Okay, so I was at a very small festival (not electronic) where I was in charge of the sound system. Mostly bands, trios with acoustic guitars, banjos, balafons, voices, etc. There was also a DJ. Again, not electronic overall, he was playing stuff for people in their 40s, standard 80s hits, that kind of stuff. The sound was absolutely awful (even painful), which came as a surprise because my sound system never sounded bad, . I talked to him and learned he was using Youtube rips… the very bad kind, where the sound has been through multiple stages of transcoding. What a tosser. Unless you want to play very obscure or incredibly rare stuff, what’s the excuse for that ? If you want to play ah-a’s “take on me” why don’t you buy one of the millions 80s compilations that litter every pawn shops ? If not out of respect for the artists, do it for the ears of your audience. And the lame excuse:
But I have like 12000 tracks here, I can’t afford them all
Why do you have 12000 tracks when you play the 80’s top 100 ???
The worst type of dj, absolute shits upon what any decent dj does. Probably got him cheap but you get what you pay for. DJing with YouTube rips is like serving microwaved food in a restaurant, out of date and dipped in piss then microwaved for 40 minutes and served on a plate of tears
Well, it’s not like we did not have the tools to properly steal good quality files these days. He’s a bad dj AND a bad pirate, he really has no excuses
I run a low-power FM station here in town and one of our DJs uses shitty YouTube rips for his live sets and pre-programmed hours. It sounds horrible even to my weathered ears. I’ve called him out on it but evidently I’m the only one who’s ever noticed and/or commented on it
I run an AV rental business. So many times I’ve urged amateur performers (dancers etc) to get proper sources. That many times they ignored it then realized at show time, when they hear it on a big PA, that they should have done so.
I made the mistake of playing SunnO))) from an mp3 - possibly vbr - over a Funktion 1 PA. I was mortified and have tried to avoid doing anything as horrible as that ever again.
Oh man… we don’t even have a big system (2x 18" subs + 2x 15" tops) and it was already a nightmare. I can’t imagine people playing YT rips on a line array system. I’m sure this happens more often than we imagine.
Club I used to play had a function 1 and the guy that ran it would be straight over asking if it was mp3 and what bit rate if you played something that sounded bad. Rightly so, cost a lot for that system and they had a guy fly in from function 1 to set it all up for the room it was in
I’ve not played out on a big system in ages. I don’t trust my ears after 20 years of raving and some tinnitus. Still a bedroom DJ. My music stash is a mix of wavs and 320s. Some of the 320s are joint, some “full” stereo.
Should I be worried?
(I have played out at a tiny handful of clubs over the past 3-4 years, but as it was Burner events and I was also usually partying or organising something as well, and the venue ran the sound desks + gear, I didn’t spare the time to worry about it…)
