Laptop DJing

[Surreal]

I just noticed that the Creative Labs Xmod is on sale on their site for $30. It's usually $70 or 80, so that's pretty good.
http://us.creative.com/products/product ... duct=15913

(now if only it didn't cost nearly the same to ship it up to Canada)
edit: owch, shipping is actually more than the sound card

[Toon Town Dave]

I'm really happy with my Turtle Beach Micro. It's small, does what I need and just works.

I have never been happy with Creative's drivers and user interfaces. The echo is tempting but a little more featureful than I need.

[Surreal]

Creative also had that PR disaster with the DanielK incident a few months ago. Regardless, it's still a good deal and I figured someone would be interested.

I really liked the Echo Indigo DJ (which I can't use on my new laptop). Depending on the price, I'd be very tempted to get the new one.

[russell]

I have managed to fill up my 200GB hard drive on my MacBook and I am about to embark on upsizing the hard drive. Western Digital have just released a 500GB internal drive suitable for a MacBook so I have ordered one of those. I am also planning to upgrade from Tiger to Leopard at the same time. Maybe a little bit ambitious but I could always revert to my old hard drive (cross fingers).
Other than the obvious of having a good backup any advice.
I will let you know the result of this journey.
ps I prefer not to go to the external drive route though that would be another option.

[russell]

Operation completed and the patient is still alive. All round was pretty painless. Now have a 500GB hard drive on my MacBook. I upgraded to Leopard by installing it directly on the new hard drive. I just copied my old iTunes folder onto the new drive and everything worked in iTunes.

[david]

David Kågedal on this board (he's also from Uppsala, Sweden) uses CuePhase and is, I think after speaking to him about it on severak occasions, quite content, although he has spoken about writing a dj app of his own...

Update: I have given up on CuePhase, and the developer seems to have abandoned it. Instead, I have moved to Play, which is an open-source application that seems close to what I want. Important parts of my wishlish that it matches are:

1) Queue-based interface (instead of two virtual record players)
2) Sound card for output selectable in preferences
3) Good support for Ogg Vorbis (including bpm tags)
4) Cheap (it's free!)
5) some hope of problems getting fixed (at least I still have hope)

and one thing that I didn't know I wanted, but I do:

6) support for AU effects, including equalizer etc,

The database browser isn't all that excellent, and there are a few bugs that I have found, but I like it anyway. I have downloaded the source and tried to fix one of the bugs I found, but I haven't learned modern MacOS programming yet.

[david]

A while ago, I bought a Creative Xmod, which has been discussed here, for DJing purposes mainly.

I suppose it works like it should but there is one really annoying thing about it. One of the reasons I thought it looked like a good device was that it had a big and useful volume knob that meant I could easily control the volume even if I wasn't always within arm's reach from a mixer.

But it turns out that the big knob isn't a volume konb. Instead it is a thing that pretends to be a keyboard (or something similar) that sends "volume-up" and "volume-down" keypresses to the computer when you turn it. And MacOS interprets those keypresses as instruction to change the volume on the primary sound device. So if I'm keeping the internal sound card as the primary sound device and configuring my DJ software to run on the external (Xmod) device, the volume knob will not control the volume of the sound coming from the device it is attached to, but instead control the sound of the internal sound card (to which I typically would connect my headphones). This is totally idiotic.

I guess it's because it can be confusing to both have software volume and hardware volume, so they opted for software volume only, but the implementation doesn't really work for me.

My M-Audio FastTrack Pro USB box is much nicer. It has no software volume. The hardware volume knob is kind of small and cramped in with some other knobs, but at least it works.

[Surreal]

Hmm, here's another interesting looking/sounding toy I've come across:
http://www.headphone.com/products/headp ... ithead.php

the first few reviews I could find on google:
http://www.anythingbutipod.com/archives ... review.php
http://www.dansdata.com/bithead.htm
http://www.stereophile.com/headphones/1204headroom/

Any thoughts on usefulness for a laptop dj?

[zzzzoom]

Instead, I have moved to Play, which is an open-source application that seems close to what I want.

I just checked out this program and it's really very nice. Thanks for the heads up.

[Toon Town Dave]

Hmm, here's another interesting looking/sounding toy I've come across:
http://www.headphone.com/products/headp ... ithead.php
<snip>
Any thoughts on usefulness for a laptop dj?

About as useful as a cruise missile is for hunting gophers.

[Surreal]

Mmm, more toys.. http://www.soundandvisionmag.com/speake ... ystem.html

[Toon Town Dave]

A toy, that's about it. They talk about it being for audiophiles and then their point of reference is an iPod as an audio source. It's likely not much better than a host of parity products in the iPod accessories market. $200 would buy an nice set of headphones with $100 or more left over to spend on music.

[Surreal]

I never claimed it to be otherwise. The mini speaker/ipod dock market is pretty crowded these days, but the reviews for this one seemed a step up (at least in terms of volume & sound quality, vs size).

An ipod for a sound source isn't all that bad. It's certainly a step up from my onboard soundcards on my desktop and laptop.

I keep hoping somebody will design an mp3 player that can act as an external sound card.

[Haydn]

An ipod for a sound source isn't all that bad. It's certainly a step up from my onboard soundcards on my desktop and laptop.

If an iPod produces better sound than a laptop then presumably anyone who DJ's with a laptop using the built-in sound should use an iPod instead?

[Haydn]

David Kågedal on this board (he's also from Uppsala, Sweden) uses CuePhase and is, I think after speaking to him about it on severak occasions, quite content, although he has spoken about writing a dj app of his own...

Update: I have given up on CuePhase, and the developer seems to have abandoned it. Instead, I have moved to Play, which is an open-source application that seems close to what I want. Important parts of my wishlish that it matches are:

1) Queue-based interface (instead of two virtual record players)
2) Sound card for output selectable in preferences
3) Good support for Ogg Vorbis (including bpm tags)
4) Cheap (it's free!)
5) some hope of problems getting fixed (at least I still have hope)

and one thing that I didn't know I wanted, but I do:

6) support for AU effects, including equalizer etc,

The database browser isn't all that excellent, and there are a few bugs that I have found, but I like it anyway. I have downloaded the source and tried to fix one of the bugs I found, but I haven't learned modern MacOS programming yet.

Have you looked at Disco XT? It does automation and might be of interest to you.

http://www.discoxt.com/