Laptop DJing

Message

GemZombie · #346 Post by **GemZombie** » Mon Jul 18, 2005 8:44 am

Bob the Builder wrote:I'm wondering if any one culls there crap song files off their hard drive.
I've still got 15G of space free so I don't even have to think about it for a while, but do you ever think of deleting the songs off your lap top that you hate and know that while you are alive you will never spin them. From a quick look I've got about 1400 of these on my lap top at the moment which is over 4G.
If you are insistant to hold onto them, Why?

Brian

I rip entire albums and like to keep them in the complete form. When I run out of space I buy a new drive

But after 560+ albums (11,000 songs) there are tons of repeat songs, and crap songs... so i've often thought about cleaning stuff off. I think I'd put the originals on backup, and then keep the purged fileset with me.

wheresmygravy · #347 Post by **wheresmygravy** » Mon Jul 18, 2005 9:05 am

I keep all of my complete CDs on my big hard drives at home and only keep a subest of stuff I might actually Dj on my laptop. That way I can keep it to a managable number of songs. Even at that i still have ~4000 songs on my laptop.

Bob the Builder · #348 Post by **Bob the Builder** » Mon Jul 18, 2005 3:42 pm

wheresmygravy wrote:I keep all of my complete CDs on my big hard drives at home and only keep a subest of stuff I might actually Dj on my laptop. That way I can keep it to a managable number of songs. Even at that i still have ~4000 songs on my laptop.

Makes sence.
How do you manage the two different hard drives, with files on one and not on the other?

Brian

LindyChef · #349 Post by **LindyChef** » Mon Jul 18, 2005 4:32 pm

Jerry and I do the same thing.

The way I manage them is that I go through and every time I get a new CD, I rip it, then put a copy on my desktop and a copy on my laptop. I then listen critically on my laptop, decide what I want, and then run a dupe check. I'm also then constantly pruning stuff I have on my laptop and going "Wow, I thought that was cool?" BALETED!

Bob the Builder · #350 Post by **Bob the Builder** » Tue Jul 19, 2005 4:17 pm

Makes sense.
I’m not sure how I would apply it to my set up. I’m continually updating my music library to add information and make it more user friendly. I’m not sure how I would do that with two different lots of music folders.
Maybe just instead of deleting the files I'm not that interested in, I can just move them to a separate part of a back up drive. That way I can import them again if ever I wanted to listen to them.

Brian

wheresmygravy · #351 Post by **wheresmygravy** » Wed Jul 20, 2005 6:23 pm

I also make a backup of my laptop drive occasionally to an external drive so if I did have to recover I could just resore the backup copy not pick and choose again from the master set. With the price of disk drives now days, what's 30-40 GB of duplicate files???

Bob the Builder · #352 Post by **Bob the Builder** » Wed Jul 20, 2005 6:56 pm

what size backup drive do you have.
I'm looking at getting a 250G USB2 external drive.

CafeSavoy · #353 Post by **CafeSavoy** » Wed Jul 20, 2005 9:48 pm

Bob the Builder wrote:Makes sense.
I’m not sure how I would apply it to my set up. I’m continually updating my music library to add information and make it more user friendly. I’m not sure how I would do that with two different lots of music folders.
Maybe just instead of deleting the files I'm not that interested in, I can just move them to a separate part of a back up drive. That way I can import them again if ever I wanted to listen to them.

Brian

the easiest approach is to add some common unique identifier to the file names of songs you want to move to laptop then you can either search for the files in explorer and copy them over, or you could use some sort of file comparison program (such as Beyond Compare). You can use itunes to search for dupes or one of the mp3 tagger software (e.g., ID3-Tagit can search for dupes based on various criteria). You could use the group tag in itunes differentiate between versions.

rockandroll · #354 Post by **rockandroll** » Thu Jul 21, 2005 8:31 am

I solved the hissing on the audio system ... I used a three pronged to two prong plug converter to eliminate the ground loop. I also used a better shielded Audio cable too ... It worked great...I got clear sound... Thanks again for the suggestions

wheresmygravy · #355 Post by **wheresmygravy** » Thu Jul 21, 2005 6:50 pm

Bob the Builder wrote:what size backup drive do you have.
I'm looking at getting a 250G USB2 external drive.

I have a 200GB that is getting a little full.... may need to go plop down another $50 at Fry's.

Bob the Builder · #356 Post by **Bob the Builder** » Thu Jul 21, 2005 9:05 pm

rockandroll wrote:I solved the hissing on the audio system ... I used a three pronged to two prong plug converter to eliminate the ground loop. I also used a better shielded Audio cable too ...

Hi Rockandroll

Please be really careful at removing the earth from your power point. The Earth is there to make sure you don't get fried and it may also save your laptop.
If my previous suggestion on how to solve the problem don't work use a Ground Loop Isolator. link
This one has good reviews and is recommended by some DJ sites. It may also help protect your PC against a power surge.
Lets make sure that our own safety is always our first priority.

Brian

rockandroll · #357 Post by **rockandroll** » Fri Jul 22, 2005 10:28 am

Thanks Bob ....I'll get a ground loop Isolator today ...

Nate Dogg · #358 Post by **Nate Dogg** » Sat Jul 23, 2005 1:39 pm

wheresmygravy wrote:I keep all of my complete CDs on my big hard drives at home and only keep a subest of stuff I might actually Dj on my laptop. That way I can keep it to a managable number of songs. Even at that i still have ~4000 songs on my laptop.

Bob the Builder wrote:
wheresmygravy wrote:I keep all of my complete CDs on my big hard drives at home and only keep a subest of stuff I might actually Dj on my laptop. That way I can keep it to a managable number of songs. Even at that i still have ~4000 songs on my laptop.
Makes sence.
How do you manage the two different hard drives, with files on one and not on the other?

Brian

wheresmygravy wrote:I also make a backup of my laptop drive occasionally to an external drive so if I did have to recover I could just resore the backup copy not pick and choose again from the master set. With the price of disk drives now days, what's 30-40 GB of duplicate files???

LindyChef wrote:Jerry and I do the same thing.

The way I manage them is that I go through and every time I get a new CD, I rip it, then put a copy on my desktop and a copy on my laptop. I then listen critically on my laptop, decide what I want, and then run a dupe check. I'm also then constantly pruning stuff I have on my laptop and going "Wow, I thought that was cool?" BALETED!

I agree, the songs on my laptop are all dupes. The same songs appear as part of the albums on my portable hard drives at home. The only dupes I am concerned about are dupes on the laptop itself.

As you stated, hard drive space is cheap. It is not that big a deal to have dupes, as long they are organized dupes.

Whenever I get a new CD, revisit an old one, I move the songs that I might want to play over to the laptop (which is backed up regularly). I keep extensive tags in the comments, which I search on (mostly using SmartViews in WinAmp, which is the same thing as a Smart Playlist in iTunes).

I used to use compilations and spreadsheets as organizational tools for DJing. Now I achieve the same purpose by utilizing the comments section within in MP3 tags (along with the standard tags, artist, album, song, etc..).

I think I posted this elsewhere, but I my MP3 comments tags contain everything thing I would want to search on:

Style, specific dances that you would want to dance to with that song (i.e., Balboa, Blues, Six Count, Fast Lindy, West Coast, Waltz, ...), bpm range (ex: 120_129 is a tag I use; era; personal ranking; ranking the song in terms of it's overall popularity (it may not be my favorite, but how much does the entire community feel about it); key side players; prior compilation cds that I included the song on; whether or not the song is overplayed by other local DJs; dominant instruments (songs that are heavy piano, heavy sax, etc..., type of vocalist (male/female/duet/instrumental);themes (food songs, alcohol songs, novelty songs, spiritual songs, etc...); whether or not the song is associated with a geography (Austin songs, New Orleans songs, etc...), whether or not the song is associated with a line dance (ex: Shim Sham songs), and much more

Pretty much anything I can dream up, I add new tags to search on all the time, it is a very fun process.

My laptop SwingDJ folder as 4,941 songs (19.5 gigs). The full albums in my SwingDJ folder on my portable hard drives contain 24,702 files (110 gigs), all my rock n roll, non swing/blues music is not included in this count.

Obviously, there is probably a treasure drove of good songs in the 90 gigs that has yet to make it onto the laptop.

Nathan

russell · #359 Post by **russell** » Tue Jul 26, 2005 6:55 pm

Brian,
Thanks for the suggestion. I got myself a Xitel Ground Loop Isolator and it fixed the noise problems I was having with my laptop. Recommended.

Skippy · #360 Post by **Skippy** » Tue Jul 26, 2005 8:45 pm

Hey BTB (and others),

I thought I'd jump online and share how I manage my music. For me its not a matter of running DUAL drives, however at one point I did do this but found it to be highly inefficient.

With Hard Drive space being so cheap these days I am not concerned about keeping "redundant" files as I once was. (read: I have 600gb available at the moment). I keep songs I wouldn't neccessarily DJ as they more often than not make good listening music. Clearly the crap songs are nuked.

I prefer to use JR Media Center to catalogue my music. Using this program I can add my own custom ID3 tags, create custom searches, generate different libraries and all sorts of nifty things that a lot of other music player software cant do (including listening to music on headphones while playing out of the speakers).

At present I have music that ranges from Scott Joplin to Rammestein(sp?) and everything in between and beyond. Using JR Media Center I am able to seperate things into the following customised areas/lists.

Jazz/Swing
- shag(ish)
- balboa(ish)
- charleston(ish)
- blues
- lindy 0-140
- lindy 141-250
- lindy 250+

Other (non dancing related)

I also have many sub groups that branch down beyond that in both the jazz/swing and other parent groups. The program then has many sub filters that can be applied. Thus making the organisation of files/tracks as simple or as complex as you would like.

It also has a synchronisation feature which is normally used to synch my ipod with specific lists, but with a laptop on a network you can map the HDD of the laptop and synchronise to it. Specifying which items to synchronise - the program then only moves across copies of the tunes you want to the laptop. For example I could simply drag the parent of "jazz/swing" to the laptop (within JR Media Center) and it will only move the songs that fall into that list/area to the laptop.

Of course for it to work the best I need JR Media Center on the laptop so I can simply import an XML export of the pc based library.

I know it sounds confusing in print but I assure you it's as easy as a couple of clicks of the mouse.

The only stuff i archive these days is music that I've PPD'd and then it goes onto a RW DVD.