Freshers’ bop last night ended up very badly organised. First DJ was relying on Spotify (I mean come on) which went down, so she moved to using YouTube to play songs. Stay classy, Balliol. At this point I went and got my laptop from the library and played out some tunes for half an hour or so, which was v amusing as I have no mixing software on my laptop atm. So it involved mpd, mplayer and at one point while everyone was drunkenly dancing around I was standing there reading the mplayer man page to find out how to change the volume to try and ‘mix’ two tracks together. Unfortunately my ALSA is set up badly so both mpd and mplayer were on the same volume meter, making this impossible. So pro.

Anyway while I was playing these random tracks I realised that I wanted to be able to change the speed, fiddle with the treble/mid/bass and generally mess around with the sound to fit what was going on. I realised then just how hard it is to DJ in the sense of choosing tracks and modifying them, rather than technical skills like beat-matching. So I can learn a bit and have fun doing so without committing myself to massive skills I’ll probably have no use for once I leave Balliol (and don’t really have much interest in).