More (Compact) Music for Pod People

Keep digging the music, but stop digging through albums. WIRED magazine reports the birth of a jukebox that holds 17,000 tunes, and the possibility that Apple's tiny iPod may soon get a slight adjustment that could make it the DJ's party instrument of choice.

For over 10 years, New York club owner Mike Stuto ran the indie-rock dive Brownie's in Manhattan's East Village. Recently re-opened as Hi-Fi, the new club boasts the world's largest jukebox, at least in terms of capacity. One dollar still buys three tunes (and ASCAP and BMI take their cut, to pay the artists), but patrons can choose from tens of thousands of songs, not hundreds.

The secret? According to the August 2003 issue of WIRED, Stuto and business partner Timothy Roven have constructed a 900MHz Pentium III-based music system, connected to a pair of 160-Gb servers in the basement. The components themselves are off the shelf, but Stuto and Roven designed a new interface that patrons find especially easy to use. Reaction has been so positive that they have formed Empire Digital Music Systems to market their creation to other bars, clubs and music collectors.

In the same issue, WIRED reports that Apple Computer may soon make a seemingly small modification to its hot-selling iPod MP3 player that could change the way music is dished out by DJs in clubs around the world. When Apple launched the product line, they booked DJ Richie Hawtin for an opening party at its SoHo store in New York. Hawtin liked the convenience and quality of the product, but he couldn't move seamlessly from one song to the next, because he couldn't make the slight alterations in speed and pitch that DJs often do with turntables. The iPods are "cool, but pitch control is what I really want," says Hawtin.

Other PC-based DJ tools with pitch control features are already in use, but the iPod's attraction has been its efficiency -- big storage in an extremely portable package.

Apple will not confirm that pitch control will be a future feature, but a spokesman agreed that "DJs are a constituency [Apple is] interested in reaching."

Read the WIRED article "17,000 Hit Wonder" and browse its enormous music list

Read the WIRED article "Give DJs what they want" and learn more about Apple's iPod

Explore MP3 DJ software for PCs at Atomix, which offers one-click beat matching and other features for Windows machines