Now available for download is the TwitterDJ application. DJ pioneer/Producer/Label Owner Richie Hawtin and his Minus label helped develop this application that tweets each track a DJ plays during a set in (nearly) real time. You can see the application in action @ his twitter account. The app utilizes an updated version of Traktor’s standard broadcasting technology and the popular social site twitter.com. Traktor being the Djing software that allows you to mix digital music internally within the software or externally with a standard mixer, turntables or CD decks and timecoded vinyl or CDs; depending on the software version (just in case you’ve been locked in a padded room flippin old tresor wax for the last decade and finally decided to conform).
TwitterDj is currently only available to run on Intel based Macs running OS X 10.5 and Xcode software. You will also need Native Intruments Trakt5o Pro 1.2 and Icecast 2.3.2 or higher.
This type of technology is an excellent step in promotional advancement for digitally released music. This gives an artist, and typically their independent label, the opportunity to gain further recognition for their music as its being played by a performer. How many times have you heard a track at a party, then again at another, frantically needing to add it to the collection but every pain-staking effort to find it on the small information you have is entirely fruitless? Yes, it may take a little something away from those diligent heads who scour through dusty crates and scan thousands of samples before finding those gems; only to broadcast your find to the world so it can be soaked up by some brat who lets his software beatmatch for him. But there are inventive ways around such things. Maybe counterproductive, but there’s always a way… Or, like a good friend pointed out to me, how annoying will it be with a bunch of techie-hipsters standing around at a club, too cool to dance, face lit up from the warm glow of their iphones, anxiously awaiting the next track tweet.
But (after years of denial and sly looks in the mirror) I excepted the fact that you must embrace technology and the information trade. The faster technology is adopted and the more it is exposed leads to faster development. It’s just the way it is, you can either your turn your back on it in denial… or except it. It will still continue to exist either way.