If you haven’t had your head buried in the sand this past 12 months, you’ll know that the new digital revolution is upon us – as consumers and as DJs. The ease of using MP3 files is at an all-time high and DJs unafraid of the technology stand to benefit the most from it. This report will hopefully open you up further to the concept of taking and "spinning" these compressed digital files and show you one company that’s diving headfirst into the DJs’ immediate future.

Before we get into the nuts and bolts here, it is really important for us DJs to get our minds in the right place to deal with all of the new information coming at us from every direction. We have the privilege and the curse to be in an industry that over the next five to 10 years will see change probably second only to the computer industry itself. And considering that many jocks out there have yet to recover from the "vinyl-versus-CD" controversy, brace yourselves, DJs, because here we go again!

What’s needed most is a little paradigm shift here. As in most cases, there is no single right answer on these issues, but many different right answers (and which one might apply at the time and to whom). For example, a DJ heavily invested in a system or systems with turntables and crates of vinyl would be less likely to totally replace everything with CDs. However, he or she yet

might find it very wise to augment what he or she already has with CD capabilities and be able to play things he can no longer find on vinyl. Simple really – no controversy here.

So the answer for you is to find what works for you. It might not be "right" to the pundits, but hey – they don’t sign those checks! In that light, we will look at two different pieces of MP3 software, get a feel for what is out there, and give you some starting points from which to enter the truly digital age.

If you’re looking to break into the simple concept of playing MP3 files, check out Nullsoft’s WinAmp (www.winamp.com). The current version is v2.50.

From its humble beginnings as a bored college student’s attempt to avoid using the DOS command line to play one MP3 at a time, this tribute to laziness has mushroomed into a virtual phenomenon. Originally distributed as freeware by this student, he was forced by his parents to charge a $10 registration fee when they found out he had dropped out of college in the early ’90s. Last year, this student sold WinAmp to AOL for something in the range of $40 million. Ain’t that a kick in the pants!

After checking the website in research for this article, I noted that, again, WinAmp is freeware. Download it for free and use it as you will. Another benefit is that the website supports this software and can really help you get to be an expert not only in WinAmp, but takes you a long way down the path of MP3 enlightenment.

WinAmp has been the de facto standard MP3 player for the past six or seven years. Its simplicity makes it good for beginners and some of the advanced features keep advanced users using it for years. The interface is simple and easy to use. Picture a VCR’s controls (and you don’t have to set the clock) and there you have it. Items like a built-in equalizer and a song-list viewer (with the ability to change and rearrange the list while playing the list’s songs) make it a great home unit for casual listening while at the computer or for foreground entertainment.

I might even suggest putting this freeware on a laptop and running pre-show music at the club this way since most early nights don’t require intense attention to detail. It’s a great piece of software and the price is right – free. The other plus might be that it will even run on a 486 Wintel machine. There is even a version for Apple machines called MacAmp and a Linux version as well. Again, WinAmp is a real good way to start cutting your teeth with MP3s. Load it up, snag some MP3 files off the web and, hey, you’re making music.

Need to know how to find MP3s? Look no further than the WinAmp website. A direct link to MP3.com is right there – go and have a ball checking out the talent there. Looking for specific songs? Different players? Rippers? Software? Hardware? The search starts at http://mp3.lycos.com/ – the place for MP3 music files and paraphernalia. Despite a disclaimer absolving it from responsibility of each site’s content and a notice urging users to abide by "all copyright and other intellectual property laws," the Lycos MP3 search engine has even drawn the attention and ire of the RIAA. For some DJs, of course, that’s all the endorsement they need.

Those of you familiar with USENET Newsgroups can go look at the alt.binaries.sounds.mp3 hierarchy for music from the 1950s all the way to the 1990s, including current dance and hip-hop product, and many other groups dedicated to different eras and genres of music. The odds here, however, is that you are dealing with pirated music. Keep your karma clear.

Another option is to create or "rip" MP3s right from CDs you already own – perfectly legal to do and use. There are a number of freeware and shareware products out there. New ones are introduced so often that it is difficult to recommend any one program. Instead, I will send you to www.hotfiles.com where you can do a search for a CD ripper and get about 20 choices to download and try for free. Mac users can go to www.macfiles.com for their platform.

The other end of the spectrum is a piece of software from a Clearwater, Fla.-based company called Visiosonic (877-778-4746, www.visiosonic.com). List price for their PCDJ 1200sl system is $499 and there is a free 30-day trial version that’s downloadable from the website, so you can try this out and see how it works for you.

Now, this is a serious package for the professional DJ. If WinAmp is akin to the home CD player, then the Visiosonic package is the high-end dual-CD player. If there were any single item that might make you look at being a totally digital DJ, this would be it. Installation was flawless. The whole installation process took about 40 seconds on a PIII 500 with 128-Mb of memory. I looked at the file structure of the installation CD and the actual code was extremely small – this hints at very good programming to get all these kinds of features into such small file sizes.

I was even more impressed when the software loaded almost instantly. I have some software that sometimes takes up to a minute to load on this same machine. All controls were not just accurate, but snappy. They were right there as needed and, if you are going to use this in a professional environment, you will appreciate the absolute lack of any lag time.

The first few minutes after I had installed this I became somewhat lost as I was presented with two onscreen players looking very much like any dual-CD unit available today. I then picked up the manual. Maybe I should have done that first!

After browsing the extremely well written (and possibly a little too simplified) manual, things started falling into place and I started to get the feel for what was needed. I became somewhat familiar with the process in just about 30 minutes of practice and started to have some decent sound mixes after that time. It was awkward at times trying to do all that was needed using only the mouse – considering the fact that I have been DJing for over 25 years using both hands. Then I looked back at the manual again and found the "Keyboard Shortcuts" section. After some reference, I acquired the ability to work with both hands and, after about another 30 minutes, was pulling off mixes as easily as on my Technics 1200s, my Denon DN-2000F, or my Pioneer CDJ-700S units. This was getting good to me. I think I found another way to augment my shows and use this in my studio as well.

The controls not only look like those of most dual CD players, but they work the same as well. You have the ability to set multiple cue points. Set up a loop, an intro point, and a point at the beginning of a break so you can actually do a live remix with this player. Take the same track and load it on both players and you can really start getting creative – once you finish playing, it takes literally a second to load another track in one of the players (with any named cue points you had previously designated) and mix into that one. Truth be told – the more I sit here and look at this software and the more I think on it, the more possibilities I can see coming from it.

The pitch controls work as advertised. The sliders are tunable in that you can adjust the range from +/-4% to +/- 52% – an especially wide variance. The downside, for me, is that I have been spoiled by my Pioneer CDJ700S units in that I like the True Tempo feature. OK, in actuality, pitch controls don’t actually change pitch, but change tempo – i.e. how fast the song is playing. The pitch is altered because of the change of speed. My CDJ700S units, the newer Denon units and a number of others compensate the pitch when the tempo is changed, so all the vocals and instruments sound as they were recorded, just coming out faster or slower. This software doesn’t compensate for the change in tempo, so there is a natural change in pitch resulting in chipmunk-like voices if you speed up a song too much. This should be a feature Visiosonic should put near the top of their list for development.

Although not currently in the set of features, I would love to see the software automatically detect the BPM of whatever track I select and add it to the database. However, the software does have a section where you can actually tap the <enter> key on your keyboard and a metronome starts matching the beat and gives you a digital readout: A cool tool that actually works.

Another feature that would be intriguing: How about a scripting language or mouse/keyboard recorder that would allow the user to save a series of keystrokes and essentially record the mix with all the settings. Put enough of these together and you could have a set, a show, or other pre-planned and mixed set.

Now it wasn’t all roses mind you. I did install the software – and my machine had all the DirectX drivers recommended by Visiosonic in the installation info – but occasionally during use I would get sudden and immediate computer lockups. Everything would just stop and a hard reset (turning the power off and back on) was required on the system. This would be unacceptable in any critical situation, such as a mobile gig or club use.

So, I went to the Microsoft website and downloaded the latest DirectX drivers (version 7.0a) and that seemed to correct the problem. Be sure to have the latest OS (Win98SE or the soon to be released Windows 2000) and, of course, the above mentioned DirectX Sound and Video drivers. This should help alleviate some of those problems. Visiosonic also has a PCDJ Mixmaster on their website for a $29.95 download, which might be a good interim step between WinAmp and the PCDJ1200sl. As a bonus, both the Mixmaster and 1200sl software include a "ripper," which will allow you to take tracks from your CDs and automatically encode them into MP3 files of CD quality.

Another consideration for the PCDJ 1200sl program is the hardware requirements. To get optimum performance from this software, this is the recommended hardware required:

AMD K6/2-400 or Pentium 2 350

or faster processors

32 Megs of RAM

AGP Video card

10 Mb on hard drive for PCDJ 12sl software and lots of space for MP3
storage

A Buyer’s Tip: I just bought a 20-Gig hard drive at CompUSA for $149 – no rebates – two Turtle Beach or SoundBlaster sound cards, and very fast CD for data retrieval, if you will be storing MP3s on CDR (32X or better). There are options and ways to use this software with lesser hardware, but that is like taking out the nice new Jag only for trips to the neighborhood convenience store.

"Two sound cards!" you say? What the heck is that all about? Stop and think – one sound card provides the output from the software and your computer and the other provides the cue audio, as in headphones to mix with. This means you need two open slots in your computer. Or if you have a laptop, you need a combination totaling two of either two PCMCIA sound cards or one PCMCIA card and an onboard sound chip. And then (oh happy day) you need to configure them. Be sure to know your IRQ’s and such before you attempt this!

For those DJs who just want to hit the ground running, Visiosonic also offers ready-to-go, preloaded computers, and a rack-mount unit as well. Again, check their website, as there is a lot to look at.

Now, looking at all of this I think it is time for some of you to start considering adding this dimension to your repertoire. It is too soon to start a CD-vs.-MP3 or Vinyl-vs.-MP3 argument, as some will undoubtedly do; but that is only for those who need to impress you with their "rightness." But I’m not interested in that.

Me, I am going to learn how to use this software and decide how and when it will most benefit me. I already have started to burn archive CDs to preserve some of my vinyl – since I already own it, it’s fine. I sometimes take my laptop to a gig and plug it in for early night music and I will look into upgrading or replacing my laptop now to meet the requirements of some of this software and will have it available for use at any gig if I need to. I suggest you all do the same. After all, your competition is reading this too!

 

If you have any questions for Gary Deane, please write to DJ Times, 25 Willowdale Ave., Port Washington, N.Y., 11050, fax 516-944-8372 or e-mail djtimes@testa.com.