Last night, I ran a small event in my hometown. The headline DJ had just received his MBP back from the Apple Shop repairs 2 days before, after his friend had spilled coffee over it. It had been working fine in his house when he gave it a solid road test.
I was finishing up my set and he was meant to come on, everything had worked fine during sound-check, and when he tried to cue all he was getting was a fizzling white-noise. We unplugged one of the turntables and put his CDJ/soundcard out into that channel, to check that it wasn't just a dead channel but the noise was coming through still.
I was using Traktor with timecode vinyl, and some actual vinyl, and in the heat of the moment my laptop became disconnected, thankfully while I was playing a piece of real vinyl. For about 15 minutes I was using 1 turntable and 1 CDJ as they were the only things I could while i connected everything back up. Thankfully I had burnt a crapload of CD's before, just in case.
His laptop eventually started freaking out, and shut itself down before coming up with a 'your laptop was shut down due to a fault' screen. Me and the other DJ set his S2 and my timecode back up and went back to back for the last hour and a half.
It ended up okay but it goes to show, even when you think that your laptop is in tip-top shape (as it should be coming back from Apple having been repaired, and the laptop itself only being a month old before the coffee was spilled) things can go wrong, so always have a backup. I'm glad I did, and as a fairly inexperienced DJ it was the people on these forums who made me want to be completely sure about it the first event we ran, and not risk it.
That's carried on with me and I just hope someone else learns from this story as well, because it can seriously fuck up your evening.
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