I have just been speaking to a DJ mate of mine who did a 50th birthday last week.... He presumed that because they were all gonna be around that age group, he didnt have to take tons of discs with him.... How wrong he was... he presumed that they were gonna be into 60/70s stuff and a bit of party.... Whoops! What did they want? RnB and Garage!

The lesson to be learned here is that even though most of us would have a good idea on what type of music your customers want, unless we actually ask them, we could be in for a surprise! Alway ask your customers what they want before the gig so you havent left the all important cd case at home which holds their kind of music!

This is the area where us DJ's using mp3 come into our own. We're able to bring an absolutely huge collection to EVERY gig, and don't need to go through the collection before each gig to sort what we're gonna bring and what we're gonna leave at home.. Consequently, we're ready for just about any type of audience/style of music.
I have 10,000 tracks at all my gigs which covers an incredible range of music genres, and it's served me well many a time. For example a few weeks ago I did a wedding where they had requested a lot of jazz, soul & R&B, absolutely no cheese or pop whatsoever. It turned out that there were a few people there from South Africa & Namibia. I put on some Kanda Bongo Man & other African music and virtually the whole audience went absolutely potty! but if i'd gone along with only what they asked for, I wouldn't have brought the African stuff with me.

I believe that its called being prepared, i carry at least 2000 cds with a wide selection of everything.

I must admit that despite my earlier reservations, I'm starting to like the laptop idea more and more. There is something about NOT having to carry around seven heavy boxes of CD's and figure tip control over searching for an elusive track through 1000's of compilations. .

I take on board the quality issue mentioned on the other post regarding lap top soundcards vs full size PC's. However I am ripping my CD's at 192kbs and when playing them back from a laptop, through a 3kw P.A I can't notice anything that would lead me to believe it wasn't coming from the actual original CD.

I take 7000 songs with me to EVERY gig, even school discos for 5-6 year olds courtesy of Ots !!

Chris, You can't notice the difference so no-one else will, especially as they will be drunk. Do you play through the laptop soundcard or an external, I still use the original.

Ah Computer Esk awakens! Mod yerself! and looking at the size of you compared to me i think you better button it or i will sit on you Joking aside this week it happened,for week day gigs one club has now got a new computer system where they program in audience type,age group and required music type and the computer plays the rest of the evening.all wednesday contracts we have are now cancelled, a loss of £750 a month for me so dont expect any support from me on the computer front!

aye, but the advantage of knowing about these mp3 systems is that we also know which buttons to press to say... ahem... make them not work as well as maybe they should .... that's a nasty virus, you should get that looked at

And of course you are only a phone call away!

So am I but I never get the call

Its ok if your not a complete techno phobe like me goodself! Mind you in my collection I can usually cover every eventuality.. only thing is my cases are narf heavy!!!

Call Karens new venture !!

Right a challenge for the Esk and ADS here, i went and saw a dj this weekend who was using a laptop (apple) for his back catalogue and i was impressed.(must admit it) So if i was going to buy a laptop which i was going to use to solely store\playback my older cds do i really need to spend loads of money or can i use a cheap laptop and if so what do i need?.Advice please!

Thank u ,its a start

Chris, following advice received from ADS & co, i've recently invested in moving my CD Collection to laptop for paractical purposes, and despite my earlier reservations I've come to the conclusion, even this early on, that it's the best thing i've ever done

I'm using a 2nd hand SONY VAIO. Spec:- 700mhz p3 Processor, 128mb Memory (in the process of upgrading to 196mb which is the limit on this model - although currently running smoothly on 128mb) 20GB hard drive. Running OTS DJ on a single integrated Soundcard. I chose the VAIO since it has a good reputation for multimedia applications, and despite advice against using a laptop soundcard for this application, I honestly can't find any degradation in sound quality when plugged through a 3kw PA . Paid £320 from E-bay for the machine, and just formatted the drive and re-installed the O/S (Win98SE) and drivers. I don't run any other software on the machine other than Win & OTS or allow it connection to the 'net, I rip the CD's to OTS files directly from the main pc and transfer to the laptop using a 10/100 network connection.

I also bought a faster IBM Celeron 1.2ghz as back up (20gb/ 128mb/ Win XP), thinking that the VAIO wouldn't be fast enough (Wrong!), but i'm happier running the VAIO as the main machine and so far it has run glitch free and the audio is a little bit better on the VAIO.

I believe that OTS can run on machines P2 266mhz and above, although I would consider perhaps using 256mb+ of RAM on lower spec machines. Certainly 400mhz seems to be what a lot of D.J's are happily using at the moment.

That was a nice price you paid for the Sony Chris.

I must admit my concerns about MP3 are sound quality. I like the idea of using the format to access rare tracks, bootlegs, very new releases etc.

As for humping CDs, once I've got the heavy gear loaded the CDs are no bother. But I guess an MP3 system would save on loading time.

The files are ripped directly from the CD at 192kbs, and upon playing back I could not tell any difference through the P.A than if it was playing directly from the original CD. I do use a Behringer Sound Enhancer as part of my P.A rig so whether that is helping or not remains to be seen (I'll switch it out when I use it again).

How it would sound with downloaded MP3's is another matter, but I can state that if you rip then directly from an original CD at 192 or higher then you shouldn't notice any difference.

How are you finding the task of copying all the discs over?

Go on then, I will go and but a laptop just to see how fast my machine get rip them

Using a reasonable soundcard, 128kbs is equal to CD quality. No big deal, it just saves hard drive space and makes ripping a quicker process.
The time taken to rip a CD also depends on the speed of your CD drive, software used and configuration as well as hardware spec.

(The Moog - Stating the bleedin' obvious a speciality )