Really odd problem earlier tonight at the club. Basically, I could not maintain a stable connection between my laptop and VCI. The longest I could keep a connection was about a minute. At first I suspected a physical problem as the USB port on the VCI is rather loose already and I thought I would have to take it apart and solder a lost connection, or something of that sort.
Anyway after coming home I connected my laptop and gear exactly as it would be set up in the club, and go figure I cannot reproduce the problem. I tried jiggling the USB connection on both the laptop end and the VCI end but to no avail, everything remains in working order (which is good!). So I can rule out that suspicion.
The only thing that's different between my home and the club is:
1. The bass vibrations. We just got a new booth that has a lot more bass coming through the bottom.
2. Maybe it has something to do with the power at the club versus the power in my home (FYI my laptop stays plugged in at the club, as well as my USB hub though the VCI is not connected through the hub).
I'm thinking it's the vibrations. I know for sure my VCI is affected by them which is why I use a heavy-set cloth folded over a couple times and my laptop slipcase to hold my VCI in place. I watch to see if the Data Send light goes off to see how bad the VCI is affected but I wasn't really having any problems of this sort. As well, I tried connecting the VCI while holding it myself in the air, shielding it from any vibrations of the sort but it still disconnected.
So right now I have no idea why it was disconnecting at the club but behaving just fine at home. Any ideas?
BTW when it would disconnect, it would immediately reconnect. However the quick disconnect would result in a prompt from Bomes etc. meaning it would need to be restarted, and because I use Traktor 3.3 I'd need to restart the whole program to re-recognize the VCI, so clearly this is a rather major problem with more gigs this weekend!
I'm not going to bother posting my laptop specs or anything like that, as I've been using the exact same setup for the past 4 months. The only thing that changes are the songs on my external HD. If you're still curious though, I'm DJing with a Lenovo Thinkpad X61 (Core 2 Duo 2 Ghz, 2 GB RAM) on Windows Vista which has been optimized quite thoroughly (to the point it looks like Win95 .
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