DJ Vintage

Hi and welcome to the forums.

Balearic and lounge/chill lounge are always good choices during drinks and even dinner, depending on how formal things are.

Why on earth would you want to add CD-players to your laptop to play audio CDs through your DJ-software ???

Even Pioneer has started REMOVING their CD-playing capacity from some of their CDJ-controllers and call them XDJ-something.

In RekordBox (both regular and DJ) if you open explorer, it does NOT show the CD-ROM drive. In Serato you can load the tracks from the audio-CD (without tags of course) and play them (at least in prep mode, didn’t have a controller to hook up handy).
Mixvibes Cross shows the drive in the Files tab, but does not show content. I.e. can’t see the tracks so can’t load them. Traktor (2.6.7 is the last version I have) also shows the audio-CD and allows you to load tracks.

Yes, with the provision that the sound quality might not be all that (laptop sound cards can be all over the place) and it’s usually optimized for headphone connection, which means a different resistance (ohm) and level.

You could consider getting a simple 2-channel (= 1x stereo) USB sound card with RCA outputs.

Not sure what you mean by led headroom, who needs headroom in these days of over-compressed tracks with less than 3dB dynamic range. 0dB rulez and Red=Bad. Haven’t used the RB(2) enough to remember if the headphone output is that low. Never read anything about it as a complaint by our readers. Knowing the other Pioneer controllers (I currently own an SX) the headphone amps are usually pretty loud (make sure you set the cue volume in your software high enough though!), to the point that if that isn’t loud enough I start getting worried about hearing damage.

Theoretically I suppose you could set RB DJ to external mixer, set the two relevant output channels to your sound card and operate the controls on the SB and the actual mixing on your Numark M4.

Seems a lot of work though for some headroom and (very) loud headphone levels, bringing two extra pieces of gear (mixer and sound card) with the accompanying cabling.

Howdy Cameron, welcome to the forums! Enjoy your time here.

One of the major advantages of Digital (Controller) DJ-ing is that it has opened up many, many new and creative ways of doing things. This includes (finally) a host of new sorts of gear. If you play CD’s, pretty much every player has to to do the same things whether it’s a CDJ, a Gemini rip-off, a Numark NDX, an American Audio/DAP/Behringer low end player does not really matter. Pioneer were the “pioneer” of the current CDJ form factor and have managed to become the defacto standard. There was no real alternative and by the time the alternatives showed up, the gear was there already. More importantly, it is hard to become a contender if the same basic functions need to be there.

So, at some point in time, if a club bought VERY expensive Pioneer gear, it would be in that club forever. And if there were Pioneer CDJs in a club, you’d have no reason to bring your own brand X, Y, Z players as they added nothing new, play is play, cue is cue and setting loops and cue points wasn’t rocket science on them either. But now, more and more DJs want to bring their own gear, because it DOES add something that the CDJs don’t have. And they want to use it with the software of their choice. I don’t think we will go back to a situation where a single brand dictates what software and hardware we have to use if we go play at a venue.

That ghost, to me, seems to be out of the bottle forever.

With (now) the major SIX (6!) PC/Mac DJ software packages and a lot of controller manufacturers around, creating your personal favorite DJ tool has become easy and fun. There is really no reason to have to adhere to some kind of standard if you can have your own best solution that you can carry around in a backpack.

This time around Pioneer is all but a pioneer on the controller/DJ software front. They are followers at best. Relatively late to the market with a full spectrum of controllers, very late to the market with their own DJ software.

We have seen the “buff” they gave to their CDJ/DJM combo in order to keep them relevant for festivals (Tour-series) where they have added iPad-like screens to all units.

In short, I think we will not see a resurgence of venues willing to invest between 6 and 8k for gear that a growing part of their DJs would not like to play on because they prefer to use their own.

And the competition is fierce. A single look at something like the Denon MCX8000 shows you what potential can be had. There is currently nothing in the marketplace that compares to it. But even that will only appeal to a part of the DJs and not become a standard for whatever reason. It does show that the DJ Booth is no longer a one-brand place anymore.

Just my usual 3 cents. Look forward to hearing other(‘s) views.

Haven’t tried that combo live yet. So can’t tell you. The software is still developing pretty rapidly from it’s first pretty much bare-bones Pioneer only release last year with very frequent updates. It seems they are watching forums and their support desk like hawks and making sure problems get solved fast. With that being the case, a two month old complaint might have already been fixed by a software or firmware upgrade.

So, hard to advise. Good thing it’s not a 1500 bucks controller.