I received my Prime GO earlier in June, and have enjoyed using it. I also have a Prime 4, which is my primary rig. I use the GO for remote cocktail hour or ceremonies. I know and use the workaround for automix for the Prime 4, but I’m wondering if anyone has come up with something creative for the Prime GO. I am currently running my iPad into the Aux input to allow continuous playlists with no gaps, but I feel like that is defeating the purpose of the standalone nature of the GO.
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If it’s only for background music, why does it matter if there are gaps? Nobody will care. People won’t complain if the music is not mixed or segued.
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I’ve been a wedding DJ for a very long time, and people do care. When there are 8-10 second gaps between songs, people notice. I’ve always had the ability to provide automix, and it is important to me.
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10 seconds? What are you playing?!
CDs have a standard gap of 2s if I remember correctly, and even vinyl albums - I doubt if it’s 10s between tracks. With digital files it should be much less than 10s.
I’ve been doing it for a long time too, and never once used automix at a gig. The clients hire me to DJ, not my equipment. 
The DJ will and as we are the artist then it’s what we think that matters. We bought the prime, we paid our money for our prime. It should behave the way we want it to.
Did Leonardo Da Vinci just do the Mona Lisa using some chalk he found in the flower beds in the garden? Did Alexander Bell think… maybe 3 metres between phones is ok? Did Neil Armstrong just think “stuff it, I’ll plonk this USA flag in the tarmac at Cape Canaveral, it’ll save all the G force?
If we, who paid for a prime, think that we’d rather not have silence before and after each track then we shouldn’t be ridiculed repeatedly by you throwing cold water over ideas that you don’t want to read about. If your happy with gaps between background music tracks, that super… for you, but some of us don’t settle for basic. If we did, we wouldn’t have bought prime
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I’m not ridiculing anyone. I’m speaking from my own decades of DJing experience.
As a DJ who’s been entertaining people for that long, I know what’s necessary and what isn’t. I’m not saying don’t have automix. I’m just saying that based on decades of experience, people will not give two hoots if there are gaps in background music.
The DJ is there to please the others, not him/herself. Fair enough, if someone comes up and complains about a few seconds gap, then don’t have gaps - but IME that won’t happen.
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PK, it’s nice to see someone else with decades of experience. I started in 1979, so technically I’m in my sixth decade of being a DJ. That said, I do think people notice gaps. They may not complain, per se, but they also may not come up and grab a business card for the next event for which they need entertainment. And last week, I had a multiple set up wedding, and wound up having to use the GO for dinner. Since dinner ambient volume is lower, people definitely would be prone to notice gaps, which is why I ran my iPad through the Aux channel.I do believe that automix would be a great feature to add to the Prime family, and I am curious to see if anyone has come up with a workaround for the GO.
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Your black and white chalk Mona Lisa isn’t right for everyone here.
Similar, unless you dashed around with a clipboard and a questionnaire to every single guest at every single wedding asking them their concise thoughts about the benefits of gap-free background music, or unless you’re a Genuinely accomplished mind reader, you can’t presume to actually know, only guess, how people are perceiving the gaps in the music. Just because no ones thrown their prawn cocktail at you when the gaps in the music occurred, doesn’t mean that they were being given the best experience.
“Good enough” Is the enemy of great !
As for the length of the gap, look at a typical digital file. If it fades out at the end, there will be 3-4 seconds of silence (or near silence) at the end of the track. Add in the 4-5 seconds the GO or the Prime 4 takes from one track to the next when running in continuous mode, and you get there.
If the equipment is adding a gap then it could be an issue, agreed. How much I don’t know, as I’ve not used my Prime 4 for that purpose - nor am I likely to.
…and that works both ways. You can’t know for sure that they do care.
If you were at a wedding, would you care if there was a gap between background songs? Would you even notice?
I would certainly notice, but I would not complain. But I’m a wedding DJ, so that would be more out of courtesy to a fellow DJ than thinking it was OK.
The “would they notice/do they care” argument is not really on topic. I’m looking for workaround suggestions on the assumption that MY clients DO care.
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What’s the Prime 4 workaround you mentioned?
Aside from individual tracks, I do have a few long “blended” files on my SSD that I could play should the need arise (which it never has). Another workaround would be to play music via a system that does allow gapless playback (app on tablet etc), and route it through your mixer.
Just like you having those tracks available to YOU “should the need arise” the DJs in this forum and, I suspect plenty of DJs not on this forum want the prime to offer gap-free playback of background music available to THEM.
It’s not just wedding DJs either. Fun pubs and bars that I’ve played at often have had the main DJ system or some rack mount gear under the DJ booth playing playlists as warm-up or atmosphere music or background music for the couple of hours between opening and the DJ arriving. For those situations the silence is real wind-blowing- tumbleweed moments, where a couple of seconds silence will sound like half a minute until the next song starts.
The prime 4 has a crossfading-over the gaps feature , so primes can already handle the mixing of sounds bit, but unfortunately, for some mins boggling reason denon only allowed the feature on the prime 4 to route the mixed/blended sound out to the booth zone output sockets, rather than the master outputs - the workaround has been to have a pair of leads running from the zone booth out, into a spare line input channel on the mixer, which is a sort of lame way of getting a feature which denon must have thought was wanted by the masses - shame they routed it our so bizarrely.
You missed the part about “it never has”…
[edit] actually now I think about it, I deleted them all off the Prime 4 drive a few days ago. They only got there because I did a bulk copy to get my library onto the drive.
I happened to sort by file size and spotted them at the top of the list. Gone. Remnants of CDs I burned for playing in the van.
I don’t think the routing is bizarre. That was the concept all along.
A separate output that you could use to send a playlist to a “chill out zone” or similar. The Go doesn’t have that output, so not surprising that it can’t blend tracks the same way.
Honestly, I’d be fine with the Prime 4 zone output workaround forever. It’s a bit clinky, but it works. But I suspect that the only way automix will come to the GO is if they also make it available on the main outputs of the Prime 4.
Here’s an example of how I use it: Tomorrow, I will be playing prelude music for a ceremony from the GO (in addition to the ceremony songs) It would be ideal if there was an automix function, because I do like the prelude music to be continuous, gap-free. So I’ll add the iPad and run through AUX, because that’s my preference. I could mix a 30 minute prelude set and drop it on a USB or SD card, but that’s more work than I want to do.
My preference, my workflow…
Not to be rude but it seems like you don’t want to do any work, hence why you just plugin in your iPad. There’s no fun playing playlists at gigs from the iPad through DJ equipment.
You’re entitled to how you play the music, there are no rules. I just don’t see the point.
My opinion…
“Not to be rude” but then you just go right ahead and be rude.
You don’t know the first thing about me to challenge how hard I want to work.
The only reason I use the iPad is that the equipment offers no alternative. So I either pre-mix a full set of cocktail music/prelude music/dinner music for each wedding, or I stand there and mix throughout each part of the wedding. I would bet anything that the vast majority of wedding DJs use some kind of automix or autoplay functionality during cocktails, dinner, or both. I used automix in Virtual DJ, and would spend cocktail hour introducing myself to parents, guests, etc. Then I have a successful event, because people enjoy knowing who the DJ is, and that he’s approachable.
Thanks for your opinion. While interesting, it is totally irrelevant.
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Nope. Never have, never will. I’m a DJ, not a jukebox.
People hire me to DJ at their event. Presumably that’s because they want a person to play the music. If they wanted some automated system, they could’ve used their own computer/tablet etc.
Indeed. Anyway, I agree with what others have said, and as you have acknowledged, the Prime 4 is the way to go with the Zone out. goodluck.
Hallo Kurz vorne weg bin seit über 40 Jahren im mobilen DJ Geschäft und jetzt stolzer Besitzer einen Denon DJ Prime Go für kleine VA’s . Ich kann dem nicht zustimmen was hier so geschrieben in Sachen Auto Mix / Auto DJ / kontinuierliche Wiedergabe ( Prime Go), das kann jede einfache DJ Free Version aus dem Netz besser. Ob und wie man das nutzt lassen wir einfach mal außen vor und darum geht es ja auch nicht. Der Prime Go hat zwar die Möglichkeit die Fader Kurve im kontinuierlich Modus zu ändern aber diese hat keine Wirkung er spielt die Titel wie ein stink normaler CD Player ab ? mit den endsprechenden Pausen. Absolutes No Go hier müssen die Entwickler noch mal rann ist sicher auch nicht so gedacht. Gruß Ceule
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