Laptop DJ Rocks the Dancefloor
It's a familiar, almost clichéd, sight. The shabby nightclub, with hundreds of drunken, once smartly dressed people, shuffling to an ever present beat, in the vain hope that they will not leave the dance floor alone. Luckily the laptop DJ is on hand to rescue them from their disco blues.
It's afamiliar, almost clichéd, sight. The run down disco, withhundreds of drunken, once smartly dressed people, shuffling to anever present beat, in the vain hope that they will not leave thedance floor alone.
And always in these images there is the DJ, this isn't your FatBoy Slim or Paul van Dyke, spinning polished tunes for theadoring masses, oh no, this is the anonymous DJ. The one whoseems to speak through a bad sound system with a bag of cottonwool stuffed up his nose.
The pseudo music deity, who rains his basic taste in audio andpopular culture down on the people who stopped listening an hourago.
There used to be a time when requests were a staple of the DJ'slife, he was interactive, dynamic and above all interesting. Inthe computer age that we live now, the Disc Jockey has taken astep back into the darkness from this brightest of illumination.Most people don't make request of him or her, as they can't evenfind them.
However, now it seems that laptops have started to bring these reluctant minstrels back to us.
Using a notebook to convert boxes of vinyl records into MP3sand stepping down from the DJ booth, Canadian laptop DJ JudeKelly, has embraced technology in order to spin his tunes fromthe bar. In fact to the casual observer it looks like Jude isjust another guy taking in the atmosphere, chatting to thechicks, and sinking a few brewskies.
But one look at his tasty bit of kit reveals this is the guyrocking the dance floor. Using a mix of this hardware andcommercial software, Jude uses Virtual DJ, hecan run any song in his staggering digitally encoded repositoryof block rocking beats.
A request comes to him from any of the patrons, and he's on handand available to play it. If he hasn't got it then a quick popover to Itunes and the requested tune is blasting out withinseconds, thanks to a Wi-Fi connection and a local Hotspot.
So what does the future hold for this laptop DJ? Well Jude savours the freedom that he knows will come in thenear future, when he will be able to remotely operate his laptop,with a miniature connection. This will allow him to dance to histunes with the rest of the patrons in the 21st century socialstaple that is the nightclub.
