Tips for PC based DJs and KJs
by Bob Latshaw  / last updated 5-10-2010

Whether you're a new DJ just starting out or an old school DJ wanting to ween yourself from dragging your discs around to every show and switch to a computer based platform, the information contained here can surely save you a lot of trial and error.

All of the recommendations here are based on the premise that all DJ or KJ PCs should have performance, stability, and extremely low risk of failure, because the absolute worst thing that can happen to a DJ is for his or her system to fail, and bring the show to an abrupt stop.  You can piece together just about anything to work, but if you follow the recommendations, you will reduce your risk of problems.

PC Hardware

 You can use either a laptop or a full sized PC, but if you're also doing karaoke or video DJing as well, a laptop can easily overheat.  Laptops aren't as well designed for cooling and some laptops can overheat after long periods of use.  With karaoke and video, a laptop is even more prone to overheat because not only is it using the audio chip, but also working the video chip as well.  Most laptops only cool the cpu chip, and under average use this would be enough, but unfortunately for KJ work, hours of audio and video processing isn't what they were designed for, and with the audio and video chips not exposed to constant cool air, they will overheat and cause undesirable results.  With the advent of Windows 7 (which we love by the way), we've noticed a lot more overheating issues with laptops and its because Windows 7 pushes the video chip even harder to gain performance (and all those cool effects).  Laptops look cool, but that's where the cool factor ends.  On the bright side, desktop PCs are cheaper too.  Yes, its a little larger to carry, but some of today's desktops are actually lighter than a laptop.  If you have a standard 19" rack for your mixer, effects processors and amps, the best solution is a rack mounted PC that simply fits in your rack with your other equipment.

Recommended hardware:

Processor - Multi-core Intel or AMD processor running at 1.6Ghz or faster.

Operating System - Windows 7 is recommended.  This article used to recommend Windows XP, and we left it that way when Windows Vista was released, but Microsoft addressed all of the concerns with Windows 7, and most software (including all of ours) simply runs better on Windows 7.  Windows 7 video drivers tend to be less CPU intensive for running a full screen second display for lyrics.  Also, Windows 7 has a nice feature that automatically connects a second monitor as soon as you physically attach it so you don't have to go to the display properties and manually tell Windows its there.

RAM - 512MB minimum for XP, 2GB for Vista or 7.  The more the better, but anything over 2 gigabytes is really overkill for DJ work.  The software required for playing music and karaoke actually uses very little RAM memory but additional memory enables Windows to "cache" (or preload) system files in memory so that when they're needed, they don't have to be "fetched" from the hard drive which in turn makes your system faster.

Hard Drives - This is where you need to emphasize on space.  To be a good DJ, you'll want to have a decent collection of music.  If you also do karaoke (and most DJs do these days), you'll want a good amount of space like a terabyte or more.  As of this writing, 1 Terabyte hard drives can be purchased for less than $100 and that's a good starting size.  That's enough room for about 200,000 MP3s or MP3+Gs.  Even if that sounds like more than you have now, never underestimate how fast your collection will grow.  Most DJs have all made that mistake and ended up buying larger hard drives mutliple times, but thankfully we've reached the age where digital space is no longer a problem or a great expense.

CD/DVD Drive/Burner - If your music collection is still in its starting stage and you don't download your tracks in MP3 format, you'll need a CD or DVD drive that can read karaoke discs so that you can rip existing CDs into your collection.  Most drives can't read karaoke discs, but as of this writing, Plextor, Sony, and HP are a few of the brands that have models that support CD+G karaoke discs.  Karaoke discs use a special area of the CD called the "sub-channel".  a lot of drives are capable these days, but look for this feature when purchasing a drive.  If you already have your music on a hard drive, this isn't an issue.

Case - You can use a standard PC desktop or tower case, just make sure it uses a standard power supply.  Some small PCs use non-standard power supplies, and if the power supply goes bad right before a show, you're pretty screwed, while a standard power supply can be bought at your local computer or office supply store.  If some of your sound equipment is rack mounted, you can purchase a rack mount PC or build your own.  Premade rack mount PCs are usually for use as a server and are generally more expensive.  If you don't know how to build your own PC, you should at least order a good rack mount case and have your local computer store build the computer in it for you.  It will be much cheaper.   If your existing PC uses a standard size motherboard, you can actually transfer all of the components of your existing PC into a rack mount case.  As I stated before, rack mounted PCs are usually designed to be servers and the cases are usually too deep to fit into a rack mount sound equipment chasis.  You want to get a case that's less than 19" deep if possible. 

Video Card - For playing karaoke lyrics on a separate monitor, you're going to need a video card that's capable of "split screen" and has a composite out for the second monitor.  If you have a bar gig where you can hook into the bar television system, you may want to purchase an RF modulator that will convert the composit signal to VHF channel 3 or 4.  If you use a laptop, most likely it only has a VGA out port to use as your second monitor.  If you only need one screen for lyrics display, then a standard VGA monitor should suffice.  However, if you need to tap into a Bar's TV system, you will need to purchase a VGA to Composite adapter and then still may need a RF modulator to convert that signal to something that can be split across a coaxial TV cable.

Sound Card - Most modern PCs have a stereo sound output built-in to the motherboard and it's usually sufficient for most Karaoke and DJ work.  However, a separate sound card usually outputs more watts than the motherboard chip, and if your amplifier can't seem to boost the signal enough, this can solve the problem.  Also, a separate sound card also offloads a lot of work from the CPU helping it run cooler.  I recommend anything from SoundBlaster just for shear reliability.  Whatever you choose, it's important to have a backup sound card.  They don't fail that often but sometimes the constant plugging in and out of the cable can break the output plug and then you're S.O.L..  If you can set your system up so that the sound cable doesn't have to be removed for each gig, you'll cut your risk of this happening.  If you use a laptop, again we stress having a backup ready at all times, but the sound in most modern laptops is "High Definition" audio and more than sufficient for DJ work.  However, the impedence coming out of the headphone jack (which is where you'll attach your sound cable out ot your mixer) sometimes isn't enough and you'll mixer will need to boost this.  Some more modern mixers have a USB input which takes the sound in pure digital format from your laptop or PC and this is the best scenario because you don't loose any signal quality at all and you don't have to worry about boosting the signal from laptop headphone jacks.

Mouse - Get an optical mouse that you're comfortable with.  Optical mice are far superior and much better suited to the harsher environments you'll be working in and they don't require a mouse pad.  I don't recommend wireless mice because you have to worry about when the batteries will run out.

Keyboard - If you're DJing in bars or poorly lit areas, there are keyboards available now that actually light up.  As with mice, I don't recommend wireless keyboards.  You can't afford to run out of batteries or have some interference prevent you from queing up the next song at your show.

USB Backup Drive - You'll want to have a backup of your music and the best way to accomplish this is with a USB external hard drive.  Make sure the drive is large enough to hold either both of your regular and karaoke collections or get separate drives for each.  Also, make sure the USB interface on the drive is at least version 2.0 (it's 12 times faster than 1.x).  If your PC doesn't have USB 2.0 ports, you can purchase a separate USB 2.0 PCI card that will give you additional ports.  If you have multiple systems, your external drive is a good way to synchronize your music collections between systems.  If you wisely store your music collections in single folders, our free File Synchronizer program is perfect for synchronizing between your DJ PC and your external hard drive.

Setting up the PC

This section is for people with some experience in setting up a new PC, so if you're having your local computer store or a friend build your PC for you, you may want to give them these specific instructions.

1. Even if the PC comes preloaded with Windows, you're going to want to reinstall it from scratch.  Store bought PCs come with WAY too many extras loaded on them which almost always degrade performace.  You can uninstall these things one by one but you'll never quite get them completely off.  Loading from scratch will give you the best performance.

2. If you have two or more hard drives in your system, you need to pick one of them to install windows on.  If they're different sizes, you'll want to install windows on the larger of the two.  If there is more than one hard drive and they're equal size, you'll want to choose the master or lowest number in the SATA chain.

3. Boot to the windows CD and make sure you delete any partitions that exists.  If you already have a drive with information you want saved, either remove that drive (if it's different than the one windows is going on), or backup your info before you start.

4. Tell the installation to create a partition for windows (minimum 20GB for XP, 40GB for Vista or 7).  You want to keep windows on a separate partition than your music.  The amounts recommended are plenty for windows and any software you will need, but if you have tons of extra programs that you'll be using, doubling the recommended size should be plenty.  Any more is a waste.  Choose "NTFS" as the file system.  It's much more efficient.  You can also choose the "quick format" option as it will save you a lot of time.  Keeping the operating system on a separate paritition is good for two reasons.  One, when defragmenting the music drives (which you should do whenever you add new music to speed up the time to read the folders), the drive access will be faster since all of the executable programs on the OS drive (among many other things like the registry) have "prefetch" files which take priority over other files in drive cache priority, and when your music files are on a separate clean partition they are all considered equal and are accessed much faster.  The second reason, which is even more important, is because should the power ever fail while you're in the middle of playing a song, the odds of the operating system partition being affected are cut down to almost nothing.  You may loose a song file or two, but as long as you can boot your PC back up when power is restored, odds are, the show can go on.

5. After installing windows to the new small partition, use the windows disk manager to create a partition out of the available space on the drive you installed windows on.  You may want to assigned it a drive letter of "M" for music.  If you have a second drive, make one large partition out of it and assign it a drive letter of "K" for karaoke music.

6. Make sure you have drivers for everything and go to windows update and get all of the updates available, including the optional ones like the .Net framework.

7. Create 2 new folders to store your music files.  Name one of them "MP3 Music" and the other "MP3+G Karaoke".  If you have setup multiple drives, one folder goes on each drive.  Never store your music in the root folder of a drive.  We highly recommend that you don't create sub folders under each music folder as this makes synchronizing files with other PCs a nightmare.  Every MP3 song should go right into the "MP3 Music" folder and every karaoke song should go right into the "MP3+G Karaoke" folder.

8. Defrag the windows partition after all of the drivers and updates are installed.  This will help it boot as fast as possible.

9. If you're running Windows 7 or Windows Vista, you'll want to turn off UAC (User Account Control) which is located in the User Accounts section of Windows Control panel.  This is a virtually useless "feature" and can prevent some programs from workin properly.

10. Now that you've got windows installed, and a separate partition (or 2) for your music, you're ready to install the software and add your music.

11. Anytime after you've added music to your music drives, or synchronized with an external drive, it is important to defrag your music drives as this will make reading the music folder much faster in windows.  When you have tens of thousands of files in a single drive, keeping the drive defragmented is a very good maintenance habit.  After you've installed Windows, all its updates, and all the software you'll need, its a good habit to defrag the C drive and it will help the computer boot a bit faster and slightly help files from getting corrupted under a heavy load.  If youre running Windows 7 (or vista), once you've defragged your drives after everything's installed, you shouldn't need to do it again as Windows sets the computer to automatically defrag every so often, but it never hurts to manually do it once a year.

DJ software

There are many free products like Winamp that are great for playing music and karaoke.  There are also many more professional products to handle more advanced functions for more advanced DJ and Karaoke work.  For intermediate karaoke show hosting, Karma is a good choice (of course we have to tell you that is one of our own products), but take your time and look for something that you're comfortable with because your DJ or karaoke software that runs your show should be something you're very comfortable using on a daily basis.  Most importantly, don't spend as much as you can assuming that it will solve all of your problems.  There some very complex DJ and karaoke products out there that are almost more complicated than they need to be.

Dual Screen Display
(for having karaoke lyrics on a separate monitor or TV)
(You're video card must have two outputs, usually one VGA and one composite out)

If you're running Windows XP, there is built in functionality for "Split Screen" mode for video cards that have multiple outputs.  If you right click on a blank area of the desktop and choose "properties", then click the "settings" tab.

If you're running Windows 2000, the dual monitor capability usually comes with the drivers from the manufacturer and is setup via the "Advanced button" in the lower right.  Split screen is accomplished by setting the VGA monitor (the one you want winamp displayed on) to the "Primary Display" (usually screen 1 above) and then setting the TV as the "Secondary Display" (screen 2 above).  Then you tell windows to "Extend The Desktop" on to the secondary display.  When this is done, you essentially have one large screen spread over two monitors.  You can actually drag your mouse off to the right on your VGA monitor and it will then appear on the TV.  You can change the virtual orientation of your monitors in XP by dragging the one of the boxes labeled 1 or 2 to the other side.  This simply changes the "virtual" arrangement, so instead of having to move your mouse right to get to monitor 2, you'd have to move it off to the left.

IMPORTANT NOTE:  It's important that when you boot your computer, that the secondary display is connected and turned on.  Most video cards will disable the second display if it's not detected.  If this happens, you will need to go to the display settings, right click on the number 2 monitor and choose "Attached" and hit apply.  This will force the second monitor to display, provided it's turned on.

CD ripping software

CD ripping software is used for converting your regular CDs and karaoke CDs to MP3 and MP3+G format.  If you're just getting started and all of your music is on CD, you have some work ahead of you and here are some programs to get started.  We don't recommend zipping karaoke files, and although most karaoke rippers support this, its not a good idea, and the reasons are explained below in the zip section.  When ripping, most programs give you an option for setting the "bit rate" of the MP3.  Basically, the higher the bit rate, the higher the quality of the MP3, but the file size does increase the higher you go.  Hard drive space is very cheap now, and with that being said, we recommend ripping MP3 or MP3+G tracks to at least a 192kbps bit rate. 

- Audio Grabber - Great free CD ripper for regular music CDs and now supports karaoke CDGs as well.
available here> http://www.audiograbber.com-us.net/

- Power CD+G Burner - This program is for ripping and burning karaoke discs.
available here> http://www.powerkaraoke.com/src/prod_powercdgburner.php

- Easy CD-DA Extractor - This is a great program for ripping regular music CDs but will cost you $24.95 to register.  When ripping regular MP3 music, remember to rip in the "<artist> - <title>" format as this is the standard format for regular MP3s and will enable you to use them with virtually every program out there.  Connect to the internet before using this program as it will automatically download the artist and track names for just about any CD by looking them up in a public database.  It also has a built-in audio converter program that has a great feature that will normalize the volume on mp3 tracks that were recorded too softly or loudly.
available here>  http://www.poikosoft.com/

Karaoke Zip Files

Let's face it, the MP3+G standard was a great blessing for karaoke. It allowed for putting all those CD+G discs on our computers for easy access and completely trumped the whole MIDI karaoke idea with actual real background music. Of course, once the music was in this new digital format, it made copying it and sharing it on the internet just too easy. The idea of zipping the songs came soley from the people who began organizing the MP3+G karaoke channels in the newsgroups and illegally sharing the files millions of times a day. It simply made it easier to send a single file instead of two files for every song (which is what MP3+G is). Initially a few people defended the zip idea saying that it also saved hard drive space. It didn't really save that much space considering the MP3 file is already compressed, and now that hard drive space is dirt cheap, that argument no longer holds any weight. Unfortunately, its estimated that for every CDG disc track ripped, there are thousands of people illegally downloading the same song in zip format from a newgroup. This alone has made zip files more common than unzipped files, but at a tremendous cost. Basically, there is no longer a single reason for keeping your files zipped, and many reasons to keep your entire collection unzipped, and here they are....

1. The zip standard isn't as "standard" as you'd like to think. A zip file can use one of many different compression schemes, and they are inventing new compression schemes every year. Why is this a problem? Its a problem because the people sharing the zip files and even the companies offering zip downloads legitimately tend to always use the latest and greatest compression scheme and most of the zip engines out there aren't up to date and have problems unzipping them. Just to prove this, if you have a zip file that doesn't open on your favorite karaoke program, try unzipping it in Windows and rezipping it in Windows. Odds are that it will now work. Why? Because the folks at Microsoft are bright enough to know that it only makes sense to create a zip file in its most compatible format. I only wish everyone else did.

2. Keeping your files zipped slows down whatever karaoke player you use. The program has to take the time to unzip them, and on the average computer, it could be a full second or more before the file actually starts playing.  Also, with all the different zip compression schemes, there's a chance your player may not even be able to unzip the file.  You may even delete the file thinking its bad, when in fact, you could have simply unzipped the file in Windows and solved the problem.

3. Maintenance.  No music collection is perfect and everyone has different ways of naming different artists and songs.  When your entire karaoke collection is in zip format, any changes you need to make also need to be made to the files inside the zip file as well.  Our KJ File Manager program can aid in this process, but even then, the program itself still take siginificantly longer to rename zip files due to the time it takes to manipulate the compression in the zip file.  If your files are not zipped, this processs is virtually instantaneous.

If you have a large collection that is zipped, here is a free program you can use to unzip all of your files at once.

http://www.snapfiles.com/get/unzipall.html

Even if you like keeping your files zipped, but still seem to have some zip files that won't open in certain programs, you can use this program to unzip all your files, and then you can use another program to rezip them to a much more compatible format.  Its up to you, but you will save yourself a lot of future headaches if you simply leave the files unzipped.

Music Downloading

There are virtually an unlimited number of places on the internet to download regular music and karaoke music, ranging from paid legitimate sites like iTunes to shady illegal sites.  iTunes Plus is great for original artist music because anything in the "plus" is DRM-Free (they're copyable).  For karaoke, a lot of new manufacturers are providing downloadable karaoke.  You really need to talk with other DJs or KJs and find what's best for you.  A good place to speak with other DJs or KJs is on the internet chat forums.  Go to google and search for either "DJ Forum" or "Karaoke Forum".  There's plenty to choose from.

Electrical Protection Tips

DJ and KJ work will take your system to all sorts of places, all with varying voltages and electrical conditions at each electrical outlet.  Some locations will have a weak power output at their outlets and your amplifiers can cause quite a drain.  Because of this, it's important to always turn your amps on before your PC.  If the PC is booting when you turn your amps on, the sudden draw of electricity or spike associated with it can be disasterous.  I've seen it happen before to two different DJs.  Once we implemented this method, it's never happened since.

Surge protectors are also important.  UPSes (uninteruptable power supplies) are great surge protectors but their ability to help in a power failure is pretty useless unless you bring enough of them to power your amps, lights, etc..  I don't recommend this.  Even small UPSes are quite heavy and you surely don't want the many extra pounds of battery backup to carry with you to each gig.  The odds are that if the power fails at your gig, the show is over anyway.

A lot of bars have neon lights plugged in all over the place.  I once was at a show where the DJ's CD player kept failing.  Once the DJ removed its power plug from the same outlet that a neon light was plugged in to, the player worked fine.  Neon lights can cause a lot of "line noise" and interfere with other sensitive electronic equipment so keep this in mind when setting up your show.

Virus Protection

To prevent viruses, you should limit your internet access with your DJ PC.  Only use the internet when you have to download known programs, updates or to activate a program.  I don't recommend using your DJ PC for receiving email or random internet surfing.  It's just not worth the risk.  Anti-virus software does use up RAM memory and slows the machine since it examines every single file before it's opened.  Although you can gain some performance by eliminating antivirus software, it requires some responsibility on your part.  Whether it be a virus or hard drive failure, there's a good chance there will come a time when you'll be glad you have a backup of your music.  As of 2010, I can safely say that third party anti-virus programs are now virtually useless and I've written a separate article to help explain why.

If you have any ideas or your own recommendations that could help improve this info page, please let us know.