deathy

Business, at least until recently. It’s a common way for your music to stand out from the crowd was to be loud, since it has been shown quite clearly that the average person does respond favorably to loud, and if you are the loudest track played in a group on the radio, your track is what gets remembered. If it sells more units, then crank that knob up to 11. (I don’t agree with this mentality, of course.)

However, now that we’re all using personal media devices that can normalize the volume levels of all your tracks, hopefully we’ll see a shift toward higher quality sound being what sells the track – if they are all the same volume, then the battlefield will change. That said, places like YouTube, Soundcloud, etc., are not normalizing all tracks to the same volume (yet, hopefully), so it will still be a way to stand out there.

Great, glad I could help!

Record of Loudness War @ Wikipedia

Soundcloud is a great idea… these days, a huge part of marketing yourself as a musician is actually to give away a lot of your music. Not just so they can listen to it, but let them download it. There are a lot of DJs who scour Soundcloud for free tracks in the style they play, and if they like your sound and there’s a free download, they may well play your tracks for their audience.

Another suggestion that I wish I’d known when I started making music – if you don’t already know how to DJ, and your style is one that gets played commonly by DJs, then learn. This will help you to learn what DJs do when they play your track, the things they look for when mixing a track, and so forth. If you make a song that is a lot of fun to mix, then you’ll get more plays too.

Also consider releasing DJ edits of your tracks. Many DJs can make their own edits, but unless your track is spectacular, they may not feel like committing the time to do this. This is particularly a good idea if your normal mix tends to be shaped a bit strangely in spots, such as fills that are a different length than your normal phrases right in the middle of where a DJ might normally want to transition with the track.

I can’t address all of your questions, but your second one, specifically – The “4GB” in your Mac refers to its RAM, not its disk storage. That’s the space you have for what you’re running at any given time, your programs, etc. Your music, if stored on your laptop, goes on the disk, which is going to be a different number – and that number is going to be a LOT bigger than 4GB.

If you are using 320Kbps MP3s, then you figure an average of 7MB per song if you play in a genre where tracks are “typical” length for most music, that being approximately 3.5 minutes. So, that means per GB of storage your disk has, you should be able to fit approximately 150 tracks. Now, you aren’t going to be able to use ALL of your disk storage for music, of course, but that should help you to get a rough estimate of how much music you can pack in.

Let me add – you should limit how many tracks you have loaded, especially in the beginning, because it is more important that you be intimately familiar with the tracks that you are playing than it is that you can play thousands of different tracks. I am also a new DJ, and currently have about a hundred tracks in my primary style, about 50 tracks each in a couple of related styles that I am trying to work into my sets, and a very small smattering of a few other styles that I have loaded just to satisfy my curiosity about mixing in genres other than those I like to work in.

Now, I may not be able to play every song that somebody might want to hear, but for most of my tracks, I know them very well – I know how they transition, I know other tracks that they sound spectacular with, and I know their idiosyncrasies – such as where they have odd phrase lengths and where I have to ride the gain during spots because it can be a little too dominant for parts of my transitions.

When I first started DJing, I made the mistake of loading my entire music collection up, and I had no idea what to do with any of it. I was completely overwhelmed. I cleared out my collection completely (not deleting the files, of course) and started adding tracks back into it a handful at a time, practicing with those until I was really comfortable with them, and then I would add in more.

This has really helped me to get a handle on my sound.

Ableton is certainly really great software for doing mashups and DJ edits, but it may be too much blasting power if you’re not looking to get into serious production (though I can’t say I know Lite). It does look like Ableton Lite is just a pack-in with particular products, so you’d probably need to buy particular hardware to get a copy of it with it.

A good place to start may be to check out How To Make Your Own DJ Edits, offered by this site – it seems like it should be a good course, though I do not have personal experience with it as I have been producing much longer than I’ve been DJing.

You might want to check out Mashup by the folks over at Mixed in Key. I don’t have direct experience with it, but it looks like a good low cost solution for mashups and DJ edits if you are not needing hardcore production software.

Live remixing is certainly a lot more work, but at the same time, it is something that really allows you a lot of expression – it is something that I want to work into my sets more.