bob6397

When choosing a controller, first you need to decide which software you will be using as different controllers have different features depending on which software they are designed to be used for.

The main choices out there are Traktor, Serato, Virtual DJ and Cross DJ.

Once you have made a choice (they all have demo versions – apart from serato as you need a specific type of audio interface – so you can download them and try them out) then you should find that your job becomes much easier 🙂

On a different note – those headphones are good. They are what I use when I am DJing/Producing and I cannot recommend them more. BUT headphones are a very personal thing – ones that are comfy on my head may not be comfy on yours – so I recommend trying before you buy (Or at least getting them from a site you can send them back to if they aren’t comfy).

And when you come to get speakers, I recommend getting some Active speakers (with the amp built in) – most monitor speakers have this nowadays and roughly half/half in the PA Speaker market – the Alto speakers that were reviewed earlier this week on here may be an option??

bob6397

Love that reverse cymbal…and that deep kick 🙂

Like the track – I listened to the first one – not my style but nice 🙂

So, what I think you are referring to is a RAID configuration – where data is simultaneously stored on 2 disks at the same time so that if one disk fails the other can take over and the user experiences no downtime. This is used in pretty much every server ever made and nearly every company worth anything will have their servers set up in this way – it reduces strain on IT departments as they then have time to fix the problem rather than having people at their heels while it doesn’t work..

However, I would not recommend this as a may of making a backup of your data – with a backup you want records stored incase everything gets corrupted and then you need to restore from it. if you only have an exact copy of your hard drive, with all the corrupted data included, this is not going to help. You just end up with 2 sets of identical corrupted data.

What I use (on windows) is a program called All-Way Sync. I have it set up so that it runs a full backup of my laptop every week (The rate at which I make most changes – if it goes wrong it will take me 15 mins to get a week’s changes back). I rotate the folder it backs-up to using 4 different sync programs so that I have records from this week, last week, the week before that and the week before that.

I store all the data on a local NAS drive on my network (which it itself uses RAID) and on a portable hard drive as well..

This way I know that I A) Always have a backup and B) Always have a copy of the backup with me when I am DJing. It is in fact possible for me to use the portable hard drive as the main hard drive for my laptop – so if my main hard drive goes dodgy I can boot from the portable one, and it behaves like normal only a bit slower.. And then I can sort out the issue when I get home.

That’s how I set mine up. You can do the same (or similar) if you want, but it requires a decent level of technical understanding to do most of it – but the actual setting up the backups is easy. I run them every Sat night and then I know that my data is safe..

bob6397

Just a thought – could it be that the XLR’s on the wall are wired up wrong? Or wired up as an unbalanced connection despite being XLR? If so, do you have any adaptors that you could use to input an unbalanced signal into the sockets? EG going from the RCAs on the back of your denon through an adaptor to then output XLR??

This is the only thing that I can think of that it might be as the small PA mixer the singers used could well have been outputting unbalanced (Esp. if it was a smaller mixer – it’s quite hard to find a small mixer with proper balanced outputs these days..)

It could be complete nonsense.. on the other hand it may work.. Worth a shot??

bob6397

On Windows, right click on the little “speaker” icon bottom right. Select “Recording Devices” It should appear in that list if your laptop has that function (If you aren’t sire just post the names of all the different things and I will translate it 😉 ). If it does, then download Audacity (google it), then set the audio device up along the top and then hit record.. 🙂

In iTunes, go to your playlists. Select the playlist and go to File > Library > Export Playlist. Save it whereever you want an then repeat for all you other playlists…

I personally don’t do this, I instead backup my entire iTunes library onto my network file server.. If you then load up that iTunes library that you have backed up then you can then see all the tracks in them and restore from there.. It is much easier however just to have a full backup of everything – to the point where if it corrupts you can just delete the corrupt data and transfer your whole backup onto the file system of your mac, and it should then just work as if nothing had happened..

Another option would be to use the playlist export facility in your chosen DJ software… That will probably be easier than fighting iTunes all the time 🙂

bob6937

A cheap way would simply to be to feed the audio out from the numark through a splitter and then send one signal into the mic input on your (or another) pc.. You could then use Audacity to record the input signal and then you would have a recorded copy of your mixes. However, this would not be fantastic quality as you are relying on your laptop’s internal sound card to go from analogue to digital again before you can record it – actually buying the full version of Serato DJ (which you will probably end up doing anyway for other features) would be much higher quality and a lot easier to set up.

Another solution would be if your laptop’s internal sound card supports a “What-u-hear” (also known as various other names) function. My laptop has this and it basically means that any audio you send to the soundcard it presents back to the pc as an input device – you could then record this using audacity at much higher quality as the signal does not have to converted from digital to analogue and then analogue to digital before you can record it..

Hope this helps,

bob6397