DJs playing on Pioneer DJ CDJ-3000s can now access their Beatport accounts directly from the units, allowing them to browse and play tracks from the full Beatport Streaming catalogue, with “StreamingDirectPlay”, announced today.
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DJs simply have to log in to their existing Beatport account from any CDJ-3000 to enable playing from their Beatport playlists and the full Beatport catalogue on all devices connected via Pro DJ Link – the standard way such club units are configured in the pro DJ booth.
Watch the demo
Here’s our live demo of the new StreamingDirectPlay feature on the Pioneer DJ CDJ-3000 players, plus a full guide to DJing with it and special Q&A session.
When loading a track, the CDJ-3000 automatically analyses its beatgrid so the DJ can easily understand its progression via the waveform display, and to enable the use of features such as quantize and beat sync for accurate beatmixing.
Mixers that support Touch Preview in the Pro DJ Link network, such as the DJM-A9, DJM-V10, or DJM-900NXS2, also allow listening to Beatport Streaming tracks before even loading them to the players, making track selection even more convenient.
First Thoughts
Pioneer DJ’s CDJ-3000 players broke fundamentally from the internals of the previous CDJ-2000NXS2 players in that they have more modern and powerful architecture – “computers inside”, basically. This means it is far easier for Pioneer DJ to issue far-reaching firmware updates, just like this one.
Beatport is an obvious first choice for a streaming service in this upgrade, but we expect to see other streaming services added now that the technology is in place (Pioneer DJ’s Rekordbox software offers Beatport, Beatsource, SoundCloud and Tidal streaming, for instance).
We also expect Pioneer DJ to add similar functionality to the Opus Quad standalone all-in-one DJ system, as that too features the same technology as the CDJ-3000s.
This technology requires stable in-booth internet of course, but as Ethernet (ie Pro DJ Link) is part of the set-up of pro CDJs and DJM mixers anyway, once internet is in place, it is a single cable to get a DJ system online. It’s our view that stable, venue-provided internet in DJ booths is a when, not an if, and so streaming from the club – whether your own music (CloudDirectPlay) or Beatport and other streaming services (StreamingDirectPlay) will become widespread, even the norm, one day.
As far as audio quality goes, audio performance varies depending on the Beatport Streaming subscription plan: the Professional plan has 256kbps AACs, while the Advanced plan has just 128kbps AACs. So for pro use, the Professional plan is advisable (256kbps AACs are equivalent to 320kbps MP3s, which are fine for DJing with in our view).
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It’s instructive to note that Pioneer DJ has made a point of saying how easy it is to switch between streaming your own music from the cloud and Beatport’s – this is clearly a workflow they see as the future.
Links
- More info on StreamingDirectPlay from the Pioneer DJ website
- More on Beatport Streaming here
- This feature requires v3 of the CDJ-3000 firmware, available here
Phil Morse
