autokdj surprise, surprise

[The Wizard Of OZ]

The romance with my new laptop is over. I was SUPER CAREFUL when I fist got it about putting software on it and making sure I didn't do anything that would make it unstable or bogged down. I tried winamp and autokdj shortly after I updated Vista and I had cleaned off any unnecessary things put there by the PC manufacturer etc. The first time I launched winamp it crashed so I immediately uninstalled it and cleaned every vestage of the program off my computer.

Fast forward a few months. I have seen several local KJs using Sax n Dotty which is based on winamp and uses the pacemaker plugin for pitch and tempo control. I got curious. One place I sang at they lowered the key 4 half steps and it didn't sound distorted, now I was very curious. A couple days later I downloaded winamp, autokdj and the Pacemaker plugin. I installed everything and had some glitches which I somehow overcame and worked through. At first I couldn't get autokdj to run. Finally somehow I got everything working and I'm surprised, it seems to be working OK so far. I'm going to continue to put it through it's paces and see if it breaks.

 

[JoeChartreuse]

Just out of curiosity, did you use this program with XP, and if so, did you encounter any problems?

 

[The Wizard Of OZ]

I used it in the past with a PC that I have XP on and it worked fine. My laptop that I just installed it on has Vista.

My favorite program is KaraFun. I've grown used to it and I'm very comfortable using it. It does everything I want and need. I use it all the time for practicing. It's very stable and what I like about it is that it has both pitch AND tempo adjustment. It's extremely easy to operate too.

I don't think KJs would love it like I do though. It doesn't have a good way to search for songs so you need to have another way to find the requested song before locating it with KaraFun and then loading it. It also has no way to handle a rotation. I don't think it's intended for use by KJs.

 

[jokerswild]

Just out of curiosity, did you use this program with XP, and if so, did you encounter any problems?

It's completely stable on XP....

As for Vista I haven't had the pleasure of loading it there yet... but I will be in a few days as a KJ friend of mine is getting a new Dell with Vista on it.

Wiz - Welcome back buddy.... I'm glad to see your giving us another try. I hope it goes well... as always if ya need help just give me a holler.

 

[JoeChartreuse]

It's completely stable on XP....

As for Vista I haven't had the pleasure of loading it there yet... but I will be in a few days as a KJ friend of mine is getting a new Dell with Vista on it.

.

Kinda what I figured. Wiz, for future reference, you could have specified XP with dell. They do custom work. So many of the Karaoke Hosts and DJs that I know who are (sigh- ) PC have told me that Vista is nothing but problems for any program not specifically designed for it.

Which of course, is probably the reason Microstupid probably introduced it. Their best platforms are the original Windows, which ran DOS programs beautifully, and XP. That doesn't mean their really good, just that those two were the best of the bunch.

 

[The Wizard Of OZ]

Well, I have to say that after some initial problems with certain programs not running under Vista I'm doing ok now. It was a process of discovery and trial and error, but I found programs that run just fine. Vista on my Dell laptop so far seems to be working with few to no problems now.

One other issue that subsided was intermittent crackle and pop noises when playing music. My hunch is that it was mostly caused by the internal sound card/driver. I'm using a Behringer USB sound card or a Creative Labs XFi USB sound card and everything seems fine now.

I have allowed every Microsoft Vista upgrade and suspect they have corrected many of the initial problems. I've accepted Vista now and moved on from XP. At this point Vista appears to be every bit as good as XP as far as I can tell.