SwingDJs

Here's a new one. The venue that I DJ at every Thursday night has installed a Roku Soundbridge 500. This means that instead of hauling a whole car full of sound equipment, I now show up with my lap-top and turn it on. The lap-top links up with the Soundbridge and the device reads my music folders. I select the folder that contains the nights play-list and we are off and running! The only down side is that I haven't figured out how to change my play-list once the devices are connected. According to the manufacturer I should be able to have web-page control over the Soundbridge from my lap-top but, I haven't figured out how to do this yet. Anyone else out there have any experience with this device?

Can't you just plug your laptop into their sound system using a cable? DJ from your laptop using the media player/DJ software of your choice.

I don't see the benefit for a laptop swing dj with the setup you describe. At least, if you want to have a DJ that is actually responsive to his or her audience.

Did the venue provide you with a sound system to plug into before? As a laptop DJ, the only time you need to lug around a bunch of heavy equipment is when your venue does not have a system.

Nathan

The sound system at Hot Water is like a rather high-end home stereo on shelving behind the bar. I was DJing from a coffin with two CD players and a mixing board and needed room for all my cds I did not see plugging into the house sound system as an option.

Initially I was lugging the coffin, CDs, my amp, two Sonic lt-12 speakers and tripods there every Thursday night. After six months of that I decided to just store the equipment in a closet there so I would only have to set-up and break-down every Thurs. When I finally got my lap-top a month ago the owner coincidently put in the Soundbridge addition to his system. He suggested that I give it a try and it works pretty well with the exception of loss of control of the play-list once it's uploaded to the Soundbridge.

However, there is supposed to be a way of controlling the Soundbridge from the lap-top which would then restore full control of the play-list, hence my question to the forum.

In case you haven't seen this, here's the on-line userguide ( http://www.rokulabs.com/support/SBUserGuide.pdf ).

OK, I was able to figure out how to pause, restart, and skip tracks from the lap-top. It is still cumbersome to accomidate a request or to make changes in the playlist so I'm going back to hard wiring the lap-top to the sound system. It was an interesting experiment tho.