Every DJ who performs live knows the hassles and risks that come with using a USB drive. The hours wasted transporting your tracks, the gut-wrenching feeling you get when you realise that you forgot the drive at home, and the heart attack that comes when you find out that the USB has been corrupted, just like what happened with Zedd this year whose USB corrupted minutes before his Ultra Music Festival performance. Well this is all going to change now.

Industry-leading DJ equipment brand Pioneer DJ announced on June 27th the implementation of StreamingDirectPlay into the CDJ-3000, one of the highest-standard DJ players on the market, which allows users to access the full 11m+ Beatport streaming catalogue directly within the on-board interface.

The new feature is available via the new firmware 3.0 update. You can browse, play and mix music without ever connecting to a laptop, you’ll just need a reliable internet connection, and a Beatport Professional or Advanced plan.

Once you choose a track from the Beatport catalogue, the tracks are fully cached onto the player as soon as they’re loaded, so if you suddenly lose internet connection any loaded tracks will continue to play right through.

The CDJ-3000 will automatically analyse the file, where you can check the song’s waveform, use the quantizing, loop, cue and beat sync features. Now you won’t be totally getting rid of your USBs and SD cards, as you’ll need a media drive connected to the player to store the metadata of the features you used.

The player gives you the ability to sign-in on one CDJ-3000 unit and play from up to four units in the PRO DJ LINK network, or a different DJ can log into their Beatport streaming account on each individual player in the same network, as long as one of the decks is connected to the internet.

The CDJ-3000 also gives you the option of combining Beatport StreamingDirectPlay with Rekordbox’s CloudDirectPlay, the feature that enables you to access tracks straight from the Rekordbox cloud. BPM, key information, hot cues, memory cues and other features analysed by Rekordbox are transferred to the player when you load a track.

When you edit any feature from the CDJ-3000 they will be uploaded to the Rekordbox cloud too, so you’ll always have access to your latest Rekordbox library from any of your devices.

Here’s a tutorial we found by DJcityTV on how to use the new firmware features: