Comment by jsmthrowaway | Hacker News Reader

Comment by jsmthrowaway | Hacker News Reader

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Aspiring DJs do this, then play out the files they got from youtube-dl via Serato or whatever, then every other minimally competent DJ in the room immediately knows what’s happening based on how obviously shit it sounds. Practice mixing in headphones and playing room scale PA are two different ballgames, and when amplified, any youtube-dl format is as obvious to me as a file being ripped from source vinyl. YouTube does more processing than people realize, and it doesn’t take much ear for me to identify a pirated crate (even beyond YouTube specifically).

If you spin and use youtube-dl to build a crate, we all know, and we don’t respect you. You might win the crowd, but the people who actually bought into their profession and contributed to the community are also in attendance, and are very aware of your intrusion. You will quietly lose gigs without any explanation, and assume promoters simply can’t see your genius until you’re furiously working on 100 precious listens on SoundCloud. Fair use sampling? Go nuts and clean it up after youtube-dl. Five minute record? Make a Beatport account and get it overwith.

Now that's a strange rant. Not everyone who wants to download Youtube files to MP3 is downloading electronic dance music for the purpose of playing it live as a DJ.

In my personal case, it tends to be relatively obscure classical music. Due to the "nature of the genre" there are quite a number of pieces that have never been studio recorded and exist only in OTA radio recordings, or are only available on long out-of-print vinyl, sometimes from foreign sources.

I honestly tend to prefer other sources other than Youtube personally and will only plunk from there as a last resort (Youtube is a place that is more "perishable" than others, which is why I Youtube-DL instead of just relying on the stream), but Youtube has attracted some curators of recordings of this sort.

> Now that's a strange rant.

It’s called “expanding a conversation with additional perspective that most of this audience is probably unfamiliar with,” including watching it happen to a close friend who thought she could get away with it, but sure, interpret me as angrily ranting at absolutely nobody in this audience because you skipped the “if” that qualifies my pronouns in the part that made this thread upset and would rather talk about your much more interesting obscure classical collection instead.

I love how stupid Hacker News thinks I am, and it’s telling me I’m on the right track in the conduct of my life. Feeling’s mutual, rest assured.

Geez, I'm pretty sure OP was talking about a mix playlist to play at home or for personal use, not for their professional DJ career aspirations.

I know they were. What’s your point?

> any youtube-dl format is as obvious to me as a file being ripped from source vinyl Since YT now encodes sound tracks in Opus 160 kbps, if upload was in any decent quality, it will be downloaded in it too.

Would you like a five minute lecture on frequency response and bandwidth of what you upload based on the dynamics compression, filtering, and other processing YouTube does to make videos sound good and all of which have nothing to do with a transport compression algorithm, but how said transport algorithms reduce bandwidth when double compressed because you’re probably not uploading 32-bit PCM to YouTube, and how none of that matters anyway because most people uploading to YouTube aren’t familiar with a spectrogram nor DC offset? (Seriously, one track I got via youtube-dl was the most offset I’d seen in my life. They either don’t fix it, or the fix goes horribly awry.)

I’d simply offer it but this thread thinks I’m an angry ranter so I’m making you not cower in fear out of respect.

i don't get the downvoting for this comment. i too used to carry 70+lbs of vinyl to gigs. CDJs became a thing around the same time napster/ftp trading/etc was popular. on a multi-thousand watt sound system, i agree that the sound was atrocious and quite obvious when a compressed format was burned to CD. that bothered me on multiple levels not just the sound quality, but there was a very large chance the music was downloaded from napster/ftp/etc and not paid for from a legitimate source.

from this thread and other similar to it, it is becoming clear that a vocal segment of HN readers are not concerned with copyright.

whoaa .. wasn't expecting all this. I just download songs to put in my android phone for running. Though I doubt your salty words. Mostly a bunch of drunk people in a crowded party want to dance and have fun. I am sorry that you had to spend a lot of money 'buying in'. But I think the point of a DJ is to play music to a crowd, get them to have fun and dance..

Thanks mr. Gatekeeper

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