The Null Device blog: DJ set

Last night's DJ set went quite well. This time, rather than using 2 CD players, I used one CD player and my Archos Jukebox, which worked quite well (though required a bit of thought to make sure that I have the next track in the appropriate format). If I had the money, I'd be tempted to buy another hard-disk-based MP3 player, synchronise the contents of both units and use them instead of actual CDs. (I heard some guy in New York or San Francisco or somewhere does something like that with iPods.)

The bands were also quite good; Smock are a quite promising mix of glitchy electronics, female vocals and shoegazer guitarwork. And Seedy Reed was just odd.

There are 3 comments on "DJ set":

Posted by: gjw http://the-fix.org Sun Apr 6 06:47:34 2003

Really, why not just dump a whole pile of files on a laptop and mix between them in one of the dozens of appropriate pieces of software? Or is a real mixer with physical sliders the only piece of equipment that defines one as a DJ these days?

Posted by: acb http://dev.null.org Sun Apr 6 07:14:14 2003

(a) My laptop is a Pentium 133; hardly powerful enough for that sort of thing.

(b) It's the interface. Typing on a QWERTY and sliding a mouse around is a lot more fiddly than moving physical sliders. Which means that either (a) it makes things harder, or (b) you get software which does it all for you and just select the next track from a menu. And clicking menus on a laptop doesn't have the same sort of studly babe-magnet potential that operating a mixer does.

Posted by: gjw http://the-fix.org Sun Apr 6 23:49:25 2003

True, true. Maybe if you link a MIDI slider-controller to the crossfade on the software, for another layer of cool complexity...