SwingDJs

Anyone else use this for Laptop DJing? I just got it and tried it out for the first time, and am not too impressed. It was not very user friendly, and made it very easy for me to make bad mistakes while DJing.

Jeremy, which version do you use? Silver, Blues, Red, FX? or the New Red or Blue "VRM" versions?

I use Blue and have been happy with it. But I have been wondering if I would like the Blues VRM version better.

A lot of people say how much they like it. I think they like that it's cheap

I have always, and continue, to prefer BPM Studio Pro. It looks like an actual Dual Deck DJ system, and works a lot like it too. It has just about every feature a DJ of our nature could want, plus some:

1. Actual Working BPM Detection (it's amazing when BPM detection works on old swing music).
2. Stored Cues and Equalizer Settings
3. Manual and Automatic customized Fading (on a per song basis).
4. Can drag/drop directly from Explorer, or you can set up customized playlists to drag and drop.
5. Keeps track of songs played, and that list can be exported to any number of formats, including html.
6. Multiple soundcard support so you can assign decks, or the preview "deck" to any soundcard you choose.


... the list goes on. It's a bit pricey, but to me this is the best piece of software.

http://www.bpmstudio.com

I've been using Traktor DJ studio and KIND of liking it. None of the DJ software I've found has a good MP3 tag editor/sorter for my tastes. The one thing I don't like about Traktor was that you can't set up multiple sound cards, kind of annoyed me. I think you can set up a 5.1 sound card as a monitor on one channel and the other channel as speaker output, but that doesn't help me.

I've been using media monkey as my music sorter/finder/previewer and then using Traktor as my actual player. seems to work okay, although it'd be nice if I could drag from media monkey right into my playlist in Traktor, but oh well, not like searching up a song takes all that long.

I tried out PCDJ blue and didn't like it. The music sorting seemed even more clunky than Traktor and the feature set seemed more limited. And I couldn't find any previewing mode at all. /shrug.

Yes, PCDJ Red it was. It actually isn't as horrible as I thought, just not as good as I wish it was. I was using it for a graduation party (not a swing dance) so I was actually mixing songs. It had a very frustrating time getting all of my music loaded in.

One particularly frustrating thing that happened was that when I attempted to sort a folder in any way other than the default (i.e. by song title or artist title), the program would subsequently lose track of the song. I would get a message like "the track is not in the record case" or something like that. It meant that I could only look through the songs in the way that the program wanted to sort them (which wasn't always the same.)

Anway, I think I'm going to go back to using CDs for swing dancing and use the laptop for the more conventional DJ stuff. We'll see....

yedancer wrote:Anyone else use this for Laptop DJing? I just got it and tried it out for the first time, and am not too impressed. It was not very user friendly, and made it very easy for me to make bad mistakes while DJing.

Yes sir re Bob....

The 2004 swing DJ championships was won on PCDJ !!!!!!

thats right, and I use the cheapest version downloaded.
Been using it now all over the world not only to DJ with But also to teach.

oh and i have a shitty slow laptop... ! hahaha

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Hey Peter,

That's what I like to hear - especially the cheap part

I've been trying out new software and my biggest challenge is getting comfortable with how the music is managed. Do you have any advice for getting its storage case structure to feel comfy? I've become very used to iTunes (for better or worse)

Also.... As this is my first post, Hello to Brian and Choco and all others who know me as Ben Birns (moved from Melbourne, to Sweden and now Edinburgh).

Regards,

Ben

SirScratchAlot wrote:

yedancer wrote:Anyone else use this for Laptop DJing? I just got it and tried it out for the first time, and am not too impressed. It was not very user friendly, and made it very easy for me to make bad mistakes while DJing.

Yes sir re Bob....

The 2004 swing DJ championships was won on PCDJ !!!!!!

thats right, and I use the cheapest version downloaded.
Been using it now all over the world not only to DJ with But also to teach.

oh and i have a shitty slow laptop... ! hahaha

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