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..."

Comments

Access time and capacity

[yerricde]

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 my

Not important.

[Krapangor]

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.