(you can justify the expense in this by the sheer saving you get by using link and not buying every tune you like)
Managing your tunes across multiple devices
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I remember the pain of iTunes as a DJ. I think as a music fan it would be fine if you collected music in a more ‘everyday user’ fashion and didn’t want to DJ from it. I think it works well for the masses.
But I have a portion of my hard drive from an era when I used to use it to burn CDs for CDJs before going to USB and I just wish I hadn’t.
For DJing, I still say two Pioneer cdjs, a mixer, headphones and a usb/sd card are king, and will be for some time. Denon, Serato, lugging vinyl, streaming etc are imposters.
Still use iTunes to rip cds which I store on an external hard drive, works fine with my iPods. Can’t be fucked with storing any of it in the cloud.
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mono-stereo
Been on it today now some tosser has made me think about it again!!
Seems pretty decent to be fair.
Particularly taken with the idea I can try tunes in mixes whereas without would basically be a bit of a punt.
Currently throwing together 5 - 7 tunes then getting stuck. Could be a lack of imagination but then finding something to progress the mix becomes a ball ache. Beatport link could help here.
Especially when I’m only using at home anyway
I create playlists in Apple Music and then utilize UKeySoft on a PC to rip that playlist into FLAC files. Sometimes the size of the playlist is 25 - 80 tracks. I add them to a folder and then import folder to Rekordbox on the iMac used exclusively for music storage and Rekordbox. Rekordbox then used to export a USB which is then plugged into an XDJ-1000 MK2. I may not be the help you were asking for but thought to explain my setup. Outside of my iMac using an operating system that is steadily becoming unsupported by Apple (High Sierra)…think my setup is somewhat standard.
DJing sounds like an absolute ball ache.
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Funnily enough, storing on certain cloud solutions would be way easier than what you are doing.
I have everything backed up on Google
Drive. So when I paste a file into my music folder within a minute it’s mirrored on the cloud. That’s it.
My computers could go up in flames and I’d be up and running in a few hours of downloading everything on my next machine.
We are usually just intimidated by what we haven’t learned.
Mad_Cyril this is what I miss.
Beatport link helped me find 2400 tracks in about 6 months.
When I stopped using Link I got better by default at choosing tunes and putting them in a potential hold bin. Coming back to them the next day to see if I really liked them and then only buying those.
It really trained my brain. However I do occasionally still come across tracks I love that won’t fit anywhere and either buy them wasting money or discipline myself to just not buy it (and spend a moment being quite sad).
My idea for using beatport link would be to use it to experiment with loopy techno that I wouldn’t usually rate enough to buy a full track of. With link I would just download all sorts of shit and start experimenting. I think that sounds like fun.
Defo. There’s bags of potential to do this if you are well organised with playlists / crates.
NasserAlazzawi It really trained my brain. However I do occasionally still come across tracks I love that won’t fit anywhere and either buy them wasting money or discipline myself to just not buy it (and spend a moment being quite sad).
Eh surely you should be buying those tracks you like and learning how to use them within a mix. Your mixes improve and you improve as a DJ no? Is that not the “discipline”?
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SM001 usually, but some are little buggers when you go through as many as I seem to be.
I think it’s down to wanting a real flow but I know some DJs do killer sets by jolting/changing the rhythm more suddenly and frequently.
I’ve been training myself not to do that - some of my early sets were (imo) full of great tunes but the rhythm/groove changing didn’t make sense. It took Alan Ruddick to train me to focus more on that and create a journey. I don’t get that right all the time but I’ve even seen Sasha get that wrong lately.
Thinking about it I would have been much more likely to shoehorn tracks like this in 2018, 2019 than I am willing to do today.
NasserAlazzawi You’re assuming that Apple doesn’t burn to the ground (see the fire at Universal for ref)… or get hacked, or fuck up, or just fuck you off. I don’t trust the platforms much. Having my own drives works for me at the moment.
NasserAlazzawi wanting a real flow
It’s such a killer when you can’t find the tracks that allow you to do this. Proper head banging against the wall stuff as you spend hours on Beatport looking for the ‘one’ right track that works on all levels.
It’s a fair point about Apple. It seems unlikely but is possible.
The cloud solution I mention let’s you keep your files on your machine and it just picks up when you add a new one and mirrors it up there.
So if google ever died it is still on my machine at least.
NasserAlazzawi Oh I get it, it’s just that when you have a few petabytes of music, they want you to pay for it every month, and they can do one!
I manage my tunes on separate devices.
Hope that helps.
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It would be nice if Apple gave you back a HQ file that you uploaded.
I use Itunes Match and the way music syncs across devices / Macs is superb, unless you need to download the original HQ file on a Mac that doesn’t have the orig WAV/FLAC/HQ AIFF file. What Music does is just give you their version at 256 kps…….Does my head in.
That said i’m not playing out at Fabric any time soon, so do mixes/streams really suffer when using AIFF at 44.1 kHz/ 256kps? I suspect not so should just get over myself and suck it up! lol