Being an amateur DJ as well as an experienced musician, I fell in love with VirtualDJ some time ago. It is by far the best, most complete and utterly stable DJ-tool I've seen so far. It has almost all of the essential options and tools a live DJ needs; mixing, effects sections, 12(!) sample slots for live sampling and playback(very useful when you are playing Drum and Bass and similar styles of music), etcetera. It also remembers the gain it has to generate to make all the songs sound pretty much at the same volume without sacrificing the dynamics of the music. I definitely don't want to hear super compressed music because I have suffered from that 'House-trick' for long enough. Everytime a stupid commercial walks by on TV or on a website I cringe because of the insanely high volume/compression. There should be a law against it, and I believe some countries are actually clearing new laws to ban this abuse of our ears. Anyway, back to VirtualDJ :
(click on picture to enlarge)
You can find more screenshots and information here if you're interested.
Ok : and then I switched to Linux. A great OS but Damn! VirtualDJ only runs under Windows!
So I installed VirtualBox in Linux and Windows XP/VirtualDJ as a guest. That amazing combination(think of the complex audio-routing: from VirtualDJ's own internal hardware-control via Windows via VirtualBox and the preferred sound engine in Ubuntu) worked fine for a while. Friends were amazed to see it work; Linux- and Windows-users alike.
'Unfortunately' Ubuntu then released a new version of their distro and VirtualDJ also released a new version of their software and everything went belly-up. The DJ-software still ran somewhat, but the sound quality was abysmal and it ate up all the CPU cycles of my 2.6Ghz Laptop. I tried everything I could think of to fix this, in Windows as well as in Ubuntu, but to no avail.
So this week I installed Ubuntu in its own partition(thanks go out to Mattijs of Pegasys ICT for the assistance and the personal lessons!) and I installed Windows 7 in another dedicated partition. My reasoning was that if nothing works I can always run a dual boot machine and boot Windows 7 for the DJ-gigs.
I finished installing and configuring Windows 7 and VirtualDJ tonight and it works like a dream(well of course : it is basically a standard Windows machine on a fine and pretty modern laptop).
Of course there are always snags. In this case the Windows 7 installation ruins GRUB so I can't boot Ubuntu anymore. That is a well documented problem however(thank you Ubuntu community!) with a relatively easy solution so I'll get that to work later this week.
One other - and unexpected - practical upshot of installing Windows 7 by the way, is that my Remote Desktop Connection to the workplace(for my standby shifts) now works much better. Under Ubuntu I have a pretty serious problem with the time it takes for the remote desktop to be built up and displayed, so I was forced to work with limited colours and a limited window-size. Under Windows 7 everything works lightning fast and full screen.
Although I'm not a particularly big Windows-fan I have to give credit where credit's due : Windows 7 is a major step towards a really seriously grown up PC Operating System. I'd almost start to think that those techies at Microsoft actually listened to the criticism about Vista(for me the biggest mistake in OS-land ever. Even ME ran better).
So another day or so and I can use whatever operating system that is most suitable for the application. Next stop will be to install VMWare and see if I can get Windows 7 and VirtualDJ to work properly in that configuration. If so I can always delete the Windows 7 partition again.
I keep learning, but that is one of the purposes of life in my opinion. For now I am massively enjoying VirtualDJ again. And that's what started it all.
Now excuse me while I put on Dave Matthews' LOUDDDddd version of All Along The Watch Tower. I feel another setlist coming up...
3 comments:
I'm going to have to beg to differ on your less then favorable Vista assessment. Granted, it was a mess upon first release, but so were all, no exceptions, previous Windows-versions. As it stands, two major service roll-ups down the road and a third one in the making, it's a solid, albeit bulky OS. Talking from (in all modesty) ample experience, a few things need to be taken heed though.
Vista 32-bit-bells-and-whistles, Ultimate in MS vernicular, is no-go unless stripped down to its bare essentials - essentially leaving AD domain access the only bell. Or whistle, depending on your domestic pet variety. It also needs a few tweaks, like switching off disc indexing and Aero, and RAM-loading (instead of pagefile-loading) of the kernel. 64-bits is the way to go, provided you own the tech to host it. It really rocks.
Hello Alfred,
Well, obviously everyone is entitled to his or her opinion, it's just that I personally don't care much for improved Operating Systems if they come with new bugs.
Even Ballmer(!) has said 'NEVER AGAIN' when it came to the release and first two years of support of Vista.
I don't have much sympathy for Microsoft but neither am I a Microsoft-hater. I full well realize the importance of Microsoft to attain a generic OS-standard for Intel-platforms. Having said that : I only look at the stability of the OS; if the OS is unstable then by definition so are all the applications running on top of it. In this respect Vista has been a bloody nightmare for me for several years.
I've said this before and I'll say it again : Vista was extremely buggy on my Acer laptop. This was disgraceful because Vista came 'pre-pre-installed' in a hidden partition so Microsoft and Acer had an agreement to churn out Vista-copies to the customers.
I spent one and a half years working with this operating system, suffering from spontaneous abends of Explorer.exe(the desktop, not the browser). This in itself is damn annoying but one can live with it, but when you use the laptop in a Live DJ-environment where the music HAS to keep playing, you definitely do not feel good when you are working in front of 300+ people using an OS of which you just don't know if it's going to fail you at any given moment.
What's more, and what pissed me off beyond belief in those days(I'm talking 2007/2008 here), was the fact that Microsoft was aware of this bug and that there were literally thousands, perhaps even tens of thousands, of users with this same problem screaming bloody murder on the Interwebs(Google for "vista explorer.exe keeps crashing"), but Microsoft adamantly refused to address this issue as urgent. 'It will be fixed in the first Service Pack' that was released way later. This I call contempt for their customer base in a way I had not seen before from Microsoft.
As an ICT-professional I just so do not agree with the Vista Release Philosophy it makes your head swim! :) You either sell a properly working product or you don't sell it at all. To Hell with the marketing division, they are by definition short-term thinkers.
Monday Morning Diseases will always be a part of software but in my opinion there is no justification for waiting until friday afternoon to cure them.
For the record : I am very much aware that Little League Players like Linux also have their problems, some of them quite major. There are areas in which Windows beats the living daylights out of Linux. If I would have to work with audio- or video-processing full-time I would never ever run Linux(at least not 'just' Linux). Or take The Sacred Apple OS X : that stuff is so proprietary that it makes Windows look like open source! Every time you fart Apple charges you for it, it refuses to interface with some of the most basic non-Apple stuff, etcetera. Nothing is perfect in ICT and I don't think it will ever be.
But let's not forget that you have to pay for Windows, as opposed to Linux. To me that means that Microsoft can be held to a higher standard than for instance Ubuntu(although there is of course a minimum quality-level that ALL Operating Systems must absolutely adhere to).
To summarize; from what I understand you say that with a lot of tweaking Vista runs fine and is stable and I accept that observation. I even got WindowsME to work properly in the old days... But I for me do not want to have to go through all that crap, not anymore; this is the 21st century. An OS has to work from the start, right out of the box. That we can then tweak and improve it is a great bonus but should not be necessary.
It's nice to see that Microsoft has actually managed to write an OS that works pretty good and is pretty stable right out-of-the-box. Windows 7 is the first Microsoft OS that I find surprisingly good.
And it looks quite pretty too! :)
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