So I have finally rid myself of the scourge of iTunes! (crowd goes wild) I’ve managed to cutover my entire collection to Media Monkey. It’s a great piece of software. The best thing I like about it is the ability to keep separate collections, this allows me to keep a folder of music that I listen to on a regular basis and a folder for music that is purely for DJ mixing. There is a big difference in the two types of music and I don’t regularly make a habit of listening to the music that I am blasting off the decks every weekend, so it’s nice to not have it all mixed together. This also gives me the ability to define different auto sort rules for the two file structures, this is great! Because it allows me to sort albums as artist/album/song, and the singles for DJing are stored as genre/year/song in a different location, which is exactly what you need to see when doing a DJ set.

I’ve also managed to integrate the playlists from DJ Decks into the playlists from Media Monkey, giving me a single point of playlist management. But the absolute best thing about this is that Media Monkey allows you to install in portable mode onto a mobile drive. So I have copied ALL of my music on a single 1TB portable drive and can carry it around from dekstop to laptop and take it to gigs with me. Imagine having every single song that you have every heard at your fingertips…. that’s what it feels like now when I do a DJ gig… insane! and it’s all organised, even crazier! The software is skinnable and highly configurable and it can easily sync with your iPOD or phone, which is also what I have managed to do.

So I have splashed out and bought myself a Pioneer DJM-900 Nexus mixer. While I have used Pioneer mixer on many occasions and am very familiar with how they work, I have never actually owned one myself. The mixer I had previous to this one was a Behringer DDM4000, which is basically a knock off of the Pioneer DJM range, so the transition onto this mixer was fairly painless.

Where the DDM4000 is packed full of features like individual channel effects and a sampler, the DJM-900 Nexus does not have so many wiz-bang features but makes up for it in quality of manufacture and a much easier to use interface. The DDM4000 controls are a bit cumbersome and contain time consuming menus that you have to flick through, but the DJM-900 Nexus has all the effect controls available in easy to reach buttons so it allows you to have a more spontaneous performance without doing you head in thinking about whether you have things set correctly or not.

Of course the DJM-900 Nexus includes channel EQ, fader and crossfader curve settings, features which are expected in pro dj mixers. But for me, by far the best feature is the inclusion of a built in sound card. The mixer actually becomes your computers sound card and is connected via USB. This removes the requirement to carry around and connect bulky sound cards when using timecode DJ systems such as DJ Decks. Since I got he mixer I have had the opportunity to use it at many gigs and I can say that It is very, very reliable! I can confidently take the latency down to 64 which gives just over 1ms delay and results in a near perfect control feel, I use timecode vinyl and really only run into problems with dodgy needles and drunk fools bumping into my setup…!  mehh what you gonna do…..

Pioneer DJM-900 Nexus, your a winner !

I’ve seen this ad once on TV. I love it, great tune and cleverly down using a turntable. But there is one big problem, the turntable is spinning the wrong way! I suppose that if you want to lick the record with your tough like this then it has to spin this way, only a minor problem!

Turns out I have a Discogs artist page, trouble is that across all the releases that I have had my artist name was never consistent. Sometime it was just ‘Reaver‘ sometimes ‘DJ Reaver‘ and more recently ‘Steve Reaver‘, my real name is even used on one of them… But I’ll leave that to you to figure out. This means that not everything is listed in the one place, and to make things more confussing there seems to be another artists called ‘DJ Reaver‘… guess I’ll have to get in and fix it all up…. I’ve also been using Discogs to catalog my record collection, I have a system where-by as I convert each record to mp3 I add it to my collection in Discogs, and  I add to the meta data of the mp3 the link to the release details. Iit’s great because I can have all the records details at my finger tips as I play or use the mp3….. ahhh the interwebs, how I love you!

Last night I logged into Ravers Paradise, created myself and account and had a listen to what was playing. It just happened to be a DJ friend of mine, DJ Shade banging out some excellent Old Skool tunes. I like the site and enjoyed the time I spent there. There are interactive pages and you can listen to the stream as you interact with the tools and forums. Although, some of the site code does need a little bit of work in relation to general tidiness, it doesn’t matter though because it all seems to work.

As it turns out after I was on the site for only a few minutes and chatting to Commodore, one of the site admins, he set me up as a DJ and pointed me towards the info for setting up the stream so I can play a set! Wow! So it looks like very soon I will be banging out a set on Ravers Paradise, can’t wait! So get set, go create your login and get ready for something special….