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A few more from Lladro event, Beverly Hills, CA

Ok this time is really the last of the photos, there were a few more I wanted to post.  The system we used was the Torq Advanced Exponent and Virtual DJ.  I have mixed feelings about both, it'll be a while before we fully move over to using only computers, I like CDs still and I think the computer will be great for more background music type situations.  But the flexibility to have all your mp3s at your disposal is incredible, you can save and reuse playlists and always add notes to songs which can be saved in the ID3/ medadata of the MP3 tracks. A lot of times what I'm looking for is more of a mood and less of a genre, which is often hard to find. So being able to build a database over time clearly is the way to make your life easier, especially for events that require a huge mix of different types of music.

Torq Xponent

DJ Zerman purchased the Torq Xponent MP3 Mixer with software so we were working out the bugs last night at South Street Seaport. Initial thoughts, one of the best things about it is the cumulative effect of having playlists stored so you can always go back to them in a jam.  It also forces you to go through and organize those 40000 mp3s you have sitting all over the place so they can be imported into the Torq database.  In my slow switch away from CDs I've tried Traktor, Virtual Dj and now Torq. Traktor's interface is overloaded with controls you don't need and occasionally crashes, Virtual DJ I don't have an opinion yet, and Torq seems to be the simplest. It will take a while for me to incorporate computers fully into djing as I think under the gun I'll still use CDs, but it is time for the change without a doubt.  Probably one it's best features is the integration with Itunes, your playlists automatically load into the Torq interface so you can manage your music in Itunes prior to events and  I think it resyncs with Itunes.  The downside of course is simply having too much music, and forcing yourself to dump all the songs you're never going to play under the gun, or  create a separate library which has all your music and a smaller one with just the essential songs.