Reworking My Large System
- Thread starter DJ Bobcat
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Yes, we do! In person too. For here, I wonder if Danno could add a Swap Meet section for people that want to swap stuff (or if it would even be worth it).
How many mics do you think you'll need? I can provide 5 with my large system. That's more than enough for my kinds of gigs, but I don't provide Karaoke. I thought about doing Karaoke at one time, but got overwhelmed by having to provide monitors, and of course acquiring a decent catalog of music.
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I suppose 4 would be maximum. I typically use 3 for karaoke (1 for me, 2 for singers). The Behringer XR12 takes 4 and I have a Rane MLM42S (4 ch mono mic mixer) that can feed another device, so I'm good there. I doubt I will do band coverage anymore .. if I do something small, my A&H has 6 mono inputs.
As for monitors, I usually bring a small powered 8" speaker. The A&H and the XR12 both have enough Aux outs for the monitor.
I suppose 4 would be maximum. I typically use 3 for karaoke (1 for me, 2 for singers). The Behringer XR12 takes 4 and I have a Rane MLM42S (4 ch mono mic mixer) that can feed another device, so I'm good there. I doubt I will do band coverage anymore .. if I do something small, my A&H has 6 mono inputs.
As for monitors, I usually bring a small powered 8" speaker. The A&H and the XR12 both have enough Aux outs for the monitor.
Oops... when I said "monitors", I meant TelePrompTers, but yea... singers need audio monitors too.[emoji1]
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For karaoke text, I used to use a 17" LCD monitor off VGA. I have a VGA splitter to drive that and an audience monitor as well (used a 32" TV I had). Now I usually use an iPad running the Duet app and a 10 foot lightning cable. Bought a mount for a microphone stand .. works fine.
I was thinking for Karaoke, you'd need some pretty large monitors, and maybe a big screen TV for the audience. Is it just me???[emoji1] Is the rest of the world fine with SMALL displays?[emoji1]
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The 10" iPad is fine .. there aren't that many words per screen for karaoke ...
For the audience .. yea, bigger is better, but for bar karaoke, I'm not paid enough to worry about the audience seeing the lyrics ..
I have a projector if I need it.So let's talk about computers. My large system has two rack-mounted computers I built myself. Both have ECS Mini-ITX motherboards, quad core i5 CPU's, 8 gigs of RAM, 240 GB SSD boot drives, and 2 TB SSHD data drives. These are good performing computers. They're in 1U server cases. Not as compact as a laptop, but not bad.
Still... you can now get even smaller. You can now buy computers less than half the size. In fact, you can get pretty powerful computers in stick form... about the size of a large thumb drive.
I have a stick PC I don't use anymore, and I think I'll see what it does if I ran Traktor on it. Mine has a quad core Atom processor. I've seen stick PC's with Core M processors... faster than Atoms, but pricier too. Is a stick PC worth $330? Do they have a place in a DJ's arsenal? I know you could use one to run DMX control software, so there's that. If anyone has experience using a micro-PC or compute stick to run your controller software (Serato, Traktor, VDJ, or PCDJ), we'd like to hear about your experience.
If I could eliminate those two 1U boxes and go with much smaller computers, that could help save a lot of weight!
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Still... you can now get even smaller. You can now buy computers less than half the size. In fact, you can get pretty powerful computers in stick form... about the size of a large thumb drive.
I have a stick PC I don't use anymore, and I think I'll see what it does if I ran Traktor on it. Mine has a quad core Atom processor. I've seen stick PC's with Core M processors... faster than Atoms, but pricier too. Is a stick PC worth $330? Do they have a place in a DJ's arsenal? I know you could use one to run DMX control software, so there's that. If anyone has experience using a micro-PC or compute stick to run your controller software (Serato, Traktor, VDJ, or PCDJ), we'd like to hear about your experience.
If I could eliminate those two 1U boxes and go with much smaller computers, that could help save a lot of weight!
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I've seen the Raspberry Pi's but I think they have a ways to go before they're ready for controllers and their software.
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View: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qen3xVnxWiw
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... But as I've said before, laptops and the requisite stands are no easier or quicker to set up than my monitors, and at 17", not nearly as easy to view... and I'd still be using an external keyboard and mouse, because the keyboards would be an arm's length (or more) away. Only thing using a laptop would do for me is lessen the weight of the rack, but I'd still end up carrying the same weight in, just in more bags and more trips.
Don't get me wrong, I don't dislike laptops... I just don't feel like they work for me.
I got my little compute stick PC setup last night... Today I'll load Traktor on it and we'll see how well it works. There's only 14GB of free disk space on it, but that should be enough for a test. It took a little time to get set up... had to dig a stand for a monitor out of my pile of boxes stored in the garage. Then I had to find a USB hub so I could hook up more than two USB devices to the compute stick, which has just two ports. With the USB Nic, external hard drive, wireless keyboard/mouse receiver and connection to a controller, two port's ain't enough. The down side to a stick PC is that it ends up having all these external devices connected, creating a mini wire management problem. Since there's not much internal to the stick, you end up adding it externally... sorta negates the portability a bit. If I wanted to use something like this compute stick for real, I'd have to find a way to hide all the clutter inside the rack. You can't really hide the compute stick inside, though, because you need access to the power on/off button, which is on the side of the stick.
I'll use my Pioneer DDJ-T1 controller for the test. Don't use it much, and it's kinda big, but it's not very heavy. It'll be easy to setup.[emoji4]
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This is pretty interesting... I'm running Traktor on a stick PC I bought in October 2015 (for $91.99 on Amazon.com). The specs:
MeeGOPad T02 Pocket Intel Compute Stick
Windows10 Home Version
Intel Z3735F Atom Quad Core 64bit CPU
2Gb Ram, 32Gb Storage
HDMI Port
Bluetooth 4.0
Wifi
Took me while to get everything working with the Pioneer DDJ-T1, but that's because I have to relearn everything I know after not setting it up for a month or more.[emoji23] Stuck the Stick PC in the back of an old 19" LG widescreen monitor I use to use with my office workstation, hooked up a USB hub, attached a 1GB USB Nic, wireless keyboard/mouse receiver, USB cable to the controller, and a 4TB disk drive (not being used).
Been running a 10 track playlist in Cruiser Mode, and have had only one little hiccup on one track... not sure why (might be some O/S thing happened in the background). Seems to be running fine on the second time through. Now, I would not normally run on a Windows 10 PC, but that's what's on this stick PC. I'm pretty impressed. If it will run on this hardware with only 2GB of memory, maybe my current DJ computers are overkill. I'm not sure I could make a stick PC work in my new setup... gives me something more to think about, though.
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If you can get a stick pc with 4 gb you should be fine unless you’re running video
Even with 2GB of RAM, this stick is doing just fine.[emoji4]... 4 gig would be better of course. It's on the second time through my playlist and the song that had the hiccup didn't have the hiccup this time. Must have been some background process that messed it up the first time through.
If I was gonna use this for REAL (and that's unlikely), I'd stop all unnecessary Windows processes and disconnect from the Internet (so Microsoft won't try to update it).
This stick PC has been in a drawer for about 6 months, so it's getting lots of updates.[emoji4]
Here's a pic of my MeeGo Stick PC/Traktor/Pioneer DDJ-T1 test setup.
... Still running fine on third time through the 10 track playlist. No hiccups since that first time through on the 6th track.
... Still running fine on third time through the 10 track playlist. No hiccups since that first time through on the 6th track.
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my thought is I can use a 19 inch monitor i have a usb hub connected to a rack panel already so that part is simple, I get a bigger monitor which my main goal
The monitor I'm using to test with doesn't have them, but I have a Dell monitor with several USB ports built in. That would eliminate the need for the USB hub. If you could get by with a USB thumb drive for your music, or could get all the music you need for your gig on the stick PC, you would have no cables or extra components to deal with...Just the stick PC.
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