If I’m reading the press release correctly, wifi enabled players will only be useful to users who sub$cribe to Beatport’s, et al. various monthly streaming services (Beatport price below). Is this a correct reading or am I missing something?
The press release states:
“Streaming of digital music services within standalone unit”
…and that’s it regarding the source from which the players can get music from.
There is absolutely nothing about wifi/internet enabled devices allowing users to access their own local network in order to play their own music OR playing their own music via a private cloud-based drive.
While I’m sure InSound’s research/marketing people have assured DenonDJ that “the global DJ community has been hoping for, expecting and demanding…[…]…the capability of playing digital music content from the world’s premier DJ streaming services as well as directly from the Prime Series units, with no necessity for a laptop computer.” - the same team presumably convinced Akai that Akai customers really really really wanted their wifi enabled samplers to have full integration with Splice (for sample streaming) - but when it turned out that Akai users could only wifi stream samples if they had a Splice subscription, and then even if they have a subscription, ONLY samples purchased from Splice (you can upload your own samples to Splice’s bloated sample management software but the Akai Force can’t access these via wifi/Splice integration).
No doubt we are at A Turning Point in DJ Technology History. SUPER! Since turning points in the history of technology seem to come either every financial quarter or maybe five times ever in the history of civilization (depending on who you talk to), I’d like to pause and reflect on a little place called Thinly Veiled Earth…
Image we live on a planet called Thinly Veiled Earth in Alternate Universe Prime: Weirdly and shockingly enough Thinly Veiled Earth is almost identical to Earth earth, except that at the Turning Point in Transportation Technology History, when ‘horseless carriages’ were replaced by a new machine called Car Primes, one thing was different… PARADIGM SHIFT PARTY!
Unlike Earth earth cars that could basically be driven anywhere on earth (except under water or in the air), the company that built these revolutionary machines (LemnonDJ - the “n” is silent in that universe) decided not to equip them with tires. Drivers had to subscribe to one of three possible ‘automobile streams’ which though spanning the entire terrestrial plane of the earth (said the marketing people ), was actually limited to a network designed and controlled by a corporation that owned the company that built the ‘car’ (the corporation was called DimSound, if you’re wondering), which was of course restricted in a number of crucial ways (either by purposeful design or accidental design). Let’s call these revolutionary devices a Streaming Car 5000 (the Streaming Car 5000 M was the same but with a tactile-based driving wheel).
Every now and then DimSound / LemnonDJ offered exciting sounding seasonal upgrades that were also equally exciting bug fixes. (Alternative historical sidebar: it took years for LemnonDJ to address the RPM gauge accuracy issue; and of course the acceleration was calibrated to .1 something or other which a few hated, and though the high end speed trials eventually got better, history still remembers the lone dissenter who continued to run his Streaming Car 5000 at top speeds in order to show that a claim LemnonDJ made wasn’t entirely accurate) ). Sadly after a few years - and not learning from the mistakes of the formerly powerful maker of horse-driven carriages (they were called Pie & Fear and their flagship horse buggy was called the Carriage of Divine Joy 2000 SXN2) - in later years the only innovation Lemnon could be credited for was offering the Streaming Car in white, and making some overpriced toy cars for kids who wanted to pretend to drive but only in kitchens and perfectly diverse parties full of people from stock footage photos) .
(Last alternate historical sidebar: sadly, the fate of this reality is a grim one. It is whispered that a disgruntled former employee of Pie & Fear (FULSE), having lost his company-sponsored torture support forum, used the only known mark II prototype for something called the Kraken - that basically didn’t do much of anything except shoot out electricity from itself to other things - to somehow destroy the entire Universe Prime. “FULSE: Destroyer of Worlds” they cursed before the end.)
The End.
Anyway, I for one am looking forward to the next greatest firmware upgrade in the history of all firmware upgrades in this or any other universe: SUMMER FIRMWARE PARTY 2019!!
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