Streaming is here, and almost certainly here to stay. And depending on your chosen product path, you have just about every streaming platform available in one form or other. It’s usually via laptops, tablets, or phones, but as Denon DJ has shown with the release of the Prime 4 v1.4 public beta firmware update bringing Tidal streaming, it can be entirely standalone too.
Access to the majority of music ever made is as easy as entering your account details into a screen, and then you have the entire libraries of the assorted streaming services at your fingertips. Technology has brought us to the point where there will be little excuse for even the most obscure of niche tracks to be played within moments.
BUT WHAT IF?
A month or so ago, we were discussing this progression of streaming in the DJWORX Slack channel, when Jared dropped this into the conversation:
And four weeks later, I’m still pondering the reasons why this can’t happen. If you can log into Tidal on the Prime 4, then why not Dropbox, iCloud, or your own web server? Why can’t we have access to our entire library from anywhere in the world?
DJs have sort of been doing this for a long time via services like Dropbox, where files can be dragged and dropped into playlists in laptops. But this isn’t quite so easy on mobile devices and the emerging wave of Denon DJ standalone.
Extending this a little further, why couldn’t you as an artist set up a server and allow users to subscribe to your super exclusive tracks and remixes? This would allow artists to get paid directly rather than the micro-pennies that the streaming services pay out.
NEEDS WORK
Obviously, this is isn’t a fully thought out idea, and there’s a lot of detail to fill in. So I’m keen to hear from people more in the know about such things about barriers to making this work.
At a base level, logging on to a server and having access to audio files should allow you analyse the files and store the analysis data locally, which is how existing streaming works. The step beyond would be recognising the type of library and loading in waveforms, hot cues, and loops — perhaps pushing your whole library or just some crates/playlists to the cloud, maybe as a background task that does it over time.
But wouldn’t it be nice to see a list of webservers in your library along existing streaming services? Perhaps this could be your own stash available wherever you are in the world, or your favourite artist’s super exclusives that you’ve paid good money to access.
So… if we can stream from Spotify, Tidal, Soundcloud etc, why not from our own cloud files? Over to you.
In a perfect world all the metadata (waveforms, keys, BPMs, playlists, points) would be stored using an open format, so you could stream your files from https://cloud.dj (TM)(C)(R) to your hard- or software regardless of the manufacturer.
I for one would welcome streaming my own files from a cloud drive over some streaming service such as Spotify or Tidal. I’m very fussy about the quality of my [lossless] files and I’m very particular where they came from. For this reason I’ve stopped buying from Beatport completely and favor Bandcamp whenever possible. Beatport tracks have proven time and time again to be poor quality despite the declared bitrate.
Having just some version from some source is not enough when one is fussy. It has to be that certain version of a track.
Hey Mark! We’re working on this exact idea. Using Dropbox/Google Drive to store all your tracks, and then a cloud database to sync your playlists/trackst/hot cues/loops/beatgrids across all your devices.
Here’s my video response to this awesome article…
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=58MCkII26TE
your upload speed should be very fast so when you access you music files so it wont be long to load.
this can be possible if all major dj softwares will have a feature that you can put your own server address at home to their software and login to access your own music files. note: you have to know how to setup server of your own.
Why not take an step further and just set some kind of decentralized p2p system to share music… oh wait!
iCloud Music Library is doing this. Well, almost, because you need to manually download your tracks or entire playlists/albums in the Apple Music app. And then you can use your favorite iOS DJ app. :-)
Edit: yes, this is one user or one family only.
Offtopic: Why is DPP FB down?
What is DPP FB?
DJ Player Pro FaceBook page. It’s gone for quite some time.
Exactly. It’s what I’ve been doing for years now. All my 27k songs available “over the air”. I would say downloading the songs before you play them is something you want to do either way. I would never want to risk a network/audio hickup during actual playback..
I get the idea of having access to some exclusive servers that you’ve subscribed to, but why would you bother streaming your own entire collection when you can have a copy of it on a local drive connected to your laptop?
Even large capacity (4tb) USB powered drives are relatively cheap now. ….why would you mess about setting all this up?
Just because you can doesn’t mean you should!
I often play with a friend and it would be nice if we could share the library. I’d sync it to local when performing as not to rely on a stable internet connection.
It could be a backup in an emergency, but in most cases, yeah I agree. Why introduce the unreliable complexity of networking when you could have it all on local hardware?
I’ve got all my digitized music backed up to the cloud (along with other important stuff) so I could do this if I needed to. My phone can’t hold my entire library but I can browse my cloud storage from an app, so I can play or download anything I have “clouded”.
As Ian said though, I’d much rather have everything local, and I’ve never streamed anything at a gig (most sites T&Cs say you’re not permitted to do that anyway). If I need a track that badly I’d rather buy it than stream it.
It’s exactly what I’m using and advocating for a long time.
Store your tracks on a FileServer(NAS) and like @disqus_Pp9mHd2j2i said, use a VPN to access it et voila.
I got access to all my tracks no matter where I’m given a fast enough internet connection is available.
This works fine for:
iTunes
Traktor
Serato
djay Pro 2
Rekordbox
This doesn’t work with stand alone units like CDJ’s. However if it is Denon Prime hardware there is solutions for that. Engine Prime doesn’t allow tracks stored on anything else but a physically connected drive. But using my own tools I have my complete Traktor collection available to each of my SC5000 players (works with any other Prime hardware like the Prime 4 as well). This exact workflow can be easily adopted for Rekordbox, Serato or iTunes users as well.
Here is my complete workflow recorded and explained:
https://youtu.be/UWTYBobq3WU
This isn’t too different an idea from the FTP sites people used to set up to share DJ mixes or ripped CDs back before streaming and Dropbox. Everyone who had the link could download, and the best links got shared a lot. – Soba
Even on the same network, my friend’s NAS-stored files run terribly with Traktor. It’s just very unreliable. Even Spotify takes liberties with bitrate to keep things smooth.
My Traktor took close to forever to fully start up. My tracks are indeed stored on a fileserver (see my other comment). The Traktor collection files are all stored local (and synced using Carbon Copy Cloner).
I’ve found a way to circumvent this (rather big!) startup delay:
If the fileserver containing the track’s media files is NOT mounted, Traktor will start up in just a few seconds. The moment Traktor has been fully loaded I mount the server (otherwise the tracks would be missing). And everything remains snappy and without issues.
This exact same issue plagues users who have their tracks stored on external (non SSD) drives.
This “bug” seems to have gotten worst with the release of Traktor 3.2. I’ve reported it to the Native Instruments’s Traktor engineering team, but given the state of flux they are in I’m not sure how it will be processed.
Mmmm, create a VPN connection to your home network or NAS. Map the remote map to a drive and ….. or not? ;-) My VPN server is out of service due to a lightning strike but maybe someone can test the above? Lots of NAS devices can run apps like a VPN server …. and some home routers also have the VPN functionality …. testing time ;-)
It’s what I commented as soon as they released the Tidal streaming on the Denon Forum:
” Things I’ve noticed:
This is more a want than an issue: you can ONLY connect to Tidal, for ex…you can’t connect to a Networked Nas or your own wireless drive. I don’t use streaming services, so I thought maybe the songs would show the BPM’s on the site or when searching for a song or through playlists. It only shows the BPM after being analyzed on the unit. Seems this would only be useful for me in emergencies when I needed to just play a random song. I’m not sure if it’s just Tidal or other sites like BeatPort have all the info displayed already.
……………Overall, a great update but hopefully they will let you connect to your own data wirelessly in the future, for example DropBox or NAS. This would benefit me the most VS forcing a subscription to a service I may never use, as I’m already in a record pool.”
Why Stream instead of having locally? Answer: Because sometimes you want to carry your best most played tunes but IF you want to stream anything, you want to go to your own curated standby’s as opposed to non analyzed or unknown quality songs.
I was thinking about this one day how it would be cool if Plex Media Server would work if it was integrated with DJ software
This is how I synchronize and backup my whole Traktor music and configuration across laptops and a NAS, for free
https://github.com/pestrela/music/tree/master/traktor#how-i-synchronize-and-backup-my-whole-traktor-music-and-configuration-across-laptops-and-a-nas