Mid Life Crisis

If you want to severely limit your options, going RekordBox is a good choice. As is going from a controller (assuming your are on a Traktor S2 or S4 now?) to a setup with a regular mixer. The setup you are describing is a good option for people coming from club gear, that already have their stuff in RekordBox and want to move to mediaplayers. But once you have been introduced to DJ software (even if it wasn’t the right software the first time around) you’ll come to appreciate all the advantages it holds over more traditional setups.

And frankly, the money you are spending now is more than buying one DDJ-SZ which is an awesome controller that pretty much mimmicks a CDJ2000/DJM900 setup but WITH the added advantage of being fully midi-compatible.

Perhaps you could tell us a little more about plans/ambitions.

Funny thing, as the one thing I take to a club or venue that has CDJ2000s IS my laptop, hook up my USB leads, fire up the DJ software and don’t have to worry about no keyboard, single knob, small screen collections searches and such.
I’ll have the laptop slightly off to the side, so not sitting between me and the audience.

If you do decide to go RekordBox route, you should definitely look into the XDJ-1000 (see the review over on the blog). At only half the price of the 2000, it’s the replacement for the 850s (well, sort of) and has more features than the 900NXS. We do expect a higher-end model to surface sometime in the future to start replacing the … CDJ-2000?

The DJM900 obviously is a good, feature-packed mixer that you really can’t go wrong with in a regular (semi)-analogue setup.

If I had to do it now, I wouldn’t buy the 2000s, the price is just not justified if all you do is use it at home/for practice mostly. For the price of one 2000 you have two XDJ-1000s. Then again, for the price of two XDJ-1000s you have one DDJ-SZ.

And so we come full circle.

One thing to always ask yourself (I do on a regular basis), is whether you have optimized your workflow to fit your needs and not to fit your software/gear. It’s a pretty big pitfall in digital DJ-ing, like accumulating too much music by just stuffing everything into your DJ software and letting go of good ole collection management.

Relying on your laptop is often a way of saying I have gone from audio (ears) to visual (eyes) for a lot of things. And being (very) Old Skool myself I can relate to that. Still, the advantages that digital (with a laptop) offers are such that I don’t want to consider sacrificing all that and going back to “traditional” CDJ/DJM setup.

In this case I think that making the right choice is less dependant on the available budget as it is on the “truth” of going “traditional” being the real solution to your problem.

Hope that makes sense at some level 😀