[citation_please]

At great risk of sounding haughty, as someone who's perhaps a bit more into the DJing scene than what's probably the average HN user, all of these sound horrible. Beat matching is the easiest part of DJing, and that's about all that this tool does, so I don't think it's solving any DJing problems specifically.

One thing that it does do is take away the turntable GUI (or hardware) and replace it with a two-field upload form, radically reducing the amount of know-how required to perform beat-matching. That's just really scratching the surface of what a lot of "live" DJs do (as they're called these days), as many are bringing instruments like drums and saxophones (see Big Gigantic[1]), keyboards and vocoders (see Lorenz Rhode[2]), their voice (see Gallago[3]), and traditional African drums (see Black Motion[4]), let alone simple song selection and set progression - "reading the crowd".

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TkxMjfYOE-g

[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vwf2uvWlL_c

[3] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wmCFPjwlxIU

[4] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zHEc9uA2Zmw

When the tool comes along that can style-transfer two songs in the same way that it can for images, then I will admit that AI is on the verge of taking our music-creating/music-playing jobs. But for now, I'm satisfied that there's a bit more to the depth of DJing than that what an AI can learn.

[ArmelC]

Hey, I'm one of the devs at Rave.

I posted some general responses here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17852736

We're aiming to make the process as simple as possible, so anyone can make mashups/mixes, and will add on customizations over time. Our focus first and foremost will be to make sure that the core process is solid before we add on to it.

Our AI does do more than beatmatching as well. Though a lot of that is going to be more evident in our mix AI, which we've been focusing on recently.

[citation_please]

To be honest I didn't think my comment would get that much attention - and if I did I would've worded it a bit more gently. I think the framework that you've built around this product is really, really, really impressive (the virality and interactivity, for example). But I also think it's a very hard problem that you've set out to tackle. I alluded to it a bit elsewhere in this thread, but there hasn't been nearly as much work put into audio signal learning as there has been photographic signal learning. I'm really excited to see what else can be done, and I'm happy to see that someone is trying to do it. I wish you the best of luck

(But I'm also hoping that this doesn't further dilute the music industry by making music "production" even easier. Pop music is already "algorithmically solved", and other genres aren't as unique as any fan would like to think.)

[slededit]

There are a lot of "mixes" on youtube for electronic music that have great track selection but do simple fades because they don't have the technical skills. If this technology helps them solve that then it would improve my listening experience dramatically.

[ArmelC]

That is actually precisely what we're aiming to solve! Give those who don't have the technical skills, a means to get the best result they can get, while letting them focus on the part that is important to them: the music selection.

[tomphoolery]

Agreed! I'm in a band called The Wonder Bars[1], and we play house music live with real instruments, but we also include drum machines. We're very far from computers being able to improvise (well), and 4-5 humans playing live instruments is just a crowd-captivating visual. Along with Agent Zero[2], Worldtown Soundsystem[3], and several other bands in the Philadelphia area, we make up a vibrant "live electronic" scene united by the way we make music, not by the genres of music that we particularly choose to write and play.

We're also DJs/producers, and as a DJ, I somewhat disagree with AI ever taking our music-creating jobs. Perhaps playing music will be somewhat more automated in the future, but history shows that creating music will just become more complex and more interesting as we continue forward. Think about it: There are still _professional_ drummers out there, people just paid to drum, when drum machines exist. There are entire orchestras that are paid almost the same salary as developers, yet the Vienna Symphonic Library lets a single person on a keyboard play an entire orchestra's score. The truth is, compositions have classically exploited the modern technology of the day to their own advantage, and I don't see that stopping anytime soon. I can even imagine a world where the independent singer/songwriter suddenly becomes more capable than ever, with AI allowing them to orchestrate entire film scores by just playing a piano or a guitar into their computer. But I don't see the creative aspect of music dying just because we built a machine to organize some stuff better for us.

[1]: https://open.spotify.com/artist/2nrkwnQWEqM20n92QC7Cdy [2]: https://www.facebook.com/agentzeromusic [3]: http://world.town

[citation_please]

Oh I definitely agree we have nothing to worry about :) I may have to check you out though! I enjoy live house of many flavors.

But at the same time, photo style transfer is...impressive[1]. It's interesting to me that so many engineers are focused on creating machinery that learns the photographic signal subspace, but there's not too many working on the audio signal subspace.

[1] https://i.stack.imgur.com/Rdoiv.jpg

[paulm12345]

please take a look at mixes of many songs instead of mashups, that's a lot more relevant to what you are looking for in this product:

https://www.rave.dj/iOfKQXFw3TxTWA

https://rave.dj/7_laQmBqX-ZWjA

https://rave.dj/Im9bExHRkftbXg

They try to only play relevant portions of songs, includes many other DJ rules that Mashups of 2 songs do not.

I'd argue that mixes in their current form could replace a DJ at a small bar patio.

[aembleton]

They sound terrible.

[wavefunction]

It would be pretty trivial to add key-matching to this thing but like you say that wouldn't come close to everything a good dj or live band is doing during a performance with an audience.