DDS80 Crate vs Playlist

One of the first things you need to get your head around with the DDS and DDS80 is the concept of the Crate and the Playlist.

The Crate harkens back to when DJ’s would have their vinyl in a plastic milk crate. Typically the DJ would pull out and rotate the albums that he was considering playing and leave them sticking out of the crate at an angle. Then as the gig progresses, it was easy for the DJ to flip through the pulled out albums to pick the next one for play.

The Crate takes this metaphor and applies it to the digital world. As you search for songs or scroll through your music files in the DDS LCD display, you select and send songs to the Crate. You are then able to view the Crate and see just the songs that you’ve selected. You can add more songs to the Crate as you think of them or remove songs from the crate if you change your mind. One thing to realize though is that once you send a song to a deck, it is removed from the Crate and will not be available to you unless you add it back to the Crate at a later time.

A Playlist, on the other hand, is a more permanent way to create a list of music. For instance, let’s say you have 20 songs that you like to play at just about every gig. You can create a playlist, name it what you want, then browse or search through your library and add songs to the playlist. The playlist is stored as part of the library and can be accessed indefinitely. Each playlist can then be sent to the Crate. This way you can always add easily add certain songs to your crate without having to go through your library time and time again adding songs to the crate.

One limitation of this implementation is that you cannot add your crate of music to an already created playlist. This is a big limitation because you could spend a lot of time sending songs to your Crate and then realize that the list of songs you compiled is a great list of music that you might like to save permanently as a playlist. Sorry, can’t be done!