long time reader, just signed up yesterday..
i am a 19 year old bedroom DJ from melbourne australia looking to gain knowledge and experience..
but ive reached a dead end,
ive been mixing on a numark dj2go for about a year now (all i could afford being a student)
ive mapped my keyboard to work as hotcues and loops and everything i found i love about traktor.
which is amazing dont get me wrong, but ive now got a job and can upgrade, looking at the vci 380 or kontrol s2..
although im scared my laptop wont be able to handle the club set.. running a powerhorse toshiba pc from a few years back although has to be plugged in cos battery is shit..
so my main question to all you experienced guys is do i need to buy a mac to dj in clubs with??
or should i look at buying a rmx 1000 and just use that to do what i want to do with cdjs instead of forking out thousands on a mac and controller..
You don’t need a new Mac that’s like bringing a nuke to knife fight. Its over rated. I know lots of DJs that don’t use Mac’s. I am using a Windows 7 laptop with an I3 and 4 GB of ram. Works in the club just fine.
As long as its like a Intel core 2 with 4 GB of ram you should be fine.
Anyways I would go with the S2 and use the BeauBryte mapping from the Midimaps page. It really uses the S2 to its fullest potential. That’s what I’m using and its pretty awesome.
well thats good news.. damn thats more than ill be running.. very tempted to go down and buy a twitch when i get payed tomorrow haha, pretty keen on mapping that thing to traktor..
do you have any suggestions for optimising a pc for djing?
Sure. you need to disable a few things in the device manager, the main two would be the ACPI.sys under battery and all network devices. Other stuff you can disable optionally would be stuff like the webcam, card reader, cd rom etc
i also run a wee app called gamebooster which helps a lot http://www.iobit.com
if you have win 7 you want to disable all that aero crap, you want to maximize the system for performance, not looks.
if you really want to get into it, check out 2 other programs called DPC LATENCY CHECKER & LATENCY MON, the first will tell you your sytem latency and the second helps you to find and sort out those issues.
Win 7 may give you better performance but I’d try it on your current operating system 1st.
I’d avoid using any 3rd party programs like Gamebooster for the time being and see how well your laptop performs. Disabling Wifi and Bluetooth are the main places to start. Try Traktor out for a few hours before making too many changes and see how it goes.
traktor works fine at the moment i havnt had any issues, although i hate the fact i cant leave the thing unplugged my laptop runs great, i just want to reinstall windows and format (start clean running minimal programs including traktor) and unsure to keep vista or do windows 7
Reinstalling is a good idea and I would recommend using Windows 7 if you do, but don’t overwrite your old Windows installation in case for whatever reason you have problems with the new install.
yeah i thought 7 would be better, looks like ill have to do some research on where i can pick it up cheap.. anyway thanks for the help guys really made me feel welcome on the site!
really made me feel welcome on the site!