Groschi

DJ Psychotrance, post: 30736, member: 3792 wrote: Well alot of mobile dj’s cannot beatmatch if their life depended on it, so just running a playlist and walking away suits them as it leaves time to chat on phone and other things, now i can accept this kind of dj’ing if it’s top 40, 60’s, 70’s and 80’s music being played, but when they play EDM music and do not make an attempt to beatmatch then i really do question whether they are a proper dj who can beatmatch and phrasematch. I started off dj’ing as a hobby playing trance, happy hardcore and other EDM genres and learned to beatmatch and phrasematch, then i started doing mobile gigs and when i do my mobile gigs i never move from my laptop and controller as i use traktor and always have to load the next track…..i do my best to mix or blend 60’s, 70’s and any other non EDM music, but when i do play some EDM i sure as hell show off my mixing skills to show my audience that i am a proper dj who can mix tracks and not just do easy things like blending and cutting or even worse using an automated playlist………mobile dj’s who just play a playlist should in my opinion not be paid as much as us dj’s who can mix properly and put on a good show for their customers.
I really don’t care if a dj has spent thousands of pounds on an awesome sound system and light show, if he or she can’t beatmatch and phrasematch then in my eyes they are not a pro dj….letting a laptop play through a playlist is not dj’ing it’s exactly what it is…..PLAYING music from an automated PLAYLIST.

I totally agree with you that putting on a playlist and then walking away, not putting in the slightest effort for the rest of the evening is really bad style and worthy of a jukebox, but not of a DJ.
But i’m always baffled by how much more importance you edm-guys tend to award to beatmatching and how little is talked about a much more important issue, the one that DJing, regardless of the genres you’re spinning, is truly about. Of course you’ve already understood my point: It’s all about the music itself.

Beatmatching is only one of many tools that helps you to program and present your music more effectively and creatively. It’s pretty essential in some genres and ridiculously unimportant or even contraproductive and inappropriate for others.
I can only agree with Frank Broughton and Bill Brewster when they say in their handbook on DJing that beatmatching is a rather boring and dumb (albeit difficult and skillful) procedure to go through and a rather uninteresting topic to talk about, just as if they want to get it out of the way and get to the more fun parts.
And you can be sure: there are many of HipHop-DJs looking down on the EDM-folk just because you don’t scratch like crazy all the time, which is just as stupid as a position.

I always read those post as if some of you make a black-and-white distinction between those who do (beatmatch) and those who don’t. The beatmatching DJ is an anmbassador of the true craft, an honorable fighter for exquisite taste and for the good of the scene. The non-beatmatching “so-called“ DJ is a complete fraud with no passion whatsoever for what he does, and who only wants to rip off people for his worthless services at wedding receptions and other boring events.

But the world is not that black and white. Although i really don’t like the music played on such occasions, the typical wedding DJ has incredible abilities when it comes to animating and entertaining a crowd. They have an exceptional knowledge on all genres of music that ever gained wide popularity and thus could appeal to certain parts of the audience. And they have a great feel for their crowd, their moods and their needs. Because of these skills, 99% of all poeple there won’t give a cr*p about if they can beatmatch or not.

Now let’s take a look at underground culture ok? My point is that it’s a lot bigger than many of you think.
There are venues and events where they play mainly alternative & indie stuff, northern soul, rare grooves, walls of experimental white noise, obscure old garage rock 7”s or even shellac records.
Thing is, the overwhelming majority of these DJs don’t beatmach, but still the audience is smart enough to tell a guy who bought a couple of northen soul compilations and thinks he can pull it off now apart from someone who was breathing these sounds all of his life.
And also the indie crowds tend to be pretty sophisticated and demanding. They can smell from a distance of some kilometres if that guy’s music is his life or if he’s just replicating the billboard alternative charts.

So please, stop worrying so much about beatmatching, guys. People will notice if you’ve got what it takes (and that may or may not include beatmatching) in your particular genre of music anyway. And there’s no need to be afraid of those who don’t, because they won’t take away any of your precious status.

And to get back to the “set up playlist and walk away“- DJs: If people still danced all night like DJ Stone Crazy told us, then they must at least have got something right. If they would consider putting a little more effort into their craft, they still could become DJs worthy of that title.

Terry_42, post: 30675, member: 1843 wrote: Well what I did with a friend who is an audiophile and has this equipment:
Hook up my Digital Out (optical out) from my Computer to his Cambridge Audio DacMagic (yes this is the best DAC in the world).
From there into a Cambridge Audio Azur hooked up to a pair of Linn Akurate.
Test floor was a soundstudio of the ORF (Austrian Television and Radio station) with the listener perfectly in the middle.

Test Audio Files were 1x Apple Lossless Codec and 1x 256k AAC (to simulate iTunes).
Tested were: 1x Symhonie Fantastique by Berlioz performed by the London Symphonic Orchestra – taken from Japanese CD Version (as the Japanese CDs have the best quality audio).
1x Keith Jarret Tokio Live Concert (again Japanese Version)
1x Theme from Star Wars – Soundtrack CD – Japanese Version

Testers did not know what file was playing, file was switched (perfectly synced) every 15 seconds or 30 seconds.
4 Testers: 1 Audiohile, 2 fellow DJs and 1 studio technician.

None of the testers were able to distinguish the difference with 100% accuracy. The Audiophile Tester with the Berlioz track was the only one to get slightly better than “statistic guessing”. All others were within statistical margins aka did not know what was playing.

Now that is an interesting one. 🙂
So one tester was actually able to be significantly better than 50% right? (around 50% would mean pure guessing.)
How many times did you repeat the test? The more often you repeated it, the more meaningful we can consider the result.
Was the lossless source file in CD-Quality (44kHz, 16bit) or in higher resolution? And was the AAC file converted directly from the lossless one? If the source was a 24-bit file, could it be the software converted it back to 16 bit in the AAC conversion process (dithering etc. can also make a difference)? Have you taken care of the volume levels?
I’m not trying to nag about it, just trying to rule out anything that could have spoiled the result.
Also, in the end we have to remember that this is (like every blind test) only a comparison of a particular encoder of a particular audio standard with particular settings on a particular music sample. It could be better or worse if we change any of those variables.
If anyone wants to do any further testing, i still recommend doing it with foobar2000 because, as Mr. Andrews already pointed out in the interview, it’s known not to tinker with the audio unless you tell it to do so, and the semi-automation of the ABX-Plugin reduces some of the possibilities of human error that can occur when conducting a blind listening test.

rfb, post: 30584, member: 2662 wrote: scientifically conducted double-blind testing has shown time and time again that even self-proclaimed “audiophiles” can NOT consistently pick the higher quality file out of the two files played to them. A lot of that actually has to do with bias and the Placebo effect.

I’m not saying we should play 128 mp3s, but there’s definitely some diminishing marginal utility going on, especially when talking about file formats and lossy vs lossless.

But it’s not just in the world of DJing that some “experts” (no disrespect to Mr Andrews) need to make up a problem first to justify their own existence.

Thank you for bringing that up. I’d really love to see a bit more of a scientific approach brought into the discussion about sound quality, and blind listening tests are the only way to achieve this. Also, they’re really easy to do, try out this foobar2000-plugin for example.

But it has to be said that some things have yet to be confirmed (or refuted). And that is if lossy audio compression has noticeable effects on the overall sound quality after the heavy processing (eq, filters, timestretch etc.) done by the DJ software.

This could be done in a blind listening test somewhat like this:

• Take a genuine lossless file and convert it to the lossy format of your choice.
• Play out and record the lossy as well as the lossless file through your DJ software with identical settings (for ex. high eq at 2 o’clock, -4% pitch, etc.), don’t touch anything on your controller before you’re done playing and recording both of them.
• Make sure you cut both recordings to exactly the same start- and end-positions (at best try to be accurate to a single sample), because the slightest delay in one of them could screw up the listening test.
• Also make sure both tracks are played back at exactly the same overall volume (foobar and its replaygain-option can do this for you).
• Now you can load both tracks into foobar and do the listening test with the plugin mentioned above.

I’d really love to see some tests done on it, but i guess just like with plain high bitrate lossy files people won’t notice any difference. You can always prove me wrong, but as long people haven’t tried it out for themselves, i won’t listen to their unscientific (be they positive or negative) claims about lossless lossy audio.

Dj Neonglass (NL), post: 30586, member: 1183 wrote:

Such embarrasing situation i had in the early ’80’s when i was playing in a Club (was mixing with vinyl).
I was making an very good transition in my set, in time with perfect alined beats.
Was very enthousiasic swinging on the vibe in the Dj booth and i accidently bumped one of the 2 turntables.
Result; my transition was trainwrecked and also the vinyl that was playing out on that turntable ,
had a big scratch on its surface. So it was not suiteble to play out anymore. Me and the other members of the Dj team & the audience could have a big laugh about that.

When you have gigs where you have to bring all your own equipement with you. (mobile disco)
Be prepared for the worst…….

One time on such mobile disco gig (with a Dj Team) our DIY build mainamplifier was not functioning anymore, in the middle of this gig. Al the sound was stopped. A very stressfull & embarrasing situation, but we had brought a spare amplifier with us, so we could solve this in a few minutes. This situation occured also a long time after that on a other gig. This was caused by the lightorgan wired to one channel of the speaker output of our amplifier. We learned from that event, and made some adjustments on our DIY build lichtorgan to build an little amplifier in it, so the sound output runs from the rec output of the analog mixer.

So be prepared for almost everything, take all kinds of audiocables, a flashlight, and some small handtools, ducktape etc. with you.

Love to hear those stories from of the dark ages. In the early eighties i was still pooping my diapers, but i remember stuff i’d seen two or three years later on public fairs in the village i grew up in. It seemed very common for mobile dj businesses to play out on home-built gear back then. I remember big wooden consoles (up to 2 metres wide) with mixers and turntables built in. Don’t ask me how they’d manage to move that (by today’s standards) unnecessarily heavy stuff every weekend.

I’ve purchased from Amazon, emusic, CDBaby, Bandcamp and several label’s own download shops so far. Almost all shops except Bandcamp (where you are allowed to choose your preferred format) have settled for lame encoded mp3s with the highest vbr setting (–V0) which results in a typical average bitrate between 200-300 kbps. Should be transparent even for the most sensitive listeners.
I’ve heard some horror stories about older releases on emusic being transcoded from lossy files though. Don’t know if they have fixed that issue by now.

Terry_42, post: 30256, member: 1843 wrote: Nice to play around and you can easily learn to DJ on it, but I think it is far from usable in a live environment.

I join in with DJ Quantum: What brings you to this conclusion? Had any bad experiences with it?

I’ve never used anything else since version 1.5.x and it’s always been running ultra-stable on my linux machine.
It sure lacks some advanced features and as far as i’ve heard the beat/tempo detection (which i have no use for as a rock dj anyway) isn’t the most reliable yet. The latter issue will improve drastically with the next major release, and for the time being they added a tool to manually adjust the beadgrids as a workaround.
Also, Mixxx in its current state is definitley not the tool of choice for the fans of beatjuggling and advanced button-acrobatics, but with its perfectly useable basic feature set it ticks all the necessary boxes for the more oldschool djs who just want to play great music to their audience.
You shoudn’t be afraid of maybe editing some configuration files though and it doesn’t wipe your ass for you in some situations, for example when updating to a newer version (you better backup your configuration and database files etc.). I never found this to be much of an obstacle but it might scare away some apple-spoiled beginners who never were confronted with the inner workings of their system (“What the hell is a file system? I just drag that stuff into iTunes and it does everything for me…”).

*edit*
I forgot to mention the biggest faux pas of the software: It lacks proper effects, especially a filter. Instead there’s only some flanger stuff that no one has any real use for. I personally don’t need effects, but again, if you need ’em then stay away from mixxx.
Afaik, theres a LADSPA plugin architecture in the works (LADSPA is kind of the VST-equivalent of the open source world), that should make it easy to implement existing effects libraries in the future.

Build a time machine, travel back several weeks, backup your data.
Yeah, that might sound a bit cynical, but everyone should take this as a cautionary tale. [COLOR=#808080]Backup your data, folks. Do it frequently. [/COLOR]
[COLOR=#000000]Because mistakes like this can happen to everyone. Also, your hard drive will crash one day. And if you don’t have a backup copy somewhere, you’re kinda screwed.[/COLOR]