The Rise of the Streaming DJ

By SoundCtrl

During this year’s annual four-day MIDEM festival in Cannes, Music Hack Day featured an innovative engineer named Yuli Levtov, who discovered a way to DJ with Spotify streams. The Spotify-enabled app has been a fantasized technology for the last few years, mainly as a result of diffiicult licensing structures and logistics for app developers.

On the blog for Reactify Music, a music app development company, Levtov spilled about the process, introducing his revelation as ”by far the most involved, impractical and ‘hackiest’ hack” he’s ever done. Calling it DJ Spotify, its structure is two-fold.  DJ Spotify enables simultaneous playback of two Spotify streams, with DJ controls including pitch/tempo adjust, as well as the integration of EchoNest, which gathers key and BPM information from streaming tracks. DJ Spotify is a rather complicated hack, with connections between Ableton, Max for Live, a Wi-Fi iPad connection, Pure Data patches, Python coding and more.  You can check out the hack and the key/BPM app here.

But on the heels of Levtov’s impressive hack, a new app released a few days later consolidated his ideas into a slightly more appealing interface for the massive new wave of portable DJs. Pacemaker is a new iPad app with the first, official licensing from Spotify for integration in a DJing platform. The interface of Pacemaker is quite design-oriented, with simple electric blue and red waveform bars and cue points split down the two touch screen “decks.” Tempo and nudge functions are dedicated to beatmatching two tracks, and beat skip functions allow you to chop the record up in creative ways.

 

Tracks can be loaded from Spotify or local files, and mixes are recordable and savable within the app. Pacemaker’s sync function works relatively well, but you may have to jog the nudge wheel if it syncs on the off-beat transient.  EQ controls are reconfigured in the app’s signature wheel pattern, but aren’t quite intuitive if you have never DJ’ed before. Unfortunately, there are no volume faders that allow you to EQ and volume adjust simultaneously, but there is a crossfader for blending. Additional effects are available as in-app purchases, allowing the user to customize their iPad DJ “rig” but the lack of standardization here doesn’t show an incredible promise for getting this app into clubs. Since Traktor has integration for its own computer software with CDJ functionality, and a number of other apps offer effects controls independent of the software, Pacemaker certainly has competition in the pro market. But this app focuses on a home user experience, and it’s not a bad way to preview a mix on the fly or curate your own parties, listening sessions, and podcasts.

 

While many traditional DJs are contemptuous and apathetic toward this new type of technology due to a lack of mixing skills and faulty execution, the real problem with new streaming DJ tools is that the sound quality is sacrificed for efficiency and portability. Spotify’s highest streaming rate is 320 kbps, and as any trained listener knows, the highest quality mp3 still sounds much weaker on a club-quality sound system compared to WAV files and vinyl records. Unfortunately, this means a rise in DJs ignoring poor sound quality in exchange for track availability and cutting costs in preparation for sets. Since electronic music is often showcasing a producer’s ability to create highly specific and idealized sound environments and experiences, a poor mix with poor sound quality is essentially the antithesis of the art at hand.

However, streaming has made its way to the pro decks, especially since the newer Pioneer CDJs can play source files over Wi-Fi. As streaming quality improves and wireless connections can handle more bandwidth, cloud-based DJing will definitely take off on the professional level. But at the end of the day (or early in the morning) if your offline playlists aren’t synced and you’ve got no internet connection at a peak-time basement party, you may be relinquishing your DJ duties at the next party if you make it out of the club alive.

At any rate, the Pacemaker app is highly recommended for those with Spotify premium accounts, and you can grab it on the iTunes app store.

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