Sooner than later (hopefully). When the powers that be have decide to make a decision about the "DJ licence" We will have the choice if we so wish to convert our stuff to MP3 or chosen format and "Digital DJ"

What are the viable alternatives to PC mixing and playing.

I am aware of the Numark hard drive controllers

Does anyone have information of any others?

Which is likely to become the leading contender in the uk?

Has anyone had Hands on use of any of them. If so can you offer an opinion?

Jimbo

I suspect more and more of these products will come to the market in the coming years.

Watch this space!

More and more cd controllers and mixers offer the option to plug in an Mp3 player nowadays don't they?
The only concern I'd have about a hard drive cd player is all the knocking and banging about they get during transport and setting up etc.
Laptops are bad enough if you treat them roughly.
I think hard drives are the future though.

Ian.

I'm sure over time the likes of Dennon and Pioneer with come on board and start to produce a decent Controller that will play MP3's from a range of different mediums, like the already meantion Numrak Director does.

And yes if you are worried about knock's to hard drive use flash based media, you can them them in sizes of upto a few gig and they are getting bigger, and they are quite robust, i managed to wash one of my flash drives with my shirt left it to dry and and it worked perfect no data loss!!

One problem with flash memory is the limited number of writes it can reliably perform, although that number is pretty high - well into the tens of thousands - so for music perhaps this isn't an important consideration.

Hard drives can actually take quite a knock whilst NOT in operation, and survive. (I don't recall the number of Gs exactly.....) I would expect a piece of professional DJ gear to have the drive mounted on shock absorbing mounts in view of the inevitable bumps it would receive, and this would, depending on the quality of the mounting, make it all but immune to anything but the most severe RTA sort of shock.

I look forward to some development in this direction, as using a PC has always seemed a bit like using a sledge hammer to crack a nut.

A hard drive when switched off can survive about 300 g's but only for a millisecond or so. Your average high end laptop can survive a 3 foot fall while running and survive intact apart from cosmetic damage. I seem to remember a big AD campaign by one company guaranteeing the survival of its Laptops. Hardware reliability has improved and the cost has tumbled all the time. I suppose you could regularly replace the main Gig hard drives if it was a major concern but the event of two failing at the same time is rare unless its to a virus or catastrophic hardware failure.

Jimbo