One Library, Many Sources

One Library, Many Sources

• By Noah Zoschke • 4 min read
deadca7djinglibraryownership

deadca7 is a dead easy audio and video catalog for DJs. That tagline is the whole pitch, but underneath it is a conviction worth stating plainly: your crate should be yours to take anywhere.

Most DJ tooling does not start from that premise. Your crate lives inside one vendor’s app, in one vendor’s format, syncing to one vendor’s cloud. The metadata you painstakingly tagged — keys, BPMs, the order you like albums in — is trapped behind an export button that may or may not exist. deadca7 is the opposite bet.

Your library goes where you go

In deadca7 your library is one place that unifies every source, and it travels with you. Your collections aren’t locked to a single DJ software ecosystem — you can take them to your gear and back them up off the platform whenever you want.

That one principle cascades into everything else:

  • Export to USB in Pioneer formats and plug straight into the CDJs.
  • Back up to the cloud so your crate is safe and reachable from anywhere.
  • Script it — the same data the web app reads is yours to query through the API.
  • Move on whenever you want. Your collections come with you, because they were never trapped in the first place.

deadca7 is a hosted catalog with a free version to start. Owning your crate isn’t a premium tier here; it’s the floor.

One library, many sources

A DJ’s material does not come from one place. A netlabel posts a discography on the Internet Archive. A friend drops a set on YouTube. A record you love is on Bandcamp; a pressing you’re chasing is catalogued on Discogs. The old model forces you to keep all of that in your head and stitch it together by hand.

deadca7’s first pillar is the Media Library: manage many virtual collections of media from many sources. A collection holds albums (playlists), and an album groups tracks — each carrying the metadata that actually matters in the booth: title, artist, album, genre, musical key, BPM, duration, track number, and cover artwork. Browse by collection, by album, by what you added recently, or by audio versus video.

The point is that the source dissolves once the media is in your library. An archive.org netlabel and a YouTube playlist land in the same place, side by side, arranged however you like. One library, many sources.

The concretely working importers today are Internet Archive and YouTube — import a whole netlabel from an archive.org page, or pull a playlist, channel, or single video. That’s where the library lives now. Where it’s headed is broader: Bandcamp, Discogs, Tidal, and your own bookmarks all belong in the same catalog. The architecture already treats “source” as a detail, not a prison.

From discovery to the booth

A catalog is only worth keeping if it follows you all the way to the gig. So deadca7 covers the whole workflow rather than one slice of it.

  • Media Library — find media, pull it together, organize it your way.
  • Export Tools — get collections onto the gear and the cloud. Export to USB in Pioneer OneLibrary and Device Library formats (alpha), and back up to the cloud.
  • Performance Tools — take the library to the booth. Link to CDJ-3000s to see now-playing in real time, generate set track lists from what you actually play, and synchronize visuals to the music.

That last pillar is where the ownership argument stops being abstract. We reverse engineered Pioneer’s Pro DJ Link protocol to do it — the full story is in Reverse Engineering Pioneer Pro DJ Link with Claude Code. Reading live beat and tempo off a CDJ is exactly the kind of thing a walled garden would never let you build. We built it because the protocol is the gear’s business, not the vendor’s secret.

Built to be automated

The other half of total control is that everything you can do by hand, you can do programmatically. deadca7 ships a first-class CLI that speaks JSON over the catalog API, plus an agent SKILL so a coding agent can drive your crate for you. Importing a netlabel, listing collections, searching contents — all of it scripts cleanly. A library that’s yours to take anywhere should also be a library you can automate, and this one is.

Start here

If this is your kind of bet, the fastest way to feel it is to sign up and import something. The getting started guide walks you through setup, and features covers what’s in the box today.

One library. Many sources. Yours to take anywhere. That’s deadca7.