Managing your tunes across multiple devices

Dubman

Homegrove
What’s the sound quality like through Amazon. I always thought it was poor.

Homegrove

Yeah, iTunes is better on that regard too. You can buy more and more of that stuff from Bandcamp too thankfully these days.

mono-stereo

Mad_Cyril Have you tried the beaport steam service stright to your Denon decks? im kind of intrugued by that. Sounds like fun.

Mad_Cyril

mono-stereo
Was put off by the fact that you can’t record. Also being tied into one particular source for tunes.

Not sure if that’s still the case re: recording.

Other than that looks pretty solid, Denon have just upgraded the whole OS/DB so is miles slicker too in terms of processing

mono-stereo

Mad_Cyril you can’t record? wow that’s shit.

Mad_Cyril

mono-stereo
Couldn’t.

Haven’t checked for over 6 months. Think @NasserAlazzawi uses beatport link??

Mad_Cyril

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

NasserAlazzawi

Mad_Cyril I don’t now. I totally would, I mean I really loved it, but I had rekordbox/laptop failures during performances on some streams where the music would stop because of a bug or cable problem, or moisture / hot air being too much for the macbook.. whatever it was I never regained confidence in this method again so reverted to buying tunes.

You can record the sets by plugging a recorder into the back of your mixer/controller’s Booth Out and route it to field recording devices such as a Tascam DR05, Tascam DR-40 like mine (records crowd noise with inbuilt microphones during club events).

I’d just buy a used one.

Alternatively, if you have another laptop or computer (not the one you DJ from) you can get one of these and route the audio into it, and plug this into that laptop - it will convert the RCA signal to digital audio via USB to the computer for you and you can record via free software such as Audacity.

NasserAlazzawi

(you can justify the expense in this by the sheer saving you get by using link and not buying every tune you like)

strummer

Old-Dutch
Bang on mate.

NasserAlazzawi

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.

Amps

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.

NasserAlazzawi

Amps

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.

NasserAlazzawi

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).

segwin

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.

SM001

DJing sounds like an absolute ball ache.

Amps

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.

SM001

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”?

mono-stereo

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.

NasserAlazzawi

Defo. There’s bags of potential to do this if you are well organised with playlists / crates.

NasserAlazzawi

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.

Amps

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.

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