post recycling: is the DJ obsolete?

Here's a posting on the topic of automatic track mixing using software, from the PsyNews forum:

[...]beyond the very basics of beatmatching, you'll need a human...

There are so many aspects to take into account. Like song selection - sure you can have a database of all the tracks with different info on their characteristics that would let you auto-generate fairly decent tracklists, but there will be no innovation or creativity and the song selection will still be controlled by variables in the data set by a human being. So it's basically just more work, with no real benefit.

Then there is crowd interaction - both in terms of stage appearance (although that's not necessarily the most important part of DJ'ing) and where to take the set - if the crowd isn't up to the craziness you're playing - tone it down. If they want it harder - push up the BPM and pick another route with the set. Doing this with computer-generated mixing would be very difficult, since you'd need to send some crowd appreciation paramter live to the software. And how would you do that? Sounds like a job for... a human being.

Some variations of mixing technique could be hard-coded into the program, but when to chose them and how to apply them would be very hard to get right. A program might flag two tracks as incompatible due to their respective key modes or sound styles, but a gifted DJ could work around such things.

But maybe what you were going for was something like an automated mixer? So that there is still a human on stage (or wherever) selecting the tracks, but that just the actual mixing is handled by some piece of technology? In a way we are already there with some of the DJ tools available. But even though this may be a progress in some respects, the DJ will be more limited in terms of mixing technique, which I find to be a very negative thing.

An auto-mixing program will make a crappy DJ suck less, but will cripple a good DJ. Making mediocricy prevail isn't much of a step forward I think, just look at what happened with the software revolution in music production - now everyone can have a "studio" and make music, and unfortunately they do. A DJ that needs a mixing software isn't one I'd like to hear. Not everyone should be a DJ.