The Firmware Edition
On software reliance, performance, and cut points.
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Colin here. Last month, BBC Radio 1 DJ Jaguar Bingham walked into the Drumsheds nightclub in London, plugged in her USBs, and found… nothing. No playlists. No cue points. No history. Just a blank screen where years of careful organization should have been.
As Resident Advisor reported, she wasn’t alone. Hundreds (likely thousands) of DJs saw the same thing. Pioneer’s latest firmware update for its flagship CDJ-3000 player had quietly wiped playlists. The new software, released October 21, introduced something called OneLibrary, designed to unify Pioneer’s old and new file formats. But if your USB contained both, the system chose chaos.
The CDJ-3000 costs about $2,300 per unit. Walk into any serious club from Berghain to Womb in Tokyo and you’ll likely find a pair. When one company dominates nearly 80 percent of global DJ booths, a single firmware mistake becomes a worldwide outage. A software update suddenly determines whether an artist can do their job.
Within hours, a survival guide was posted: bring the previous firmware (v3.20) on a USB so you can downgrade club decks before your set. Veterans who grew up on more analog means, burning CDs or spinning vinyl, shrugged it off. Touring stars had techs to do the hard work to rebuild libraries. But the semi-pros, the residents playing the warm up sets and the working class DJs, got caught in the middle. And for a moment it sucked.
Pioneer’s parent company, AlphaTheta, issued the standard line: “We sincerely apologise for any inconvenience,” the tech support equivalent of “thoughts and prayers.”
Why is this interesting?
For many DJs, the software that stores tracks and their cue points, Rekordbox, is creative muscle memory encoded. Every cue point marks a conscious decision, and every playlist represents hours of hard-earned intelligence and crowd learnings compounded. When the firmware wiped those libraries, it had bigger implications than losing files.
Part of this is about what happens when professionals become dependent on a single company’s infrastructure. Adobe did it to designers when Creative Suite went subscription-only. Peloton did it to riders when servers went down and people remembered bikes don’t need Wi-Fi.
Which is why, suddenly, the old school approach of vinyl and those dusty Technics 1200s in the back room look antifragile. Just physics and muscle memory. Still, most DJs don’t miss lugging boxes of records through airports and up club stairs. (CJN)
A WITI episode as enjoyable as ever - thank you.
A minor note: the picture is of an older venue nearby, called The Drumsheds, which AFAICT has been demolished.
The current Drumsheds (a wonderful exercise in taking an old warehouse-style superstore and turning it into a surprisingly pleasant club venue, and a story potentially worthy of a WITI in itself) looks like what it is, an old Ikea: https://www.theguardian.com/music/2023/jul/12/disused-tottenham-ikea-store-to-become-15000-capacity-cultural-venue
Love this!