On Wednesday 15th November, we held a special demonstration day at our showroom for hard drive equipment. The major star was Computer DJ's ‘OODJ’ custom laptop for DJ/Karaoke use. This is a fantastic piece of kit, designed specifically to overcome the crashing and freezing that can so easily affect laptops used for music playback. It has a 15” touchscreen, twin hard drives, cool ice-blue electroluminescent keyboard, biometric fingerprint recognition for security, pre-loaded with PCDJ RED, 4 cooling fans, Gigaport sound card built in, monitor output for karaoke, USB, etc. etc. I was so impressed that I’ve bought one for demonstration, and this should be installed in the unit in the next week or two, so if you want to try it out, please ring us to check that it’s in.

We also now carry the most popular items from the PCDJ range - software, sound cards and the DAC3 USB controller. These can all be used to improve the capabilities of your own laptop, assuming of course that it has the appropriate system specification. If you are considering changing over to digital music playback, come and see us!

Our next demo was the CORTEX HDC1000 USB controller. This solves the problem of laptop crashes by eliminating the laptop! Let me explain - this is a standard 2U size CD player-style controller that controls a USB mass storage device (i.e. a USB hard drive, a USB memory stick, an iPod, or other MP3 player with USB connectivity). You play your set off a hard drive or iPod connected to the rear USB socket, and then plug a USB memory stick into the front socket to play a newly downloaded or single requested track.

Because the controller, sound card and processing are all built into a single 2U rack controller you don't need to take a PC to your gig, and you don't need an external conceit - you connect your USB storage device to the USB socket, the HDC1000's audio outputs to your mixer, and that's you ready to go. The latest software version now includes USB keyboard connectivity, so to find tracks you simply type in a track name, artist, genre or album, and in an instant the HDC1000 displays all the matches for you to select from. The HDC1000 is priced at £449.00, here and on the internet - we have stock and a unit on demo for you to play with. For a suitable hard drive, we can currently tell you where to buy a 320GB one for £79!

There are more new products due from Cortex, possibly before Christmas, the first will be the HDC3000, a unit similar to the 1000 above but with many more features.

We mentioned iPod’s in the Cortex description. Both the HDC 1000 and 3000 can be used to control a single iPod and play all the tracks independently on the two outputs. However we were showing another way of using iPods for DJ'ing, that is with Numark’s iDJ mixer. The mixer has 2 docks for iPods and controls for them on its panel. The mixer on its own sells new for £219, but we currently have a used one available for just £120.

We have another USB controller in stock, this one is the E-Mix which controls a laptop, the difference with this one is that it is a mixer as well, with mic and line inputs. You can control the music on the laptop using this unit, and it outputs the sound directly to your amplifiers. This unit is priced at £499 with the software.

For karaoke jocks, we now have the Rapsody RHS100 in stock. This is another hard drive based machine, but this time dedicated to karaoke. You load all your discs onto the machine, and then just enter a track number to call up any song. They come with no hard drive, we fit the size you want according to how many tracks you want to store. As an example, fitted with an 80GB drive the unit costs £159.00. We can load songs on for you if you’re not sure of how to do it, and we will be offering converted versions on USB pens when you buy the latest discs.

Finally the long standing Vocopro Media Jukebox made an appearance. I feel that in some ways this unit is better for karaoke use than the Rapsody. The Vocopro has a key change built in, and access to the tracks seems much faster, although I gather that a new version of the Rapsody may have key change added.

All of these hard drive systems, whether for Karaoke or disco, have one thing in common - the tracks have to be converted to a compatible format in order to be transferred to the hard drive. In the case of music, it’s normally MP3, and for karaoke the most popular conversion is to AVI files. The music MP3’s can be done on many different platforms, so you can use your favourite ripping program, I tend to use Windows Media Player, not forgetting of course to set it to MP3 instead of the default WMA format that Microsoft would like you to use! Most of these programs include the facility to look up the track names at the same time if you are connected to the internet and fill them in for you automatically, thus saving you lots of typing! For karaoke, we are using an all-in-one program that converts straight to AVI, and also manages to look up most of the track names as above.

I feel I should point out some legalities regarding the use of Hard Drive systems for music and karaoke. The two main points that you need to comply with are: you must personally own and retain the originals of the recordings, either on CD or by licence from iTunes or any other legal download site, and you have to purchase a Digital DJ licence every year. The only action this entitles you to take is to transfer the recordings to 1 hard drive, you’re not allowed to sell the discs afterwards or make multiple copies. If you’ve downloaded your tracks for free, then they are almost  certainly illegal copies. The licensing authorities are cracking down more and more on this, so expect to see an official at one of your gigs one day! Don’t let anyone tell you differently, if you don’t have the originals (and that means   originals, not CDR copies!!) in your possession, then you are breaking the law and leaving yourself open to prosecution and confiscation of your equipment.

Acme Wildtech Junior Range
These little lights are great! Plastic body but a good quality build, 100w, bright, fan cooled, unique mounting which means they can sit on a flat surface, be fitted to a wall or hung from a lighting rig Great price @ just £59 each!

KAM KWM11 twin VHF radio mic system
2 handheld mics and a twin receiver for just £69!

YES, thats 2 radio mics for £69!

Gemini GX400 Speakers
300 watts
RRP £399 a pair - NOW £249!!

Carlsbro Marlin 8400 mixer/amp
8 channels, mic/line inputs, 400 watts, DSP
RRP £299 - NOW £149!!

Magic Sing self-contained karaoke mic with 600 songs
This unit in itself is all you need to add simple karaoke to any sound system and TV. It can have extra songs added, but these have to be bought as 'chips' of 600 songs, but it would be ideal if you don't usually do karaoke but want it as a cheap extra. The mic has echo and all the connectors into a stereo line input and a TV and it's working.
RRP £249 - NOW £99!!