Wedding DJ Needed!!

[MrToast]

I dont know if this is the right place to ask. However, i am getting maried this winter and plan to have a party in late dec. We were planning on having a dance party and were going to do it all ourselves. Fearing the absolute shitness this could turn into we decided to look for a cheap DJ, nothing special.

anyway if anyone knows anything that could be of use to me that would be grand.
cheers.

Mr Toast

[GomiGirl]

What sort of music?

[Charles]

This is what iPods are for.

[MrToast]

well mainly cheesey pop music. I would present the DJ with a bunch of tracks( queen, daft punk, kenny loggins, black eyed peas...anyting goes really).
Yeah i thought about an ipod but having a break between each song would not be cool.

[amdg]

You can change the ipod settings to eliminate a break between tracks, or so I am told. Or maybe just burn a CD with no breaks. Congrats on the wedding!

[GomiGirl]

well mainly cheesey pop music. I would present the DJ with a bunch of tracks( queen, daft punk, kenny loggins, black eyed peas...anyting goes really).
Yeah i thought about an ipod but having a break between each song would not be cool.

Sorry - my DJ friends would slap me silly if I suggested this. These guys are mainly drum and bass.

[Charles]

You can change the ipod settings to eliminate a break between tracks, or so I am told. Or maybe just burn a CD with no breaks. Congrats on the wedding!

Yeah, then the only problem is that lots of CD tracks have a second or two of blank space before each song, to give a pause between tracks. It depends on how the CD was produced, what kind of music, etc.

I found a cool trick so you can trim songs easily and transfer the trims to the iPod. In iTunes, click on a track and Get Info, under the Options tab there's an In and Out point. I just bring up the track in QuickTime Player, scrub around and find the exact point where I want to start, then note that time and re-enter it in the In point. You're not destructively trimming the file, just giving pointers for the In and Out points. And those pointers transfer to the iPod when you resync. Nice. I used this to trim some live tracks that had excessively long applause or rambling spoken intros, just cut to the music, less talk more rock.

Anyway, you could customize your tracks for iPod presentation, there is a setting for no pauses between tracks. But no crossfades. You might like Traktor 3, it's a great piece of DJ software, it does all the crossfade stuff, but the beat matching and transitions are complex enough that you might as well hire a real DJ who can handle all that crap for you. You can download a demo (Mac or PC) at the Native Instruments site.