DEADCA7 Manifesto

Everyone is a DJ.

The PC, internet, streaming platforms, and online music stores let everyone
discover, curate, share, and play dance music with friends.

Professional DJ tools have fallen behind.

Bringing music to a club requires expensive and proprietary software, clunky
music library management tools, black-box and incorrect analysis algorithms,
slow and fragile exports, and a single USB drive that the whole party and your
reputation depend on.

We fear the last USB export won’t finish in time or the first USB insert won’t
work at all.

We’ve all struggled with slow exports that we need to cancel to make it to a gig
on time, USB drives not loading on DJ hardware, missing files and playlists, or
wrong BPMs and beat grids. Instead of having fun at the decks, we’re working
hard.

We deserve better.

What if…

What if we are freed from the concept of a single laptop, Rekordbox.app library,
and USB to rule our DJ music?

What if our music catalog knew about the rat’s nest of ALL our music across our
old laptops, USBs, music stores, and music services?

What if we could back up all our music, playlists, and DJ histories to the cloud
at utility pricing?

What if we could share playlists and tracks directly among friends?

What if an agent could help us find, sort, clean, and organize our music
collection?¹

What if we could mint a fresh USB export quickly and reliably from a subset of
our music customized for a gig?

What if we could plug a USB key into any laptop and diagnose and fix problems via
the web in an emergency?

Announcing DEADCA7

We’re excited to launch DEADCA7 – dead-simple, next-gen DJ music management
tools for DJs.

The initial public beta consists of simple foundational tools:

• Specification for an open DJ music library database format
• Command-line tools
• Pioneer Device Library and One Library-compatible USB exports

With a few simple tools, you can index all your music across all your drives and
devices, create backups, and create or update club-ready USB drives.

An example workflow:

• Plug in your main USB and index it
• Optionally back up the USB data to cloud storage for safety
• Find and flag duplicate tracks
• Find and curate playlists that contain “acid”
• Plug in a new USB and export acid playlists with duplicates removed

In 15 minutes, you’ve made a new USB custom built for the club night.

Example CLI commands for hackers and agents:

# install CLI tools
curl -fsSL https://deadca7.com/install-cli.sh | bash

# index a crufty USB
dc import "/Volumes/DJ"

# find and remove duplicates
dc report dups --out dups.md
dc curate dedup main.cdb dedup.cdb

# find and curate acid playlists
dc report playlists dedup.cdb --out playlists.md
dc curate playlist dedup.cdb acid.cdb --playlist "%Acid%"

# create a new USB of deduped acid playlists / tracks
dc export acid.cdb "/Volumes/ACID" --name "ACID" --apply

Just the beginning…

We also have a private beta for:

• Mac desktop app
• Cloud storage service
• Open source tooling

If you would like access, email help@deadca7.com with a personal message about
what you want from next-gen DJ tools and a link to your website, SoundCloud,
Instagram, or GitHub profile.