Steelo

As a rule I usually say its best to mix the two songs as long as you can before cutting. Obviously for some genres this isn’t possible for long before you gotta cut or use one of the above techniques. For Tech & deep house I often let the track completely play out.

I had a similar issue with a bad MP3 from a reputable site (I won’t name names but one of the big guys) and I just emailed them. They gave me a credit towards future purchases. From my experience if you put the pressure on, they will cave eventually.

Damn If only I had the cash and the ability to get the time off work and could head that way. Nothing decent is happening with the music scene in Vancouver.

The easy solution is not to play that crap…Pitbull yuck!

You can do what terry said above, to slim it down but do you really need to? 4ms is lower than most people can go and the difference would most likely be negligible. I’m running my MBP at about 8.7ms and that is more than fast enough for mixing and mid-level scratching

Check out this recent DDJT blog entry:
http://www.digitaldjtips.com/2012/07/how-to-get-dj-bookings-a-guide-for-mortals/
It may be more aimed towards clubs but getting bar gigs is usually much easier in my experience.

You can buy super cheap, chinese-made no name speakers on ebay for next to nothing. The sound quality and build/durability may not be great but they will get the job done for a few gigs (hopefully) until you can afford something better. I would suggest renting some decent speakers until you can save enough money to buy a decent pair.

The Twitch and the S2 are both excellent controllers. You’ll want to make sure your beatgrids are perfect if you get the Twitch as the touch sensitive strip nudge thingy isn’t great so completely manual beatmatching isn’t great on it either…that being said, as long as you do the prep work, jogwheels may not be essential for your workflow. The S2 is very tightly integrated with Traktor and you do have the advantage that if you decide not to use the jogs to mix, you can map them to control some really cool effects.