Of Recordings

In one of my Beatport diatribes last week, I mentioned that I have a hard time DJing in Live. I’ve been puzzling over why. Ignore for the moment all the cool effects and re-arrangement possibilities that Live offers. Since Live keeps everything tempo-synced, once I’ve warped my tracks, I should be able to make the exact same mix I do on my decks with less effort. Right?

But it hasn’t worked out that way. My Live mixes come out sort of feeble.

I recently thought of a simple explanation: I don’t know my digital dance music nearly as well as I know my vinyl. While doing the actual beatmatching, I’m forced to listen fairly closely to both records. I also tend to let them play together for a while after the beats are aligned but before actually starting the transition. And beatmatching is something that you have to practice a bit, so I’m doing this over and over. In the process, I internalize the structure of the tracks and learn where transitions and breaks are. And that is the key to making two tracks flow together, not crossfaders or EQs.

If that’s the case, the solution is pretty simple: I just need to listen to all my digital dance tracks, all the way through, with an attentive ear. It may seem odd that I haven’t done this already, but it can be kind of weird to listen to house or techno songs straight through outside of a mix.

If Beatport gets it wrong, who gets it right? Amazon! Shopping for MP3s on Amazon is exactly like shopping for books or blenders. And yes, that’s a good thing. They have spent years refining the buying process on their site– just look at the careful phrasing of the prompts that walk you through signing in and checking out. Why throw out everything you’ve learned to sell another product?

When you’ve been online for a while, you develop an intuition about how web pages work. Many of these intuitions are very subtle, and you probably won’t notice them unless you’ve studied human-computer interaction. A well-designed site like Amazon takes advantage of these expectations to make the sales process easier. A Flash gadget like Beatport’s breaks your expectations and forces you to learn new details.

Of course, Amazon is not DJ-oriented the way Beatport is. But if Beatport (or a competitor; I’m not picky) combined those great DJ features with Amazon’s ease of use, then we would have a killer online record shop. And a music fiend like me would be in heaven.

I am not a Luddite. Although I will always have a soft spot in my heart for actual vinyl, I am on board the digital bandwagon. Bring on the MP3s! (Ignore the fact that I am hopelessly inept at DJing in Live.) And I like a lot of things about Beatport: the broad selection of both big club hits and obscure niche tunes; the fast, high-bitrate downloads; the reasonable prices.

But their website is horrible.

Do not make a large, complicated web application in Flash! Just don’t do it! Yes, Beatport looks all high-tech and pretty. It’s also horribly difficult to use. Your browser’s back and foward buttons don’t work; if you use them, you have to start your Beatport session all over. The Beatport back and forward are in a weird place. Searching in the page doesn’t work. Bookmarks don’t work. Tabbed browsing doesn’t work. The fonts are too small, and you can’t resize them. And don’t forget the minor detail that the site was completely unusable in Linux for about a year.

The sad part is that creating an elaborate custom Flash app like this from scratch is incredibly expensive. They could have taken an open-source, web standards compliant shopping cart application and customized it for a third of the cost. (Beatport, please contact us first next time. Or hey, it’s not too late for us to fix your site…)

Eight years ago, usability expert Jakob Nielsen wrote a great summary of why Flash is “99% bad.” Sadly, Beatport must have missed the memo.