DJ Music

Laptop DJing is on of the best ways for DJs to get into DJing, and makes the whole process of learning to DJ a lot easier, in order to DJ music on a laptop you need to have several different elements.
You’ll need:
- a Laptop
- some DJ software
- a MIDI controller
- a sound card

To DJ music on a laptop, you’ll need to also consider the kind of laptop you want. first, for a laptop for DJing music you need to consider if you want a Mac or a PC. You’ll find that Macs are better designed to cope with the processing power need to run Music and DJ programs. PCs however are good for DJ beginners as they are cheaper and so are the music and DJing programs for them. Here are the pro’s and con’s to DJing on either platform.

Mac:
Pros:

dead easy to use

very very stable operating system (good for DJing)

all the new macs have hardware specs the meet the requirements of DJ software

good battery life

reasonably durable

long lifespan (new models don’t come out every month, but rather every few years)

con’s

expensive

OS system requires different software to PCs

As you can see there are more benefits to DJing on a Mac, particularly one that is designed to DJ music. To DJ on a mac, you’ll need to keep an eye on the specs: you’ll need a 1GHz processor at least and at least 1 GB of RAM, a hard drive of around 80GB and above is preferable although if you have an iPod that can act as an external hard drive. The best place to look for a mac to DJ music on is Mac Warehouse. In terms of Mac models good for DJing on the following are great to DJ Music with: any of the desktops, the Black Mac Book, any of the Mac Book Pro’s, and the Mac book Air. If you’re running on 1GB RAM you’ll ideally want to increase this to 2GB RAM for DJing.

DJing on a PC is a good alternative to those of yu on a tight budget or if you already have a high quality laptop, PCs are designed for mass market and may not have some of the features that are ideal fo DJing on, as such you need to be more selective and know what you want, it often helps to get some advice, lucky for you the DJ Music team will have reviews of the various Laptops the are good for DJing music on.

PC:

Pro’s

cheap

easy to buy

software cheaper to buy

hardware compatible

con’s

fragile

may not match up to specs

frequent new models come out

PCs are designed as a general all use machine so in order for a DJ to begin DJing on a PC, you first need to find a PC that meets the minimum standards of 2GB RAM, 80 GB hard drive and fast Pentium 2 processor, these are the bare minumum specs for DJing on a PC, obviously the more the better. Because PCs are so common, you can find special laptops designed for DJing, these DJ laptops are often worth the extra cost as they will have special features made to cope with DJing music. You’ll probably find that these DJing laptops are well worth checking out Dolphin Music Digital DJ System 001, 15.4″ Red Sub Audio Laptop, Toshiba Satellite Pro A200-1PN 15.4″, all these are designed for DJing and accomodate the music playing demands of a DJ.

additional components

To DJ on a laptop you’ll probably need a few extra bits, although you could get away with DJing on an out of the box laptop like the DJ laptops above, it will make your mixing easier and your DJing better by considering some additional tools. Some of these tools will be useful when DJing live, some will improve the quality of the music and some will help make it easier to DJ in a digital format.

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If you’re a laptop DJ then you’ll know that its often hard to control your music using the keyboard and a mouse. the MXS DJ seems to be a home made DJ controller, essentially a cut down streamlined DJ mixer and DJ turn table control, it looks great and really slick, and from the video it looks like it will control all the various aspects of a DJ mix it looks like it was designed to be portable and efficient and that sleek black looks awesome.

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Laptop DJing differs from conventional DJing in that all you need to DJ is  a laptop, a sound card and an output (speakers), all your Dj music, and DJ mixing ‘equipment’ is data contained with int he Dj laptop, making it highly functional, multi tasking, and unbeleivably portable.

If you plan on DJing on a laptop then you need to consider a few things before going out any buying a DJ laptop, these factors affect your Djing, music quality and costs.

First you want to consider the size of your Dj laptop- size affect portability and screen size, if the screen size is too small you might have challenges looking at and menipulating your DJ programs.

consider the size of the DJ laptops hard drive, whilst you can get external hard drives, really the larger the hard drive of your DJ laptop the more storage space you have for your msuic and programs.

Next you want to look at processing power- this is the pentium processor, go for the top spec.  Also have a look at the RAM or random access memory, for DJ laptops you want to have one that is at around 2 GB, this is critical as this determinse how smoothly your dj software runs and certainly if you’re going to Dj music with a Laptop at a DJ gig, you don’t want your software to crash mid set.

Now that you have whittled down the number of Laptops open to you you can start thinking about look and operating system. there are two main operating system for you to choose from, MAc and PC windows, personally I reckon Mac is better and the software is designed to cope with media heavy applications, however Windows PC are cheaper and have a larger variety of programs available, really it depends what you are more comfortable using…go for a Mac, when it comes to looks its really up to you, but you’ll want to think about somthing thats sturdy and able to take a few knocks.

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If you Dj, then the chances are you’ll have come accross Laptop DJing, this is a far more flexible way to DJ, with special DJ programs aready out there to help you DJ music on the go, via a Laptop, whilst the Pacemaker offer you plenty of functionality and portability, it only offers you the freedom to DJ across two channels and with a  limited amount of effects and variations, if you’re using a Pacemaker to DJ music than you’ll already have a laptop, and indeed a simple DJ program installed - the Pacemaker Editor. There are literally dozens of Laptop DJ programs out there as it is and choosing a Laptop DJ program is easy considering most of these laptop DJ programs offer free trials, this means you can try these Dj programs and choose the one that suits your style of DJing before you commit to buying one.

The benefit of laptop DJing is that you can carry your entire catalogue of music with you AND have all the tools to make some truely unique mixes without haveing to compromise on protability, in this sense you benefit from being able to make multiple loops, use squencers along side mixers, haev stand alone effects programs, and in some cases you can even add normal decks and mixers to control whats happening on the laptop, for any DJ this gives far more flexiblity and functionality that wouldn’t have been possible even a few years ago, and you can now see DJs literally producing live on stage.

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