What DJing from a streaming service requires

Loading tracks from streaming services is always longer than loading tracks from the host local storage (computer or smartphone).


Bandwidth needed

The higher the audio resolution, the higher the bandwidth needed, and the higher the response time:

Audio resolutions

• Beatport: 128 and 256 kbps AAC
• Beatsource: 128 and 256 kbps AAC
• Qobuz: 320 kbps AAC (standard),  1,411 kbps PCM (hifi), from 1,018 to 6,971 (Flac) or 9,216 (PCM) kbps in Hi-Res audio
• SoundCloud: 128 and 256 kbps AAC
• Tidal: 320 kbps AAC (standard), 1,411 kbps PCM (hifi), and high-res audio (from 1,018 to 6,971 Flac and higher in PCM) in Masters, with HiFi Plus subscription

Internet access

An ADSL or 4G internet access is needed to stream music in a computer or a smartphone.

An optical fiber or a 5G internet access is comfortable to stream music in a computer or a smartphone.

If your computer shares the internet bandwidth with bandwidth hungry devices as a TV Set Top boxes, then to avoid latency/audio drops caused by this other device grabbing most of the internet bandwidth, you may 

• either not use the TV set top box while DJing,
• or reduce the video resolution in the set top box menus during your DJi sessions, too keep some bandwidth for your computer. 

Computer settings

If you can do it, use an ethernet (wired) connection to your computer.

Wifi is workable, but its bandwidth and response time cannot match with the bandwidth and response time of an ethernet connection.

Wifi is CPU intensive, especially in Windows, so that a Windows computer whose wifi is not disabled cannot be considered as optimized for real time processing as Djing.

If you have a home internet network, check the bandwidth of the ethernet switch connected to internet box: a 100-Mbps ethernet switch would be a bottleneck, a-1000 Mbps bandwidth is OK. 


Computer latency

Except for tracks loading and analysis which are really slower from a music streaming services, other DJing operations should be as fast whether you mix local tracks or streamed tracks, so if you feel it seems slower when played tracks from a streaming service, you should make sure you have enough free memory on your computer in closing any background program.

If your Windows computer lacks memory, it may use a fraction of the hard disk as a virtual memory, but the memory swap to access this section of the hard disk data is slower than reading data in the actual RAM.