I'm a karaoke DJ and am thinking about getting a laptop to use instead of CD and DVD players. Im thinking of spending around £300 on the laptop. Is there any you would recommend. Also do you know how the laptop is connected to the mixer? Do you know of any good karaoke softwear to use, i've got VirtualDJ which i'm really impressed with.
DJ Laptop
- Thread starter the_brook
- Start date
My Dad & I do mobile disco's with laptops. At the moment we use Virtual DJ. It's a bit pricey, but well worth it as it has support for CD+G (Karaoke) and also Video files if you want to get into VJing with music videos. I can't think of a good machine off the top of my head, but what we did in the first place was download the Virtual DJ trial version installer and go around PC World/Currys/Comet asking if we could try running the program on differnet machines, and we eventally found a good Toshiba laptop (at this time Virtual DJ didn't support video and that fancy stuff so the laptop is quite low spec to todays standards) 
But if you don't fancy going around bothering the staff, look for a laptop with a half decent graphics chip, as Virtual DJ can be quite graphically demanding.You'll also want something with a large hard drive, or a 500GB external hard drive or something (depending on the size of your collection) which you know will be safe if the laptop hard drive fails or something. As for connecting the laptop to your mixer, you can use either the Headphone jack into a Phono adaptor and into the mixer (bare in mind that the sound level will be slightly quieter than CD's so you'll have to turn up the gain or something and you might loose a little sound quality) Or like I have recently done, you can get hold of an external USB sound card. I got one by Numark which improves the sound quality and volume levels, and allows you to use the decks on Virtual DJ on seperate channels on the mixer, though these cost about 80 quid. We also keep a Numark CDN twin CD decks in the case for backup. Hope this helps, let me know if you wanna know anything else. 
But if you don't fancy going around bothering the staff, look for a laptop with a half decent graphics chip, as Virtual DJ can be quite graphically demanding.You'll also want something with a large hard drive, or a 500GB external hard drive or something (depending on the size of your collection) which you know will be safe if the laptop hard drive fails or something. As for connecting the laptop to your mixer, you can use either the Headphone jack into a Phono adaptor and into the mixer (bare in mind that the sound level will be slightly quieter than CD's so you'll have to turn up the gain or something and you might loose a little sound quality) Or like I have recently done, you can get hold of an external USB sound card. I got one by Numark which improves the sound quality and volume levels, and allows you to use the decks on Virtual DJ on seperate channels on the mixer, though these cost about 80 quid. We also keep a Numark CDN twin CD decks in the case for backup. Hope this helps, let me know if you wanna know anything else.