The Lowdown
My DJ Cloud is a streamlined, slick and automatic way of backing up your music and your DJ data such as loops, cues and playlists to the cloud in the background without you having to worry about it. It works with VirtualDJ, Serato and Rekordbox, and has subscriptions from $8 to $12 a month. For pro DJs for whom having their music collection safely backed up is a big worry, this is a no-brainer.
Video Review
First Impressions / Setting up
Everything about this app is simple and slick, from the website to the download and installation procedure. Once you’ve got it on your computer (Windows and Mac) you just tell it where your music is and what DJ software you use and it just gets on with it in the background, assuming you’ve got an internet connection of course.
The iOS and Android app is the same – install from the app store, log in with the same user name and password, and wait for things to sync – it doesn’t take too long, and helpful messages appear to reassure you about what’s happening.
In Use
The software itself looks similar to any music library software, with all your tracks listed in the main window and a side window that tells you the status of the updates – but you really don’t need to look at this once it’s all installed, as it just happens in the background.
There are however, some thoughtful additions which show that the makers are DJs themselves.
It de-dupes your collection for you if you wish, and it does this by audio fingerprinting the tunes rather than looking for matching metadata – which is cool – because we often end up with versions of songs in our library that might have different titles and artists (but they’re actually the same song).
Read this next: The Playlist Pyramid – How To Build A DJ Music Collection To Be Proud Of
It also respects your use of emojis in crates and playlists – something DJs really love to do and also something you find often doesn’t work on other backup solutions.
But the biggest thing here that shows that it’s DJs that have made this app is that it will not do anything when you’re actually DJing.
This is smart, because when you’re DJing you might be changing your cues and playlists and so on, and also you don’t want anything going on in the background when you’re performing, so the fact that it will automatically pause when you’re DJing and carry on again in the background when you’re not is great.
Phone app
In addition to the desktop software, there is a slick phone app for iOS and Android.
One of the reasons many DJs have persisted with using iTunes to organise their music up until now is that it allows them to use their music away from their DJ software. In other words, if you want to play a tune that’s in your DJ library and you’ve used iTunes to organise your DJ library, you can do that just by clicking play on your phone (as long as you have iTunes set up in that way).
However if you organise your library inside your DJ software, you can’t do this, so you get to this situation where you really want to play a tune on your headphones or to a friend when out and about and you can’t because it’s only in the DJ library on your laptop back at home – kinda frustrating.
Their phone app lets you browse your crates and browse your collection (sorted by artist) and simply play any tune you want.
It doesn’t do very much more, but just to have that on your phone is really cool, and an obvious addition once your music is in the cloud.
(All that said, My DJ Cloud will also back up your iTunes data with one click, so you can continue to use iTunes with this if you wish to. )
Early kinks
There were a few small usability issues. The iOS app crashed a few times when it was syncing initially with my data, although after that it was OK.
Also, the little messages that appear as notifications when you’ve got the app open were a little bit esoteric at times: It told me “Daemon connected” – nope, me neither!
At one point, a red message popped up saying there was an “error in authentication” – I didn’t know what that meant and didn’t know what to do about it, which was a worry.
From then on everything seemed to work though, so I’m guessing these are just little teething things that early versions of any app tends to have, and I’m confident they’ll iron them out soon enough.
Conclusion
This is a laser-focused app aimed at backing up your music collection if you’re a Serato, Rekordbox or VirtualDJ user.
It is not a Swiss Army Knife app like other options out there that are designed to do all kinds of things for you, with backup almost as an afterthought, and it’s not designed to let you DJ with one music collection and database on multiple copies of your DJ software.
It is also not designed to be used alongside other cloud solutions. So for instance, if you’re a Rekordbox user and you subscribe to Rekordbox’s cloud feature, there’s absolutely no reason to use this – Rekordbox cloud does what this does and loads more besides.
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However if what you’re looking for is enterprise-grade, reliable backup, and you know that – even though you could back up using a physical hard drive, or Time Machine, or dragging to a Dropbox – or even using a custom method of doing it on your computer – you often fail to do that regularly enough, this will solve that for you.
Currently My DJ Cloud is the slickest, most reliable and best solution on the market for simply backing up your music and DJ data automatically, with a cool little phone app thrown in as a free bonus. If you’re a pro who knows you don’t back up that often, you’ll see the appeal instantly.
