retire or break 10K?
At the very high sound levels in clubs a human ear cannot distinguish any longer between the high frequency pitchs which would be affected be low quality encoding.
Additionally the standard audience of a club is usually exposed to high sound levels over longer periods therefore having a reduced ability of hearing these high frequencies.
BTW: This also affects the DJs, you can check this by making a spectrum analysis of the standard techno/club stuff on MTV. You'll notice extremely repetitive/monotone patterns in the high frequency bands. This is were the club saying: "I'm addicted to bass" comes from.
Owner of a Mensa membership card.
And he can't use iPods to match up beats
How do you know he doesn't just go pull up some wav editor and normalize everything to (say) 125 bpm before encoding his set and copying it to the iPod players?
Here's a short essay I wrote about a year ago about digital DJing.
Will I retire or break 10K?
I'm one of those amateurs DJ's playing MP3s at private parties. I would like to know what people like me use in terms of software? I'm looking for some good, easy to use solution which can support two soundcards (one for queuing, one for playing the music), beat counting and pitch control...
When speakers have the ability to playback all those frequencies clearly the ear can easily hear the difference between analogue/44.1kHz/MP3
Not when the ear has a bandpass filter centered at 3000 Hz, and when you're not dealing with pure tones, spectral masking effects inside the inner ear kill everything above 19 kHz, giving CDs a 3 kHz margin of error. In addition, CD has a -90 dB noise floor (can you hear a faint whisper over the pounding music?), and even that can be reduced by pushing dither noise up above 18 kHz.
I can hear the difference between the source and MusicMatch at 128 kbps, but LAME at just under 192 kbps has been shown (on good speakers, no less) to provide transparent reproduction.
Will I retire or break 10K?
But downloading music and then getting paid to play it out is evil. Not a cent goes to the artist.
The club already pays ASCAP and BMI for the right to publicly perform music, and most of that goes to the songwriter's publisher, who in turn cuts a check to the songwriter. And in electronic dance music, the lead songwriter is usually the same person as the artist because that kind of music is generally composed on modplug or some MIDI sequencer anyway.
I'm less concerned about the RIAA
By USA copyright law, the record label isn't owed anything for a public performance over loudspeakers.
Will I retire or break 10K?
Being a part of a reggae sound system (term used as a description for all involved artists) I have to say that no reggae/hip hop/jungle/you name it DJ would ever want to play MP3s. Maybe he would play the one or the other dubplate, that a singer has recorded for him and sent him via email, but you can't beat vinyl.
There are just so many different techinques involved that can not yet be simulated well enough with digital material in real time.
Surely, for the standard mainstream Europop club DJ, MP3s will work just fine. That's a whole different story.
there's a need for a 'popular and trendy DJ', but also only a 'human being' ;-) can react to the particularities of audience
You hit the nail. The point of this article, along with other articles that people have linked to in this discussion, is that new technology has begun to simplify the dirty work of hauling heavy vinyl and beat matching, giving the DJ more free brain cells to spend on the audience.
Will I retire or break 10K?
I've been spinning vinyl for over 10 years. And every 4 years or so, some fucking moron, with no talent hooks something else up to the inputs. Its fucking stupid, takes no talent, and is a waste of time. You simple cannot match the level of control over the music without "touching it". And I have yet to hear anything better than analogue. Fucking kiddie go home put your IPACK fudge gadgets back on the desk. Go buy some technics and learn to do something worthwhile...
heh, i'd like to see you just edit them togother into a mix of hours of dance music.. (it certainly is NOT as easy as you think) It takes me about 8 hours to mix about 1.4 hours of music when done on computer. Besides what would you have the club do? mix a WHOLE CD of music, then play it over and over again in the same song order non stop every day of the week? Yeah, that'll get the crowds going......
Any DJ who uses an iPod to mix isn't a real DJ.. why? because there is absolutely NO skill involved in simply pushing play and moving a slider. DJing is about finiding and playing music that no one has heard before, but is something everyone will like and want to dance to, and mixing it together (which often means beatmatching, which is a skill VERY FEW can master easily, hell i've hosted raves many times before and a lot of the DJs I have try out for a slot can't even hold a beat match for more then 20 seconds..)..
All clubs *really* need is a cd player... but then again they have to have a DJ to be trendy and popular right?
I've been to clubs that do just that, heh, you end up seing no one dancing, why? beacause the manager of the place doesn't have the time to find any decent music, and just plays some 4 year old cd, then stops the music dead for 20 seconds when the cd is done, then slowly pops a new one in.. sorry, but there's a reason we have DJ's in clubs..
MABASPLOOM!
Here's my beef:
I've tried to mix with turn tables and vinyl records (the good stuff). Let me tell you if you've never tried it's freakin' tough. Now as far as using mp3's or acid or wav or wm or whatever the hell you're using, I've done that too, it does take talent, but really when it get's to it, as long as you've got the loops a chimp with a pencil in his mouth could do it.
Personally the whole mp3 mixing thing reminds me of those guitars with the keyboard, yeah you know what I'm talking about. Freakishly unnatural. Or those electric drum sets. Man! what's the age of music coming to???
Well I hate to disagree but I've actually HAD experience DJ'n both with vinyl (crappy ass gemini hand me downs admittedly) and with some tweaked mp3 & similar rigs. While 128 IS fairly acceptable for club/party/etc, you have to understand by the time it GETS to the floor it's been routed through GOD knows how many jury rigged XLR cables and half assed patch bays. Your "decent" encoded signal will pick up noise like Armani picks up cat hair and end up sounding like the south side of 64kbps. I hate to say it but from having played at a number of venues (one of which gave me the joy of actually MAKING and laying my own cables bless their souls) that unless you're dealing with a pristine route from DJ booth to said speakers, you're gonna get noise. And noise loves a low quality signal. It's like they're drinking buddies or something. As for "mixing" and similar, I think the real skill of a DJ is indeed as the article stated "reading" the crowd and playing what they want to hear. It's well and good to scratch and master mixing beats and transitions but if you're not picking the right tracks in the first place it's just a waste of skill (impressive skill that I envy and lust for the spare time to develop). . . . - end psychotic 6am rant-
Find out about my new childrens book: SS Death Camp Criminal Batallion Go To Monte Carlo For The Massacre
Sorry, but with the info you provided you do not fit the category of a dj, and at best should only label yourself a cd 'mixer'.
DJ'ing is more than selecting and playing track after track. Being a dj is about being able to beat mix, scratch, and meld tracks in such a way that the end product becomes the dj's 'own' track. Sampling elements from various tracks, killing the bass on one track and just using the treble while bringing in just the vocals from another track is the sort of things real dj's do to create whole new sounds that can be far apart from the original music.
Besides this live remixing it is also about the culture - lugging your vinyl collection from gig to gig, hunting through old vinyl collections in obscure stores or searching for that elusive white label track, tweaking your decks, setting up the headshell weight and stylus to your personal preference, cleaning down your records, all these trivial elements are what being a dj is about. This distinction is not a matter of musical snobbery, just the reality of what the term 'dj' encompasses.
I am not arguing that using vinyl is more efficient, or that the sound quality is better, or that it is 'cooler', or that CD mixer's aren't as skillful as their DJ counterparts - I'm just stating that if you are mixing mp3's or CD's you should not mis-label yourself a DJ.
the above described is not djing. i have a lot of friends that are DJ's and they would be quite offended being referred as something as meager as a kid with an mp3 player. dj's are about vinyl records and turn tables, the rest are just idiots on the radio/tv
And I'm not talking about any plastic gnome lawn ornament, this little guy is the real deal. Every once in a while my dog will go back there and gnaw on him. He get's totally pissed!
There was this one time when my dog was chewing on Rufas' arm (that's the troll's name, Rufas) and Rufas got so pissed that he head butted the dog and they both passed out for like and hour it was total sweat!
Do you have pics of her? I don't know about her, but DJ RAP is pretty hot. Unless, of course, you're talking about the fat chick from Full House, in that case forget it :P
You don't know what an mp3 is? Man you're out of touch. MP3 stands for Muffin Pancakes Cubed (the cubed is for the "triple threat" as the kids say).
It's just like that time I wanted to get a Buffalo Wing pizza and the guy at pizza place wouldn't do it. So I just took a poop on his face instead.
Richie HAwtin "Plastikman" has been using FS for his latest mix album and on his tours...
It's not DJ'ing in the strictest sense of the word, but I switched the sound system at the improv comedy club I'm a part of over from tapes and CDs to an MP3/OGG based system about a year ago to good results.
Under the tape and CD system, it took a significant amount of time to find the music selection that you needed. Even if the tapes and CDs were well-organized, it could take 20-30 seconds to find the right audio clip, where you'd need to be able to get it in 3-4 seconds to hit "the moment." Plus, especially with the tapes, you'd always have to worry if the person in front of you had rewound it to the right spot.
So I converted most of the common clips to MP3, wrote a Perl/Tk frontend running with XMMS, MySQL, and Linux to allow for quick searches, and put it into production. The results have been great - the people running the audio can get to their samples incredibly fast, and it really impresses the audience.
So a digital audio solution worked wonders for us, even though we're not the traditional "DJ".
I work for one of the leading music technology companies. Some of the software coming out is really suprising. I may allow these digital dj's to bring some talent back into it. Traktor from Native Instruments is one of the first I've actually gotten the chance to review. The nice thing is that it can interface with almost any midi-based controller, so the DJ can still have a tactile way to control the mix. I also helps beatmatch, crossfade, and scratch. I know IK Multimedia has a less expensive software out, but haven't had the chance to play with it yet. I think it's more intended for the home market though.
Why stop at just making up a playlist?
I just got into writing DSP plugins for MaltX, an alternative macintosh mp3 player. it wouldn't be that tough to write live audio plugins to allow DJs to match tempos and affect the pitch of their MP3s digitally as well. You could also apply all sorts of other live audio effects and filters to your beats, like flanger, wah wah, and low and high frequency bandpass filters, to give your audio a wider dynamic depth than just scratching.
Carrying this idea further, someone could also write a live record.scratching DSP Plugin for an mp3 player to really acheive true digital 'spinning'.And all you would need to carry around is a laptop.
For every song that these dj's play, the MPAA and RIAA can cause up to $50 worth of damage to the turntable. I wonder if the warranty would cover that...
The next step ought to be DJing from multitrack recordings, with each instrument on a separate track. That's usually what was originally recorded, but it was mixed down to two tracks for volume distribution. Some DJs now are trying to separate instruments by frequency, but that never works very well. Special multitrack recordings for DJs might be worth trying. Just being able to cleanly pull the vocals from one song and synch them to another minus vocals would be fun.
while you're watching the DJ, I'll be horning in on your girl...
"And like that
I think this is just a matter of DJ's catching up to what current technology has to offer. I laugh every time I hear about this type of story, where a traditional DJ, or even radio station, starts adopting MP3 or some other digital format for their source of music. I don't mean to toot my own horn here, but when I became Chief Engineer, and later General Manager of WGHR in Marietta, the first thing I did was set up a massive file server, and a new computer in the DJ booth. That allowed people to use digital music as a supplement to the supply of CD's and vinyl already in the studio. Since then, almost all of the DJ's have turned to using MP3's, since they're available in one place, and much easier to organize than shelves of CD's. There's still a personal preference available to use the "old" style of spinning tracks, but now it's much easier for the beginners to just throw some tracks into Winamp--something they already know how to do at home.
Sometimes I doubt your commitment to Sparkle Motion.
Like the poster above said, a guy who plays one song after another is not a "DJ", he's a "Dude that plays music at your bar mitzvah/wedding/party". The difference between "DJ" and "Dude" is that you might pay money to hear a DJ spin and create a continuous musical experience, while Dude is just there filling the time with whatever crap he's got on his iPod. I'm sure he can keep the folks entertained, but a DJ has to be able to touch and manipulate his music, not just play it.
Though I don't see MP3's as a real problem, I mean the guys chopping up the music, adjusting the EQ and pitch and speed, so what if the music has a little barely-detectable MP3 sound.
(flamebait)Besides, vinyl is so shitty anyway, MP3 is probably an improvement.(/flamebait)
Surprised more folks haven't mentioned Traktor amd similar software, which lets you do real DJ stuff with the tracks, besides just playing one after the other. Another cool thing about Traktor is you can record a mix and save it independently of the MP3 files, which would be a cool way to distribute mixes (if everybody has the same MP3 files).
What'll really be cool is when the DJs go beyond just emulating the vinyl tricks, and create new MP3-only tricks, like resample the sound or combining it with another track in a unique way. That's what I"m waiting to hear. It'll really blur the lines between DJing, live improvisation, and sampling. Or maybe an artist that continuously combines other people's songs into his own in some funky way. The RIAA will love that guy.....
And please ignore the "gee whiz, them computers is nifty" CNN/Yahoo/AP articles.
$10,000* to the first hacker who figures out how to mod the iPod to create a "song speed" menu option. Or better yet, maybe this'll encourage Apple to add the option themselves. Or even better yet, maybe this'll convince Apple to open-source their iPod software, so people can continue to use the iPod in was it was never intended (thus increasing profits).
*before $10,000 processing fee
c-hack.com |
...or SoundForge for that matter. Both allow you to cut up raw material. Mixmeister allows you to beatmix, cut, splice and overlay. About the only thing you can't do is scratch, and there are other ways of adding in scratches. doing it on the fly takes some doing, but with a little practice, it still can be done...especially since you can pre-save a bunch of cool effects and drop them in at the appropriate points.
You're using her as bait, Master!
Disclaimer: I work at both a radio and in a nightclub.
Remember how they used to call people on the radio "disc jockies"? They are no longer referred to as such...they are "air personalities" because most of radio is now computerized (Prophet Sys, Audiovault, etc).
The same goes for club jocks...if you're MP3-man and you try to impress the ladies with technology rather than skill, you're a "clown pushing play", not a disc jockey.
Ok...so from a DJ to you...why do we spend $500 on a turntable when a CD player can be cheaper? Why do we opt for the vinyl from the record pool and lug around 2 heavy milk crates (or USPS mail bins...come sue me USPS)?
It's easier. It gives you more options while spinning.
On the other side of things, it puts you among the others before you...since you use the same 'ole Technics 1200s, same 'ole black discs...
To put it in perspective, what do you think about the Windoze 5cr1p7 k1dd135? Don't you get insulted when you've been using DOS, Linux, Win3.11, Desqview, OS/2, Solaris..maybe you even did some C64 programming..used a PDP.....everything learned from the ground up? Now, anyone can hop on a PC and be "1337", regardless of history, talent or natural skill.
It seems that the digital revolution is reaching the last places it had not yet conquered, whatever the djs use to mix/beatmatch/... their mp3s, doesn't matter. I don't think there is any analog effect that can't be reproduced digitally. I hope the next revolution in djing will be more video oriented ...
what i mean there is that if mixing/beatmatching/... all the usual dj stuff is made easier, Djs will try something more advanced in matching video and sound. I am aware of few djs actually doing this and even fewer doing something really complex with it .
And yet if you ever tried to adapt your milkdrop effects to match songs you will know that the effect is really great. (even better but harder try it with g-force)
milkdrop and gforce are winamp plugins but there are equivalent for xmms and others.
Imagine if the guy actually learned to play an instrument and create new music?
Its like masturbation and sex; when you dont have to the talent for the latter, you stick with the first.
are completely stupid. Yes the MP3 player has its place, but it will never replace vinyl for one simple reason. Turntables are an instrument. Sure mp3's are nice if all you are doing is just playing music, but in my world that is not DJ'ing. If you ever watch a DMC competition, you will understand precisely what I mean. The only way I can possible see digital replacing vinyl is in the digital turntable systems we see emerging now, but those are still VERY far from taking over. Until all the nuances of vinyl can be simulated very well, these products are neat, but not a replacement for the good 'ol turntable.
Now that said, I DO firmly believe that digital has a big place with ["true"] DJ's. The sampling, effects, and synthesizing possibilities are immense. Especially of interest are computer instruments. The Gameboy teddy bear from a while back comes to mind as simple example. Digital technology certainly can be an amazing in the hands of a musician, but its strength is not in replacing vinyl but rather in creating whole new possibilities. Some of the most amazing music emerges when a combination of digital and analog instruments are used. Each has its strengths.
My 00000010 cents.
----
All of whose base are belong to the what-now?
Are you sure? I've had no problems scratching my CDs...
Er, wait, we're talking about two different things. Never mind. :-)
You cannot apply a technological solution to a sociological problem. (Edwards' Law)
You're wrong there. A friend and I did a club-style radio show for 8 years, mixing with Denon CD Players and vinyl. We brought approximately 250 CDs every week, which at roughly 50MB/CD once converted, which comes out to 12.5GB. However, our complete collection of DJable music is much closer to 1500 CDs, which comes out to 75GB. I think it'll be a while yet before you can fit that in two off-the-shelf, unmodified ipods, much less one.
You'll also notice I've made no mention of the 18 crates of records we own which have not been ripped yet.
I'm currently experimenting with a mobile unit that includes a Fujitsu P-2110 Laptop, PCDJ, A 120GB firewire drive (for now), and a Creative Labs Extigy. Complete mobile DJ solution for under 10 pounds.
The recent Slashdot article on Digital DJ Turntable was far more interesting.
Lets recap this article. Some people have figured out that you can put a bunch of music on a computer or ipod and play that at events. Wow! You say this technology allows you to put together a list of songs and then play then in a row one after another???
Look at who they interviewed:
In other words, this is the guy who plays music at your wedding.
What the story should be about is about some of the developments in technology that allow *real DJs* to perform instead of vinyl. When I say *real DJs", I mean those that perform at clubs that use beatchmatching, effects, and other techniques to create a fluid music listening experience.
AtomixMP3 has been making some good progress at allowing people to use MP3s like turntables. Unfortunately, it still doesn't have anything that allows DJs to be able to "see" the CD the same way real DJs can apparently visually check out the grooves on the record.
Evolution: love it or leave it
FM radio and MP3 encoding both degrade audio quality, but do it in different ways. So if you play an MP3 over FM radio, you don't get the worse of the two qualities (which would be normal FM radio quality, as you seem to assume), but you get in effect quality that's degraded by the sum of each separate degradation. So it sounds terrible.
As a simple example you can try at home, take a CD and encode it to a 128 kbps mp3. Then decode that mp3 back to WAV, and encode it to a 128 kbps mp3 again, using a different codec. Your re-encoded 128 kbps mp3 will sound terrible compared even to the original 128 kbps mp3.
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
This whole thing really reminds me of a crude and primitive final scratch, except final scratch lets you beat match and, including the other equipment, can cost more than a coupla ipods.
But the whole idea of spinning with mp3's instead of vinyl seems horribly lame. It's kinda like taking the answers to your math homework from the back of the book (yeah, we all did that at least once...)
Where's the challenge in finding just the right records or going to a store to hunt down other tracks? Some say that mp3's allow you to get rare stuff that you can't get on vinyl, but it still just feels completely sleazy to me.
And plus, if this guy isn't beatmatching, he's not really doing anything special, is he? Couldn't he just as well be using two cd players?
Spin hard drive platters instead of records!
For club-style Radioshows I agree, but at least here in .de it is pretty common to share a night with at least two other DJs in regular techno clubs - and what works best for me is when I select my vinyl depending on my mood and the time at which Im scheduled just before I leave, never more than 2 crates. Its a matter of preference I guess, I like to know my records, which ones work together, etc.
--[Nothing important]--
Lest we forget about Afrotech's Hard-disk Sound System mentioned on /. a couple of months back. I've now got a couple of dead hard drives from work, so maybe this will be a good project to try.
I have came across this website of a canadian student's masters project in Computer Science. It seems to be really amazing what he is doing and along the same line of the posting.
http://www.cs.ubc.ca/~tbeamish
that article mentioned some commercial software due out by the end of the year to make dj-ing with mp3s easy.
time to shamelessly plug gdam an open source mp3 dj-ing app some friends of mine have been hacking for over three years now, which imho is totally awesome. using gtk and runs under linux, os/x, and maybe even windows (don't know about that last one for sure).
one of the main developers is a dj in the burgeoning new york electronic dj scene.
check it out.
The topic is about DJ'ing with MP3's. Now, I can see arguments about the lack of scratching (still something of a problem), beatmatching (programs do exist & and are pretty damn good, IMHO), and possibly computer problems "crashing" the party, so to speak. What I can't understand is all this bullshit about lack of sound quality! This is the same bullshit all the analog-obsessed DJ's of the world started spouting when the rest of us started using CD's in our performances. Who the hell cares about the "warmth" of the sound??? I still remember when I started using MP3's to DJ and I never had comments about them. Starting with parties I did back in 1997 while I was the house DJ at the Delta Upsilon house at Carnegie Mellon, I would switch between vinyl, CD, CD-R's with converted MP3's on them, and MP3's played off my laptop. Guess what? It wasn't a bunch of old people sitting around bitching about the lack of "warmth" in the sound. It was a shitload of college kids getting piss-drunk and having fun, in part because of me. They didn't complain about the sound quality at the beginning of the parties when sober & they didn't say a word at the end when they were drunk & tone-deaf. I would mix & beatmatch with simple utilities (whose names escape me) downloaded off the net. For scratches, I would impose the turntable's sound with the mixer. The trick was finding something appropraite to scratch with a paticular song, however this made me a much stronger DJ, not the other way around. And as far as the image goes, the bitches loved coming up there and seeing a laptop running Winamp mixing in with the CD's. They thought it was the coolest shit they'd ever seen.
So, to conclude, not only does your argument (sound quality) have nothing to do with parties, but all of the other arguments against MP3 DJ'ing are either bullshit or pretty weak as well.
-Kikta
P.S. If it makes you vinyl guys feel any better, I was against automatic-HTML generation programs for a long time in favor of text editors. So I guess I can sort-of see how you feel...
Pedophiles.
now instead of having the FBI raid parties for drugs, you would have the RIAA raiding parties for pirated songs.
13 year old white supremacists are shitty web designers.
Your really missing a few things:
Beat matching and beat mixing are really nifty skills to have. Of course people will still enjoy it if your just playing the music they want, but they can go off a whole lot more when your beat mixing between songs, and cranking out some nice breaks and so on.
Anyway, you can't do that on iPods (errggh, you'd be so much better off turning up with a laptop)... Anyway, check out GDAM, Greg and Daves Audio Mixer (http://gdam.sourceforge.net), it has all your beat mixing, sampling, sequencing and all that, with mp3, wav and ogg support. You can fire up as many virtual turntables as you want for samples, and loops.....
Listen. They're just codecs. You can still play both on the same computer. Hopefully, there will be good vorbis hardware players available soon (as soon as a good integer implementation is available), and maybe they'll play both Vorbis and Mp3 so you can use Vorbis for those newlymade rips while still having access to that good old Mp3 warez-collection.
so YOU'RE andy van?
i saw him on TV doing the whole fake scratching/turntabling thing, holding headphones up. extremely pathetic.
Noone has seemed to caught on here (probably cause your just reading a mainstream Yahoo article) but Stanton is supporting Linux for Final Scratch right out of the box. Of course it will run best on a Macintosh because Linux often has latency on programs running in X.
Now a little about MP3's. I am from the Techno community. Techno the artform not the things you here in clubs, but the music inspired by Kraftwork created in Detroit and Berlin and brought to the world by Juan Atkins, Kevin Saunderson, Jeff Mills, and Tresor Records.
Techno is really about pushing electronic music to the next level, creating original sounds and unique experiences. It's not about Clubs, not about exctasy, not about Raves or electronic music festivals but about the individual and his expression through electronic music. My favorite quote by Ritchie Hawtin, "Techno is about the individual and his or her entanglments with technology"...
FinalScratch and mp3's can be added to a toolkit but can't replace the conventional toolkit. Give me a keyboard and a Roland 909 over your mp3's anyday. But overlooking the technology would be costly, because certainly computers have pushed electronic music to a new level, and some really nice things can be done with audio waves when they are digital.
Part of the thing that makes Turntable musicians great is there selection of music and finding rare and unheard records. Noone wants to listen to different DJ's play the same songs over and over again. Do MP3's help this problem? Probably not, because if you can find the MP3 on the internet so can I... But if you found that domestic record in a small shop in Australia or Germany or Ireland, and play it for me, my soul will melt and I won't be able to get your music.
I do think FinalScratch is quite promising actually. It works with traditional turntables, and special vinyl... and to top it off it is being Promoted by Ritchie Hawtin, Techno God, king of the underground.
Since the music is being used in a public performace, I'm sure he pays the appropriate ASCAP and BMC licensing fees...
http://www.terminatorx.cx/
"For those of you who drop by for the first time: terminatorX is a realtime audio synthesizer that allows you to "scratch" on digitally sampled audio data (*.wav, *.au, *.mp3, etc.) the way hiphop-DJs scratch on vinyl records. It features multiple turntables, realtime effects (buit-in as well as LADSPA plugin effects), a sequencer and an easy-to-use gtk+ GUI. This software runs under LINUX only."
it does a decent job....
The recording that is being given a public performance belongs to the recording label.
The part of copyright law that covers public performances over something other than a digital network does not care how you acquired a recording.
You may be able to read a Tom Clancy novel over a loudspeaker system, but you have to have a legal copy of the book to do so
Making a licensed public performance of a song proves nothing about the recording but possession. Mere possession of an illegal copy is not infringement, is it? Can you point out the specific section of copyright law to which you refer?
Besides, because most electronic dance music artists don't record on RIAA labels, their contracts might actually let the artists authorize royalty-free electronic redistribution of the recordings.
you can't just Xerox the book
You can't "Xerox" anything; that's trademark infringement. On the other hand, you can "make a copy" or "make a photocopy" or "copy it on a Xerox machine". Trademarks are adjectives.
Will I retire or break 10K?
Nothing even comes close to the sound of vinyl, period. Just as an experiment, I hooked my pc up to the PA system before one of our parties (raves). I played a track encoded @128kbps from a cd, and its vinyl counterpart. The audio quality at 128 kbps basically sucks. Those frequencies which are lost in encoding make a world of difference when running through 15,000+ watts of sound. I could see this type of product possibly making a dent in the highschool prom/top 40 type dj market. The only thing is that this type of dj rarely relies on vinyl. It is more of a replacement for lazy djs who cannot take the effort of loading cds in and out of the tray.