PCDJ Information page
This page
was created to tell you about PCDJ and complete PCDJ systems available from Entertainment House in Lacey Green.
You can order PCDJ products online here, or
contact Entertainment House
to buy over the counter (and you can combine purchases to make savings).
Advise on using Entertainment House PCDJ
systems is further down the page.
PCDJ is a
product of Visiosonic. It turns your PC into a DJ console, with
Karaoke and more. There are a number of
products in the family…
PCDJ VRM Blue
is the baby and is ideal as a backup system or for very basic mobile use. BUY
HERE
PCDJ VRM
Red builds on PCDJ Blue and adds functionality that makes this (for me) the
entry level mobile DJ system. BUY
HERE.
Compare PCDJ VRM Blue to
PCDJ VRM Red.
PCDJ VRM FX
is the top level product. Remixing on
the fly, looping, effects and a compressor make this ‘the’ product to use. BUY
HERE.
PCDJ KJ is
the Karaoke player that runs either standalone, or as an extra player within
other PCDJ programs. Combine FX and KJ
for the ultimate DJ tool. Giving you three decks, as KJ plays MP3 also. BUY
HERE.
PCDJ DAC2
is a physical 19” rack 2U controller that can control any of the software
packages. Used to a dual CD player or
looking for an interface that doesn’t use a keyboard? The DAC-2 is for you. BUY
HERE.
Advice for users of
the Entertainment House PCDJ system.
I will be referring
to the complete system supplied by Entertainment House as your 'gig' system.
The normal
configuration includes a removable hard disk and compatible bay for installing
in your home PC system.
This is
designed to make it easy to update your music collection without dragging your
gig system indoors.
The two
ways you might use the drive are as follows;
In the gig
system, the hard drive will be known as the 'C' drive. It has Windows and PCDJ installed on it, and
we suggest you store your music files (mp3 or wma) in the directory
C:\music. Everything that is installed
is available to you.
When used
in your home system (or any other) the drive will be known as the 'D' drive, or
possibly something else depending on the build of your home machine. The drive will still have Windows installed
on it, but you will NOT be using that copy of Windows,
and you
must NOT try to run the PCDJ installation.
The only machine you can run PCDJ on (from the removable drive) is the
gig system. The PCDJ licence and copy
protection allow you two installations on two different systems, so your home machine, or any other, can have a second copy of
PCDJ on it (you have already paid for this).
This would be installed on the C drive.
The copy
protection (which is part of PCDJ and not something that Entertainment House
have chosen to install) will only allow you to run PCDJ on the same machine
that you installed it on. If you change
the motherboard, hard disk or other hardware PCDJ will refuse to run again,
even if you put the hardware back. So
contact Entertainment House for advise before making
changes such as these.
So to
maintain your music collection, put the removable hard disk into your home PC
(with the power off), start the pc, place new files onto the 'D' drive in the
folder called MUSIC, and then turn off the system before removing the drive.
You should
not remove or insert a hard disk when the computer is running.
I always
transport hard disks out of the gig system suitably protected, as they can be
damaged by physical and temperature shock. So don't drop a hard disk, and don't
leave a hard disk in a cold van for hours and then expect to use it
immediately. You should keep the drive
at room temperature for a while before use. So if it's cold, keep the drive
indoors and take it with you when you set off. Then take it into the venue, get
the rig set up, plug in the drive and power up the computer.
The other
thing is at some point (like most mechanical equipment) hard disks are going to
fail. Well your car isn't going to go
for ever, but when it fails you can just get another. When your hard disk fails, it takes your
music collection with it! So make
provision to have a second copy. Hard
disks are now so low in price, that I suggest you consider adding a large drive
to your home PC, or backup to DVD. Good
DVD writers are now under £100 and can store around 1500 MP3s on a £1 disk. Entertainment
House, or any 'good' computer engineer can do this for
you. I actually have at least three
copies of the music collection, and take two copies out when I gig (and two
PCs).
PCDJ FX
VRM, Blue VRM and Red VRM are all still being developed by Visiosonic, you are advised
to look on the web at the following sites;
http://www.fxuser.com - for updates
http://message.pcdj.com - , information, manuals and advice from other users. You need to register to use this site.
http://www.pcdj.com - Visiosonic's
main web site.
If an
update to a PCDJ product is offered, then I suggest you take it as soon as you
can get it installed.
Depending
on the build of your system, you may need to download the updates on your home
PC, whilst the removable hard disk is in your
home
machine, save the files on the removable hard disk, then remembering to power
down, move the disk to your gig machine to action the upgrade.
If your gig
machine includes a
Most people
worry about reliability when DJing with a PC, but
having done it for a number of years, I can say the PC is just as reliable
as any
other piece of equipment. So take a
backup option! Who hasn't had a CD
player or amplifier pack up on them? I
must point out that
in five
years I think I have had about four issues, but remember I am a Beta tester for
PCDJ and am often using software that has not even
been
completely tested! (That's what Beta
testers do, test software that's almost ready to go to the consumers - Doh!)
Great news
- in case you didn't know. PCDJ (latest
releases) are Napster compatible. You
can now legally pay £10 a month and have access to download and play 500,000
tracks. And you can upgrade for free
from the versions Entertainment House supply.
Note: This is correct as of June 2004, PCDJ may move the goalposts after
publication.
Unless you
really know what you are doing with a PC, we suggest that you just use your gig
system for DJing.
Don't install any software unless you have to, and don't connect to the
internet unless you have taken precautions.
See Links below. This advice is
offered as it's easy to do something that might cause you problems when DJing. If you add
software, or change settings any remedial work required is not covered by your
warranty.
There are a
few other software packages that can make life so much simpler for you when
managing your music.
1) Having
more than one copy of a music collection can be a problem, as you might add or
change tracks and not update the other collection. This is made easy with
'Advanced Directory Compare and Synchronisation'. It's a program that will compare two
collections, tell you what is different and what it suggests you do about
it. Then you can click a button to tell
it to sort it out for you. Simple!
2)
Tags. Tags are fun! What are they and what do they do?
In simple
terms there are three places you might look for information regarding a
track. This information might be the
name of the artist, the title of the track, or maybe more detailed... What is the BPM of the track, where should
PCDJ autocue the track to? The three
places are...
a) The
filename - this is what you see in Windows Explorer when you look in the
directories where your music is stored.
b) The
Version 1 TAG - this is a small area at the end of the track. It doesn't play and is restricted in what information
it can store.
c) The
version 2 TAG - this is a large area at the start of the track, again it
doesn't play (tags would sound awful).
It allows almost anything to be included in the track itself. You could
put a picture of the artist or the lyrics in there if the software supported
it. It is best that all three of these have synchronised information in them,
and if you use the online databases to get the track names when you rip a CD,
then you will soon spot that these have been submitted by members of the
public, and are variable at best. Tag & Rename will help you sort out the
filename and tags, so they agree where they store the same info, and it will
help you sort out the mess that some CDs info are entered as. This is particularly applicable to 'various
artist' CDs. The online databases don't
handle this very well, and you often end up with the track name containing the
artist name as well as the track name.
3)
Ripping. Getting CDs ripped accurately
can be hit and miss. It depends on how
well your CD drive loads audio from a CD.
When they
designed the layout of an audio CD, they decided that a bit more space for
music was better than designing something that would be technically accurate
every time. Well the worst that could
happen would be that your song jumped!
So there is not much error correction on an audio disk, and so it
depends on how good your player is as to how well (and fast) you can rip. To even the odds, I use a program called
Exact Audio Copy. This program knows a
bit more than most about individual models of CD drives, and it even tells you
how well it did when it completes. I usually rip a CD in about 5 minutes.