Laptop DJing is on of the best ways for DJs to get into DJing, and makes the whole process of learning to DJ a lot easier, in order to DJ music on a laptop you need to have several different elements.
You’ll need:
- a Laptop
- some DJ software
- a MIDI controller
- a sound card
To DJ music on a laptop, you’ll need to also consider the kind of laptop you want. first, for a laptop for DJing music you need to consider if you want a Mac or a PC. You’ll find that Macs are better designed to cope with the processing power need to run Music and DJ programs. PCs however are good for DJ beginners as they are cheaper and so are the music and DJing programs for them. Here are the pro’s and con’s to DJing on either platform.
Mac:
Pros:
dead easy to use
very very stable operating system (good for DJing)
all the new macs have hardware specs the meet the requirements of DJ software
good battery life
reasonably durable
long lifespan (new models don’t come out every month, but rather every few years)
con’s
expensive
OS system requires different software to PCs
As you can see there are more benefits to DJing on a Mac, particularly one that is designed to DJ music. To DJ on a mac, you’ll need to keep an eye on the specs: you’ll need a 1GHz processor at least and at least 1 GB of RAM, a hard drive of around 80GB and above is preferable although if you have an iPod that can act as an external hard drive. The best place to look for a mac to DJ music on is Mac Warehouse. In terms of Mac models good for DJing on the following are great to DJ Music with: any of the desktops, the Black Mac Book, any of the Mac Book Pro’s, and the Mac book Air. If you’re running on 1GB RAM you’ll ideally want to increase this to 2GB RAM for DJing.
DJing on a PC is a good alternative to those of yu on a tight budget or if you already have a high quality laptop, PCs are designed for mass market and may not have some of the features that are ideal fo DJing on, as such you need to be more selective and know what you want, it often helps to get some advice, lucky for you the DJ Music team will have reviews of the various Laptops the are good for DJing music on.
PC:
Pro’s
cheap
easy to buy
software cheaper to buy
hardware compatible
con’s
fragile
may not match up to specs
frequent new models come out
PCs are designed as a general all use machine so in order for a DJ to begin DJing on a PC, you first need to find a PC that meets the minimum standards of 2GB RAM, 80 GB hard drive and fast Pentium 2 processor, these are the bare minumum specs for DJing on a PC, obviously the more the better. Because PCs are so common, you can find special laptops designed for DJing, these DJ laptops are often worth the extra cost as they will have special features made to cope with DJing music. You’ll probably find that these DJing laptops are well worth checking out Dolphin Music Digital DJ System 001, 15.4″ Red Sub Audio Laptop, Toshiba Satellite Pro A200-1PN 15.4″, all these are designed for DJing and accomodate the music playing demands of a DJ.
additional components
To DJ on a laptop you’ll probably need a few extra bits, although you could get away with DJing on an out of the box laptop like the DJ laptops above, it will make your mixing easier and your DJing better by considering some additional tools. Some of these tools will be useful when DJing live, some will improve the quality of the music and some will help make it easier to DJ in a digital format.
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