DEADCA7 Manifesto

Everyone is a DJ.

The PC, internet, streaming platforms, and online music stores let everyone
discover, curate, share, and play dance music with friends.

Professional DJ tools have fallen behind.

Bringing music to a club requires expensive and proprietary software, clunky
music library management tools, black-box and incorrect analysis algorithms,
slow and fragile exports, and a single USB drive that the whole party and your
reputation depend on.

We fear the last USB export won’t finish in time or the first USB insert won’t
work at all.

We’ve all struggled with slow exports that we need to cancel to make it to a gig
on time, USB drives not loading on DJ hardware, missing files and playlists, or
wrong BPMs and beat grids. Instead of having fun at the decks, we’re working
hard.

We deserve better.

What if…

What if we are freed from the concept of a single laptop, Rekordbox.app library,
and USB to rule our DJ music?

What if our music catalog knew about the rat’s nest of ALL our music across our
old laptops, USBs, music stores, and music services?

What if we could back up all our music, playlists, and DJ histories to the cloud
at utility pricing?

What if we could share playlists and tracks directly among friends?

What if an agent could help us find, sort, clean, and organize our music
collection?¹

What if we could mint a fresh USB export quickly and reliably from a subset of
our music customized for a gig?

What if we could plug a USB key into any laptop and diagnose and fix problems via
the web in an emergency?

Announcing DEADCA7

We’re excited to launch DEADCA7 – dead-simple, next-gen DJ music management
tools for DJs.

The initial public beta consists of simple foundational tools:

• Specification for an open DJ music library database format
• Command-line tools
• Pioneer Device Library and One Library-compatible USB exports

With a few simple tools, you can index all your music across all your drives and
devices, create backups, and create or update club-ready USB drives.

An example workflow:

• Import your old USB libraries into a named catalog
• Optionally back up the USB data to cloud storage for safety
• Review duplicate tracks and join their catalog observations
• Plug in a new USB and export the combined catalog

The result is one USB with music from multiple drives. Transfer time depends on
the amount of audio and the speed of your drives.

Example CLI commands for hackers and agents:

# install CLI tools
curl -fsSL https://deadca7.com/install-cli.sh | sh
export PATH="$HOME/.local/bin:$PATH"

# create a collection and add two USB libraries
dc catalogs create "Archive" --apply
dc import "/Volumes/ALPHA" --catalog "Archive" --apply
dc import "/Volumes/BRAVO" --catalog "Archive" --apply

# review duplicate groups in the local catalog, then apply the proposed joins
dc dedup
dc dedup --apply

# preview, then export the collection to a new USB
dc export "/Volumes/ARCHIVE" --catalog "Archive" --name "ARCHIVE"
dc export "/Volumes/ARCHIVE" --catalog "Archive" --name "ARCHIVE" --apply

Omit --apply to preview changes before running them. dc dedup operates on
the local catalog, so review its groups before applying; it joins observations
under canonical tracks without deleting audio files. Named collections append
imported libraries, and matching playlist names across volumes get a source
suffix rather than having their contents merged.

The volume paths above are for macOS. See Install dc
for all three platforms and Import & Export for the
current CLI workflow. Selecting playlists by a pattern such as “acid” is still
a curation goal, not a command in this example.

Just the beginning…

We also have a private beta for:

• Mac desktop app
• Cloud storage service
• Open source tooling

If you would like access, email help@deadca7.com with a personal message about
what you want from next-gen DJ tools and a link to your website, SoundCloud,
Instagram, or GitHub profile.