SwingDJs

I thought this might be an interesting topic for a poll.

That could go either way for me.

Local Dance DJing: Computer
Out of Town DJing: Original CD in binders
Radio DJ: Original CD in binders

I chose "Computer" because that's what I do the most.

Also, I'll be copying my originals to backups very soon.

Other for me was lots of the above.

Over the past two years I've been slowly burning all of my original CDs to mixes organized by artist, picking out all songs that I might play at a dance.

For many years I just carried around the originals until I got to the point where I had too many CDs that I wanted to carry with me. Combined with the fears of scratching CDs irrepairably or getting my collection stolen, I finally got around to burning my collection. I didn't just make straight copies of my originals due to the space issue I mentioned above. This new system affords me better organization for quickly finding tracks and gives me a whole lot more music at my disposal while DJing. I do miss the visual cues of flipping through original album covers, but I've gotten used to it.

Jesse

Its interesting, from the discussions on here before, I thought more people djed directly from a computer, but the results of this poll to date only show 1 person.

JesseMiner wrote:Over the past two years I've been slowly burning all of my original CDs to mixes organized by artist, picking out all songs that I might play at a dance

This is pretty much the same method I use.

Also, whenever I make a mix CD, I log the tracks into a database. Periodically, I print a copy out of the titles (one version sorted by artist, title; another sorted by title,artist). I export the database to Excel and print the Excel sheets.

This way, I don't have to spend as much time remembering where I put a particular track.

For the same reason mentioned by others, my original CDs never leave my house.

Somewhat stating common knowledge, here: CD-Rs allow me to carry the danceable songs from ten CDs or more on one CD. They also allow 80 minutes of music, instead of sometimes only 45 minutes on an original CD, only 5-10 of which is danceable.

They also allow me the flexibility of either organizing by artist or cherry-picking individual songs from artists that have only one "dance-worthy" song on the CDs I own and compiling them onto compilations. With burning software like Nero, I also can edit out long intros, bass solos, or parse down a super-long song into danceable portions so that the songs on my CD-R are cued to the start of the danceable stuff.

As Jesse noted, I also don't want to run the risk of getting my collection stolen. CD-Rs are so cheap, now, that I not only have most of my DJ stuff condensced onto CD-Rs, I have a full back-up collection of my DJing CD-Rs so that I won't lose much of anything if my DJing book is stolen. CD-Rs are almost indispensible for me, now.

I have not made the plunge to computer DJing because I don't like MP3s, don't have the hard drive to hold all the music I would DJ on my laptop, and don't have the laptop equipment necessary to provide top-quality sound when I DJ. I also don't want to buy a new laptop and equipment purely for DJing when I have already put in for a professional sound system with CD players. All that might change if I did not also find that CD-Rs meet my needs rather aptly.

The one thing I do miss that a computer could offer is organization capabilities of a database that could make browsing for the next song easier. But it could also make it more difficult and less of an "art" to find the best song to play next.