This URL comes up as unavailable or the link is broken.Andy Reid wrote:http://www.techtv.com/screensavers/answ ... 80,00.html
I agree with Greg that Jesse's article is great ( http://www.sloswing.com/dj/ ). It addresses my main beef with laptop DJs: getting sound cards that are capable of playing CD-quality sound sufficient for a good sound system, not just a factory-installed, "stock" sound card sufficient for a computer speaker. Otherwise, the sound from the laptop will not sound as good as the sound from a CD player. That is one major reason I have not made the plunge. (I also already have made the plunge for a professional CD-player setup (dual CD player, mixer, and amp), so I have sunken costs invested into the CD/CD-R method.)
I have never heard anyone DJ from a laptop and get good sound, in part because of MP3 compression, but also because of the sound card quality: sometimes both. It probably is possible (I have not heard Jesse's setup), but I have never heard a sound card match up to a CD player, perhaps because no laptop-DJ I've heard has spent the extra money beyond their factory-installed sound cards. My factory VAIO sound card did not measure up in a side-by-side, A-B test to a CD player, even when playing full WAV files.
I've also had bad luck saving music in weird formats, Greg, so I feel your pain : an "image CD" format was the worst, which saved the entire CD in a proprietary format that was unreadable from any other program. After I got rid of the program, I was stuck with huge, unuseable files I could do nothing with but delete them. I don't think your problem was VAIO related so much as program-related, though. I have encountered some VAIO-specific problems on my VAIO--mostly regarding re-installing Windows after a hard-drive crash because I don't have a built-in CD-ROM drive--but I otherwise really like it. I took it with me on a two-month cycling trip through Europe, and it survived marvelously (the hard drive crashed two years later, so it was unrelated.)