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Tips for PC based KJs
by Bob Latshaw / last updated 1-18-2012
Whether you're a new
KJ just starting out or an old school KJ 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.
There are plenty of good solutions for MACs and Linux based computers, but we're
only going to cover the Windows PC platform.
All of the recommendations here are based on the premise that all 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 understand the pros and cons of each. Some slower
laptops aren't as well designed for cooling and can overheat after long periods of use,
so don't skimp on cpu power when purchasing a laptop. A full sized PC
tends to have a better longevity and holds up better if dropped, but is a
heavier load to carry to your gigs. If you have a higher end system with
audio components installed into a standard 19" rack, they make rack mounted PCs,
and you can have them custom built. These days, laptops are starting to
become the way to go for most KJs. They have enough power and are light
enough to make transporting them a lot easier. Just remember to take care
when transporting any computer. Also, do NOT leave your computer in your
vehicle or garage if you live in an area where the temperature can get below 50
degrees fahrenheit. Computers don't respond well to cold, and if you bring
a computer from a cold environment and then turn it on in a warm room,
condensation can and will cause a short eventually. I've replaced a few
PCs for KJs who failed to learn this lesson.
Recommended hardware:
Processor - Multi-core Intel or AMD processor running at 1.2Ghz
or faster.
Operating System - Windows 7 is recommended. 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 4 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 KJ, you'll want to have a decent collection of music. 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 KJs 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 - If you elect to use a full sized PC, 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 & Karaoke 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, and sometimes DJs get so caught up in all the bells and
whistles that that forget their main job, and that is to simply have a fun show
and keep everyone happy. Just remember that computers don't keep the crowd
happy, the DJ or KJ does.
Dual Screen Display
(for having karaoke lyrics on a separate monitor or TV)
To setup a secondary display, you first need a second monitor or TV to connect
to, and the proper cable depending on the type of connection. If you have
a laptop, most likely your only option is a VGA port on the laptop, in which
case, you need to attach a VGA monitor or some type of converter device that
uses a VGA port. Some desktop computer's video cards have other types of
connectors like DVI, composite, or HDMI. If you're connecting to a TV, its
important to use the TVs remote (or buttons on the TV) to tell the TV where its
input is coming from before begining to setup the computer side. For
example, if you're using a composite cable connecting to the TVs "AV1" input,
you need to go to "input" in the menu or panel and set the input to "AV1".
The computer needs to recognize that the secondary display is connected and on
some TVs, the computer won't receive the signal that its connected unless the TV
is first set to that channel as its input.
Once your monitor or TV is on and attached, the next step is to make sure its
properly setup in Windows. If you're running Windows XP or earlier, you'll
need to wait until everything is hooked up before even booting the computer, or
you'll need to reboot after hooking everything up because windows XP only checks
for additional displays when booting up and if it doesn't sense them attached,
there is no way to force it to recognize the additional display. Windows
Vista, Windows 7 and later automatically sense a new monitor the moment its
attached and also turns it on, which is very convenient.
Instructions for Windows 7. Right click on a blank area of the desktop
and choose "resolution" and you should get the following window:
You should see two displays as shown above. If you don't see two displays
then the computer isn't sensing the second display and most likely its not
hooked up properly. Sometimes clicking the "detect" button will work in
forcing windows to detect the secondary display. Once you see two
displays, make sure the "multiple displays" setting is set to "extend" as shown
above. This makes the secondary display an extension of the main display
instead of simply duplicating it. Windows should keep monitor 1 as your
desktop (where the taskbar is and where you see your programs run). If the
second display is set to be the main display you can switch it back by clicking
the appropriate monitor and choosing "set as my main display". Its also a
good idea to set the secondary display to the lowest possible resolution.
This reduces the amount of workload on the computer in scaling the small lyrics
display to larger sizes. Do this by clicking the secondary display and
then choosing the resolution.
Instructions for windows XP. If you're running Windows XP, there is
built in functionality for "Split Screen" mode for video cards that have multiple
outputs. Right click on a blank area of the desktop and choose "properties",
then click the "settings" tab.
Once at this screen, follow the same instructions for Windows 7 above.
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, but not all windows 2000 video drivers have this capability
so if you can, upgrade to Windows XP or later.
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.org
- 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
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 on
the internet. 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. 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 a slow 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.extractnow.com/
If you have WinZip, here are
instructions for unzipping multiple files at once.
If you have WinRAR,
here are instructions for unzipping multiple files at once.
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.
Click here for links to a few MP3+G
karaoke download sites to start with.
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
This section has been completely simplified
thanks to Microsoft. As of late 2010, Microsoft now offers FREE anti-virus
software called "Microsoft Security
Essentials" and we highly recommend it. Unlike a lot of other third
party anti-virus programs, Microsoft has solved the problem of anti-virus that
slows your machine down and best of all its free :)
The Golden Rule
"If it ain't broke, don't fix it"
So many DJs and KJs cause their own problems by not understanding this simple
principle. Once your computer is setup and working well, don't continue to
tinker with it. Don't use it for your daily personal use and don't install
additional software that isn't needed. In fact, don't install anything
else. If your computer is setup to run your shows and is working
perfectly, don't do anything to it and you won't have any problems. I
can't tell you how many times I get emails from people saying "I just installed
something new and it isn't working and I have a show in an hour...please help".
Never tinker with your computer when you have a show only hours away.
You're just begging to tempt fate and asking for problems. If you have new
software or any change you want to make to your system, do NOT wait until just
before a show to install it, and just because there's a newer version of
something doesn't mean you have to have it right away. Any time you want
to make any change to your system, make sure you have at least 24 hours before
your next gig and also be sure you know what you're doing. When in doubt,
do nothing!
If you have any ideas or your own recommendations that could help
improve this info page, please
let us know.
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