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...
