SwingDJs

Lawrence wrote:I figured that if I was going to make the shift, I might as well go whole-hog, re-think the whole enterprise outside the box of my old CD-DJing habits, and discard all the inefficiencies of CD DJing, even if they had become comfortable habits.

I have been giving this a lot of thought...but I have reached very few conclusions.

The "dual CD" model seems to work. Moving to a "single playlist" model with some kind of pre-defined or clickable crossfading between the songs is an OK compromise...but it certainly doesn't address all the needs of a DJ.

When you re-thought the whole enterprise outside the box...what were your conclusions?

--Stan Graves

SoundInMotionDJ wrote:The "dual CD" model seems to work. Moving to a "single playlist" model with some kind of pre-defined or clickable crossfading between the songs is an OK compromise...but it certainly doesn't address all the needs of a DJ.

When you re-thought the whole enterprise outside the box...what were your conclusions?

--Stan Graves

...that I didn't need to force myself to get a dual-deck interface....

Seriously, I have found that using a single playlist instead of dual-deck interface is great. I can instantly review where I have been and plot out where I should go in a single playlist; never had that with dual CDs unless I kept separate notes, which is a bother. I can "tune out" (talk, dance, look for other songs, go to the bathroom, etc) near the end of a song because I know the next one will start without my needing to baby-sit it. I can also go dance and not worry about rushing to the DJ booth merely to hit "play" on the next song. I can more easily plan a set ahead of time and have it all ready to play, but can still easily change it on the fly to adjust to the room. I can also save the entire playlist very easily and archive my previous sets with no extra work.

Some of these features are available on dual-deck interfaces, but not all of them. The gist is that, once I broke the habits of dual-deck DJing, using a single "main" playlist turned out to be intuitively simpler and more natural, especially when supplemented by an entirely separate "cue" playlist for previewing. When both "zones/decks" are playing, I don't need to think about whic one is pumping through the main system and which is going to my headphones. I thus make fewer embarrassing mistakes where I, say, stop or eject the song in the wrong zone/deck.

I have only experienced two downsides to losing the dual deck control. First, as mentioned, I cannot control when a song will begin: it just starts at the beginning, forcing me to re-rip MP3s to where I want the song to start (which I should do anyway). (No problem at the end of a song, because I can of course manually advance to the next song on the playlist at any time.) Second, I must rely on the default fade between songs, which makes the transitions between songs a tiny bit unpredictable. But it works well, generally, and is worth the trade-off.

Hey guys. I'm new to this forum and I've started (or am about to start) DJing. I'm currently running Fedora 7 (Linux) and am looking for good software for DJing. I'm looking for something more than just XMMS/Audacious. I would like something more like J River; in the sense that a media library would be nice (Also like iTunes, or Winamp Media Library).

In case anyone has asked about linux stuff, I'm sorry for re-asking. I read the last 2 pages and did not see anything mentioned in those pages.

So yeah, if you have any suggestions, let me know.

It's not exactly a stellar combination, and I unfortunately am still limited to CDs as I don't own a laptop, but...

On my desktop I use a combination of Amarok and XMMS. Amarok gives you iTunes-like search and database capabilities, and I'm sure you're already familiar with XMMS. It appears you can drag files from Amarok to XMMS, so the easiest way to DJ with this might be to use Amarok for previewing and searching, and then drag your selection into XMMS which is going out to the main system.

I think you can configure both XMMS and Amarok to use whatever output device you wish, so you should be able to set them up for cueing and main output however you'd like.

Warning: Amarok is a pig. It's slow, it's buggy, and it shows all sorts of "alpha" quality. But it's the only iTunes-like program I'm aware of for Linux/*BSD. I would never rely on it for the main playback for DJing, but for cueing/previewing it's probably OK.

Brent

Brooksie wrote:I'm currently running Fedora 7 (Linux) and am looking for good software for DJing.

Dual boot XP. haha

"linux djing software" returned lots of hits. this list looks interesting: http://sound.condorow.net/ddj.html

if you're squeamish and want to avoid both dual boot and crazy sourceforge projects, you can run some windows thing in vmware player (shameless plug, i work at vmware) or wine, but virtualisation doesn't play particularly nicely with sound devices. the necessary accuracy of timing is a tricky beast.

I'm going to DJ from my Mac using iTunes as the library for previewing (using the headphone socket), and a dragging to a player for output (via a USB card).

I'm using a G4 flat-screen iMac. Can anyone suggest a good player to use with iTunes?

Haydn wrote:I'm using a G4 flat-screen iMac. Can anyone suggest a good player to use with iTunes?

You're going to lug this thing around?


I would scrounge around here for options:
http://www.apple.com/downloads/macosx/audio/

I need to do that myself some time.

Mr Awesomer wrote:You're going to lug this thing around?

I would scrounge around here for options:
http://www.apple.com/downloads/macosx/audio/

I need to do that myself some time.

That's the one. I've tried dragging from iTunes to Real Player which works fine, but I'd like to be able to maintain an editable queue in the 'player', if anyone can suggest anything ... ?

Has anybody tested or used Serato Scratch at all? I am loathe to fork out the $$$ for the unrestricted version of OTS AV, much as I like it, so still dithering on my software of choice (running Vista).

I found this blog which sings its praises

http://www.bestdjsoftware.com/?dem_acti ... _poll_id=2

CountBasi wrote:Has anybody tested or used Serato Scratch at all? I am loathe to fork out the $$$ for the unrestricted version of OTS AV, much as I like it, so still dithering on my software of choice (running Vista).

I found this blog which sings its praises

http://www.bestdjsoftware.com/?dem_acti ... _poll_id=2

I haven't tried it, but I considered it when I was looking at different packages recently, and decided it was not appropriate for my needs, because it seems to be aimed at DJs who perform and 'scratch' with vinyl records -
http://www.serato.com/products/scratchlive/
http://www.i-dj.co.uk/reviews/reviewspa ... 194&page=1

I've been reading a lot of positive things about jriver. When I found that they were then offering just the audio player as a standalone for free (http://www.mediajukebox.com/), I decided to give it a try.

So far I am very pleased with it. The playlist functionality is very similar to itunes and is easy to work with. Smartlists work in much the same way as well. The tagging system looks really good. I imported my itunes library which took a while (15 minutes, 10k songs), but once in I had no problems. Overall interface is perhaps not as simple as itunes, but not hard to figure out at all. Once you start digging into the tools and options though, you realize how much is actually there. You can even customize the layout to a strong degree, but I recommend avoiding that and just downloading skins.

Searching, sorting, filtering and playing were all very smooth. Even volume output seemed stronger than itunes. I got some crackling a few times, but I was messing around with all the buttons and settings so that could have been my fault. No noticeable hiccups while running other applications or editing tags while a song was playing. Memory usage was about 35mb (compared to itunes around 75mb, musikcube and foobar2000 around 20-25mb).

I've only been testing it out for a few days, but assuming I don't suffer any crashes or stability issues I think I'll be switching over from itunes. It's less of a memory hog and seems to handle my library more smoothly, and offers far more in terms of, well, everything. I've tried a few other programs, but musikcube handles playlists poorly (though sound quality is actually very good) and Foobar2000, while promising, takes way too much work to get running.

I just tried downloading the free JRiver Media Jukebox, but I haven't figured out if it can do the "multizone" thing, allowing you to preview, or if you have to pay money for the whole Media Center for that. (There's a link to "Multizone Playback" in the "Playback Basics" help section, but it goes to a dead page.)

Hmm, going to the "Upgrade" page, one of the reasons it gives for upgrading to Media Center is Multi-Zone Playback. Darn. I guess it was too good to be true, then.

<mac deejays, assemble!>

I'm switching from PC to apple, so now I need new software.

Currently I'm using iTunes for my library.

I know about the power of Traktor, but that seems like more than I need from my dj software.

I've heard/read of DJ1800, both its pros and cons-- though I'm not sure if current versions of this software have addressed the sound dropping issues of the past, I have heard that it may have to do with whether you use it as your library or just as output software in conjunction w/ iTunes. Does anyone have any current reviews of this software?

CuePhase was suggested in the Laptop DJing thread, but it's not located on the apple website anymore (that I could find). I did find it here though:

CuePhase

The iTunes integration seems like a convenient thing for someone who's already been using iTunes, but I haven't heard/read much about it. Does anyone have any current reviews of this software?

thanks.

fredo wrote:I'm switching from PC to apple, so now I need new software.

Currently I'm using iTunes for my library.

I know about the power of Traktor, but that seems like more than I need from my dj software.

You could also look at these packages:

http://www.djay-software.com/

http://www.native-instruments.com/index ... atportsync