A new service called My DJ Cloud has just launched, promising fast, effortless and automatic music library backup for professional DJs who use Serato, Rekordbox or VirtualDJ.
The service aims primarily to do one thing, and do it well: Back up your DJ music itself, and in addition, all tags, cues, loops, crates, playlists, updates and file edits.
It is designed to make this all effortless for you, by automatically handling everything in the background, once you’ve told it where you keep your music and what DJ software you use (it also supports iTunes/Music for DJs who still organise their music that way).
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It is smart enough to know when you’re actually DJing, and so as not to affect your laptop, it won’t make any changes at that time.
It has a clever “duplicate detection” algorithm built in that works off audio fingerprinting not metadata, which fixes a common DJ problem (who hasn’t realised they’ve got multiple copies of the same song by mistake in their collections)?
Importantly, it has a mobile app so you can access and play your DJ music on your mobile – which could just be its killer feature that’ll tip people into signing up.
And finally in a small but nice touch, it also has emoji support, to enable DJs who use emojis in their crate or playlist names to have them respected.
• You can find out more about My DJ Cloud and sign up for $8/month for 200GB, and $12/month for 2TB of storage, with the first month free. More information on the My DJ Cloud website.
First Thoughts
We have had a chat with the makers of this software to figure out the pros and cons, and here are a few thoughts:
- It is trying to do one thing, and one thing well – There are lots of helper apps for DJs out there, that let you back up your music, move it between platforms, put it in the cloud and so on. This one is different because it simply keeps a secure copy of your music in the cloud – nothing else except a useful app to play that music from your phone, which is nice! But basically, you set it and forget it
- It is primarily about keeping your music safe and secure – Most of the development work has gone into the bulletproof online backup solution (it uses Microsoft Azure), and the developers refer to it as an “insurance policy for your music”. If backup is what really keeps you awake at night, they’ve already done it better than anyone else
- It is NOT about using your library for actually DJing on more than one computer – In other words, it is not the missing “cloud library” for Serato, letting you use it on multiple laptops – that’s not the idea! The only DJ software with an official cloud library solution is Rekordbox, and if you’re using Rekordbox’s cloud library solution, you wouldn’t use this too – but if you’re not, this has the backup part of their solution covered
- It is not a replacement for a basic level of organisation – Yes, it’ll smartly keep your library backed up for you, and let you hear it on your phone, and even help you remove duplicates – which is great. But if you aren’t at least organised enough to keep your DJ music all in one folder, it can’t help you! Once you are though, it can do the rest silently in the background for you
- It could be your cue to ditch iTunes, finally – We humbly believe Apple’s iTunes/Music app is not fit for purpose for DJs any more as a music library tool. One big advantage of using it in the past was that you could set it up so your music was also available to you on your phone, which of course if you use your DJ software to organise your tunes, is hard to do. This solution solves that, meaning you can take a big chunk of the complexity out of how you organise your DJ music by ditching that app entirely
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But why not just back up to an external drive, Dropbox etc?
You can, and indeed, probably should (at least a hard drive copy of everything, stuck in a wardrobe). But who does? The idea here is to provide robust, reliable, automatic backup that just happens while you’re getting on with everything else.
When we spoke to the developers, they were keen to stress that while they are DJs, and they love the idea of adding new features as they go along (for instance, the de-duping and emoji support came from DJ feedback), backup is their primary aim here, which is why enterprise-grade tech has been used to make the backup rock solid.
Ultimately, this is meant to be an effortless backup solution for pro DJs for whom the price is worth it for complete peace of mind, and who are not swayed by either the “one tool for it all” nature of other DJ helper apps, or the all-in approach of Rekordbox’s official backup and cloud solution.
Phil Morse
