I’m just starting out DJing and I’m running into problems, but don’t have a DJ mentor to show me the ropes. I’m using DJay Pro Ai with Tidal. So far every event venue has had wifi, and everything worked out perfectly. Then I started to run into issues with the venue’s wifi not being strong enough, so I added a high speed hotspot to my phone, and that worked out great. Now I’m playing at a venue way out in the boonies. They have wifi in their home, but I’ll be playing out in their building in the back. Not sure how well my hotspot will work, so I’m looking for a Plan B and a Plan C. Apparently, you can’t download Tidal to your computer and play it offline through DJay Pro either. What do y’all do when a venue doesn’t have internet? This is so frustrating. Thanks for your help!
I can think of a have a few options:
- Purchase enough songs and store them on your device so you don’t have to rely on Tidal and an internet connection for this gig. If you’re playing a 2 hour set, I recommend you have at least 4 hours worth of music.
- Sign up for a free 30 day trial of Beatport Link Professional or Beatsource Link Professional. These streaming services offer an offline locker of 1,000 songs so you don’t need Wifi.
- Run a long network cable from the house to the back building and hardwire to your device.
- Bring a Wifi booster to try to extend the signal range from the house to the back building.
I used to use Tidal and as my main source of music for gigs, but always made sure I had plenty of tracks physically stored on my device. Then I played a few gigs on a yacht with no wifi and spotty cell service. That’s when I switched to Beatport Link. It’s expensive compared to Tidal, but the offline locker is tough to beat.
Thank you so much! I will definitely sign up for the free trial before this gig. I like the idea of the long hard wired cable. A YACHT gig?! Nice! Bustin’ out the Yacht Rock. hahaha! Appreciate your help. Jaime
You’re welcome Jaime. Hope that helps!
Just get your own private wi-fi hot spot, don’t use your phone as phone modems aren’t meant for streaming 24/7.
Just buy a decent 4G/5G wi-fi router, get your own good enough internet connection for it and set it up for your usage only.
It’s gonna be mess with open wi-fi when whole crowd is connecting into it as the wi-fi is shared between users. Even if the wi-fi owner set it up so that you have your own channel… It doesn’t matter if they have <100 Mb connection to internet because that 100 Mb connection is used by everyone connected into it.
As SlakJaw has already stated, you should start slowly building up your own personal library and not rely on streaming services,
Although they are very good and serve a purpose, there is no way I would ever rely on them as my only source of music…
I’ve been djaying it since ‘84 and built up a huge vinyl collection but skipped the CD stage and went straight to digital music… I have two iPads that I bring to each venue as a backup plan…
Spotify was the best streaming service in my opinion but after they stopped supporting dj streaming platforms, that was enough to convince me that owning my music was the way to go,
I still have a Tidal account for the emergency request scenarios though and have hot spotted through my phone with no problems at all…
Hi everyone,
Thanks for giving @JaimeSummers some great tips as to how best solve their predicament!
If anyone else in the community has any additional feedback feel free to share it.
Thanks again all!
Thank you so much for your feedback. Guess I have to spend money to make money. Do you just purchase your music through itunes then download to your computer, ipad, phone? or do you purchase then transfer to external hard drive or flash drive?
It depends what style of music you play, ITunes, Beatsource,Traxsource, Juno are among a few, Don’t be tempted to rip tracks from YouTube and convert them as the quality is crap…
If you do a bit of searching there are “file sharing” sites where you can download music for free, but always download at 320kbps for MP3s…
At least buying tracks these days is sooo much cheaper than buying Vinyl!
99% of the time I download them to my laptop and transfer them via iTunes, although my laptop is getting old and slow and this process is slow at least for me…
You can download them straight to your iPad (not sure if that’s what you are using though) and put them in a My Files folder
If you want to get a bigger amount of music, it might make sense to sign up to a record pool. We have recently exchanged opinions on record pools over here: Dj pools you guys use.
Yes that’s another option as well.
PLAY MUSIC. DON’T PLAY YOURSELF.
I’m a dj using your setup.
Been in entertainment for about 15 years now
Please just buy 150 songs
Its not worth the risk of music stopping in the middle of a loaded dancefloor
Love Tidal for requests
You just have to be super exact on the name you search because Tidal search isn’t as intuitive as Spotify (yes I used to DJ from Spotify before they banned it)
150 track might be ok if you’re doing specific type of music and a small set…
Typically you would play approx. 20 tracks per hour,
4 hr set would make that 80.
If you are a multi genre dj then 150 isn’t going to cut it…
I personally have around the 2000 mark and that works fine for me as I dj over a few different genre’s,
I never can understand dj’s that have 10,000 tracks, I mean how would you remember what you have, I struggle at times remembering my music and to be honest it’s only the recent/EDM style of music which I don’t remember every track…
I have one of these. My phone as a hotspot is fast enough for music streaming. Everywhere I’ve played so far has Wifi and it has worked great. But i had the phone and hotspot as double redundancy.
Can you stop by the venue before the big night to test the signal?
People like to say NEVER use streaming at a paying gig, but keep in mind USB keys fail too. And as i mentioned above i generally have two backup streaming options available.
I was able to pretest it before my last gig and it worked great. I’m going over to the venue of my next gig next week to check it out. This one may be a little trickier as I’m playing out back in their outside building. I’ll test the speed of my hotspot and I have a wifi extender/travel router with a long ethernet cable if I need to hard wire it and I also will sign up for a DJ pool so I can download some music to my computer. I’m thinking about Xmix, but really most of the people I play for just want to dance to songs they used to hear on the radio, not the old songs remixed into dance music. Not sure which service would be best for that.
There are a lot of DJ pulls out there. I would start with some of the popular ones like heavyhits.com, bpm supreme, and crate, connect to name a few.
Personally, I would never rely on streaming services alone.
I just subscribed for a free trial to Beatsource. Checking out Xmix too. I’ll check out heavyhits. thank you!
Well, I signed up for both Beatsource and Xmix, and realized many of these songs are not conducive to what most of my audiences want. I’m playing at parties, restaurants, and social events. (No clubs). 40-70 year olds. They don’t want club music. They want the songs they grew up on. I went over client’s playlist and neither of these platforms had all the songs the client wanted; and if they did, it was not the version that I needed. I’ll look at other DJ pools. Thank y’all so much, I’m learning a lot from your answers.
Great that you find it helpful! And yeah, trying out a few pools is part of the process, plus realizing that all of them have a limited selection, meaning there is no platform that has everything you need. If you play a lot of older music, BPM Supreme might have a bit more of what you’re looking for. DJ Carlo Atendido often advertises for them on his YouTube channel, his codes will give you 25% off. You can try if DJCARLO still works.
I play the same gigs,
I collect my music on my computer and use Tidal for requests and so on…
Tidal is your best bet based on what you play, but it doesn’t have a download option 
