Hey guys,
I’m DJing for some 25 years now, and have been lucky enough to enjoy a few years of DJing with vinyl and CDs. While that was heavy lifting to and from the gig, it had one advantage: it worked. You showed up with your records, and if the CD player was Denon, Pioneer, Numark, JBSystems, Gemini, or whatever, it would do the job more or less. And if you even looked funny at the cabling behind the mixer, technicians would be angry at you. But since I have been DJing digital all I have been hearing: this works with that, that doesn’t works with this. You have to crate a custom mapping. That isn’t supported. And it became standard practice to connect gear to a live mixer…
Now, I’m extremely gassing over the SC6000: nice features player-wise, but also a big ass screen to scroll through your tracks. Hooray, one can leave the laptop behind one would think, gone are then days of hassling with cables in the booth during a gig… But then I just get more of this bull: a Denon stick won’t work with Pioneer, Traktor doesn’t support it, blah blah blah. Which leads me back to: if you want to use anything other than Pioneer, bring it yourself. If you don’t want to do that, use Pioneer.
And you know what’s funny? Everyone is looking at converters, ans eagerly expecting HID support and so on. But not one single time I have heard something about standards!
We have a serious lack of standards with digital DJing. Can you imagine this with CDs? Suppose I got to the gig: “oh no, Pioneer, my CDs arent compatible, they only work in Denon (which was top of the line back then, before Pioneer DJ even existed). Oh no, I can’t play tonight…”. No. Magically all CDs worked with all CD players. All USB pheripals work with all laptops. That’s not magic, it’s some hard work from manufacterers who realized they had to co-operate to achieve anything. And this isn’t happening in DJ-land. Otherwise we would long have a unified database format?
And yes, one could argue that Pioneer won’t open up for obvious reasons. But hey, the only reason they could make it this far is because the open standard which is “CD”. If all brands would have had proprietary formats Pioneer would not be as big as they are today, Denon has long been the top dog in the age of twin 19" CD players. And then Pioneer got the luck to be top dog when digital revolution struck and now is being cocky about it… It seems to me when Denon starts to talk with other brands they can still overcome this…
my 2 cents…