How-to: annoy Vinyl DJ's

I went over to mates place to practice the other night, he had arranged a with a couple of his vinyl junkie friends for a demo of Traktor, who when I got there were griping about having to lug around a couple of hundred pounds of records to a gig.

I just smiled knowing that I had just retired more music out of my collection on my laptop hard drive than these guys take to a gig. They became somewhat agitated when I pulled an SD Memory out of my pocket announcing that my music for the night and then some was all on this postage stamp sized card measuring 32mm X 25mm x 2.5mm (1.25in X 1in X 1/16th in) My mate has Tracktor studio on his system and I had my collection playlist and settings on the card so all I did was plug my card in, setup the file locations and I was off to the races.

It was interesting to hear the comment that because the card was so physically small the audio quality would suffer. The card holds 1GB but they did not want to get it that quality depends on Bit rate and recording settings not physical size....

anyway they were impressed but really pissed of because of all the lugging around I don't have to do.

Phil

 

damn, i didn't even know they made memory cards that big. My laptop even has a little card reader on it. I never installed the drivers because i thought it was going to be something useless to take up processor clicks.

 

Yeah I'm like you I did not get interested until they hit 512MB and then I waited for pricing to come down on the 1GB cards Now you can get 1GB for $79 with a $20 rebate. I expect they will be on special for 65.00 over the Xmas selling period, which makes putting a fully preped Playlist and MP3s or MP4s on one for a nights play really attractive. The word is, the limit for current SD Cards is 2GB but we need a new generation of high density flash chips to do that, and are not expected to hit the market till late on in 2005, They will be a permium price point too so you should expect new cards to be well over $150 at introduction.

The Technics 1210 CD player also can use SD cards to store loops loop points and tracks.

Can you imagine how torqued our vinyl only friends will be when cards hit 4 or 5 GB in a few years and Laptop DJs are taking 30-40 songs to a gig in uncompressed form or 100-200 tracks in compressed form on on cards smaller than a stylus storage box.

I must confess though that while its interesting to have the tracks on an SD card if you are taking your gear to a gig its more convenient to have everything loaded on your laptop Right now I backup my collection and Stripes data to a card for safe keeping. At home backing everything up over the network is about as fast and convenient.

Phil

 

Feel free to backup everything!!!

Last week i lost my HD, the first partition went down and of course it is too much expensive to recover the second partition. Now i have to rip all my cd collection again and rearrange music by groups.

This is pecially helpful if you pay downloads at dancerecords or beatport or itunes. Redownloading everything is a mess!!!

Now, getting into the thread, it is very nice even to have 2 cdroms with 1,4 gigs of music at your pocket. that beats vinyl the hard way. Not so stylish, but works allright. of course, it is way much better if you write the id3 tags from traktor, that way, the software info is stored in the mp3.

 

I know Beatport and iTunes, but what is this "dancerecords" ?

Hobbes

 

Yeah, my mistake.

There you buy records, not mp3. But u can listen to them befor u buy.

Sorry bout that.

Ah, i almost missed. www.dancerecords.com

 

I carry a DVD disc with about 4 gig of essential tunes on.

If my external hard drive decided to die half way though a gig, I could work from my small colection of back up audio CD's for a while, whilst importing the contents of the DVD in to Traktor. (or alternatively, the 27 gig of songs on my iPod)

Always have a back up plan, incase something goes horribly wrong.