Agreed with Rudi. And it's nice that you collectively think that all musicians feel the same way that you do. All this comes off as is being bitter that DJs have made your life more difficult to get gigs. I guess it's tough out there.

"Now the computer handles everything. It can even choose the songs."
Ah yes, the biggest cliche of digital DJing. Reality -- the computer doesn't handle everything. You can have it auto beat match, that's just about it. You could set up cross fading and such, but it's going to sound really amateurish. And also yeah, you can have iTunes pick tracks for you, but I've never seen a DJ using that at a club and no system conceived yet would know how to pick the perfect song for the perfect moment. For now, skilled humans tend to do this stuff a lot better.

"If I'm smart enough, I've pieced all the songs together ahead of time so when I get to work I only push play once. Then I put one headphone to my ear and twiddle this fader that controls nothing and people think I'm awesome!"
LOL. I guess this could work, but any misstep as far as picking a bad track and continuing down that path would result in an empty dance floor. Obviously no DJ would risk that.

FWIW, I've done the musician thing when I was younger. Now that I don't play a traditional instrument anymore and DJ instead, it's interesting to have both perspectives. Few DJs (I don't fall into this category) have the skill to really use their equipment and wield them like true instruments, using their skill to REALLY get creative, which I guess is why musicians shun them (even guys that can mix very well). I think it's still a bit silly for DJs who can't do this stuff to refer to themselves as musicians, but whatever. Most of the big name DJs you see nowadays produce themselves, so obviously they have earned that.

"Bottom line about these things are, even though they have the ability to sync BPMs for you, they don't mix automatically for you. They don't know drops, measures and breakdowns, they don't know EQs and timing etc. So you still have to know how to spin in order to well.. spin. They're a great tool to help you get there, and even dudes that talk shit about street cred or being a "Real DJ" can respect them for inspiring someone to do that much."

Perfectly stated. And while I don't agree with your preferences, I definitely still understand them. I learned on turntables and really never use them as I love some of the edges that I get from using Traktor Pro and Ableton. All these systems really do is lower the barrier to entry a bit from the $ and skill perspective (particularly around beatmatching); the stuff that separates the men from the boys is mixing, programming (track selection) and creativity. If you don't have the skills / experience to execute on the important stuff, you're still going to sound like garbage.

gimmeeeeeeeee

this thread is relevant to my interests.

i somehow stumbled upon this old portion of the internet and felt compelled to comment upon it as there are so many simply incorrect statements in it. i really don't have a ton of credentials other than understanding the some low-level game theory of chess, the depth of math of poker, their differences, and a background in information systems, economics, and statistics. oh hai.

solomonrex - your statement may be true for limit, maybe, but not for no limit hold'em (NLHE), which even thought rules are very similar is a completely different animal. any decent (i'd say about a year's worth of study / experience) poker player could pick apart today's bot fairly easily for 100+ big blind stacks (this is referring to cash game). also, let's be clear that NLHE tournaments and NLHE cash games are two very different animals. to determine who is best in NLHE cash games, long term expectation must be assessed (overall equity in when making / calling bets). this takes LOT of hands (i've seen massively winning players go on break even stretches of 25k+ hands or so, but usually 25k will give us a good enough confidence interval to assess if someone is actually winning (we call this deviations in expectation Variance). but when you say: "I don't think human players win poker consistently, so I don't see how a computer will. How many "stars" dropped out in the first day of WSOP this year?" you demonstrate a clear lack of understanding on our topic. "stars" are stars because they have great long term expectation. because poker is a game of skill WITH ELEMENTS OF LUCK, anyone can get bad beat and bounced from a tournament even though they made the best move with respect to your opponent's specific hand (e.g. i shove AA preflop and get called my KK, he hits a king and i lose). also, because deception is an important strategy in poker, one must plan certain hands similarly to mask their true holding. one way we do this is to bet when we have nothing relative to the board to make our opponent fold (you know this as bluffing). we'll do this with several hands and situations so we have a Range of hands which are in our actual hand (in the eyes of our opponent). but when we have KK and we bet into a K8922 board after we acted weak and our opponent shoves over us for 3 times the pot (this is how much money we have left), we call, and he shows us 22, this doesnt mean we're bad players. we ran into the top of his range (with the 2nd best hand!), which is another form of getting unlucky in poker. these two aspects lead to variance. there are more. so anyway, your "stars" losing in the first round means NOTHING. nobody will EVER have enough of an edge in a standard tournament environment to win it 100% of the time.

back on topic though: comparing chess to poker is basically pointless. chess: complete information. there's no fog of war on the board. you know all of your opponents pieces, where they are, what they do, and vice versa. this is why players need to think ahead and along the permutations of such actions and opponents actions -- the strategy level has just gotten to that point where the best of the best need to be able to do that.

poker, however is a game of incomplete information. you don't know what your opponent is holding. you don't know what cards are going to come out. you bet when you think you're ahead. you check and fold when you think you're not. for the most part. there's always balancing of acting weak when you're strong and strong when you're weak, but be careful, because if you do this too much you'll lose long term. it's easier to compare poker to the stock market than it is with chess. making good decisions long term will yield good results. if there are certain market indicators which are all pointing in one direction, you invest, and then it's force majeure in your face, that doesn't mean you're not good at investing or are stupid. you got bad beat, essentially. such things will normalize after time. we also call this the Law of Large Numbers.

duerra - you are so off the mark it's not even funny. have you even ever played poker? it's exponentially more complicated than chess given the differences in game dynamics.

cry havoc - "Until a massive revolution occurs, a computer will simply never be able to process the depth of human emotion and reactions that are necessary to play top level poker". you're overestimating the importance of physical reads / tells. now, i know the media loves to play that up like that's the core of the game, but poker is a game of MATH. yes, if you put the same person against himself and one has a pro's understanding of tells and the other does not (read: same fundamentals / skills for other areas of the game), the guy with the reads will win. however, all he is doing is incorporating another dimension of information into a mathematical model which he's using to decide his most optimal action relative to his opponent.

osu-no.1 - you get +1 Internets for knowing what you're taking about. succinct (not like me) and correct.

poker's complex because there is no Perfect way to play. it's an exploitative game. which means sometimes that weird actions must be taken to exploit / manipulate an opponent. this means, in a sense, learning. computers can remember everything, but to be able to use such information predicatively is more difficult. i have no doubt that eventually computers will best humans in NLHE eventually. it'll get to a point where their fundamentals are so close to a pro's that the only edge a pro would have are reads (useless on a computer!). and once a computer WOULD be able to get reads on a human (i'd guess we're pretty far off for this, but who knows), then the human is toast.

for more on this topic, read No Limit Hold'em by David Sklansky and the Mathematics of Poker by Bill Chen.

pretty interesting setup, adam. you might wanna try mixing two tracks which are in key for a demo though, my ears are bleeding :-|

Paperwork???

No.....sprinkle some crack on him....

@ olaf:

There's always something new around the corner, yeah. But this is basically utilizing a storage medium instead of a record crate and then slapping a chit mixer on it. Traktor Scratch / Serato already fill the first need as they leverage a laptop as a storage medium and DJ's can use their existing mixers, which far surpass this most of the time.

Anyway, this could open up some possibilities for entry level people getting into DJing (said above), but that's basically it. The "future" of DJing involves utilizing software (now, it's software such as Ableton Live and such) to enable DJs to have more flexibility in live performances. There are also some cool new applications / hardware based on multi-touch displays, interactive hardware which creates new enviornments.

@ James: Serato is out, Traktor Scratch is in. It's totally ridiculous and I love it.

Depends on what you mean by "odds". If you calculate that as knowing how many outs they have, you'd be wrong. True skill in poker isn't on the "odds" so much as calculation of equity (amount in the pot weighed against your range of holdings -- which is given by accurately modeling your opponents' tendencies).

I love it when I sit at the table with morons and they quote statistics, "oh, he only had a 8.3842% chance of hitting that" when knowing the level of detail is just, well, unnecessary. Approximations are key.

If they have a database of Phil Laak hands on which the computer can refernce vs. starting to model him at the beginning of the game, THAT would certainly be unfair.