Nikhil Dev

Allright then. Came home really late last night(in fact, in the morning) so wasnt able to post the picture. But here it is

I was provided a Pioneer DJM-800 mixer by the resort guys. Apart from this I used my Compaq laptop which was running Traktor DJ Studio 3.2.2. I then use the Numark Total Control USB midi interface to control Traktor DJ Studio.

When it comes to output routing, I used the Numark DJ/IO to split the output in terms of monitor and master.

The setup is pretty straight forward and one of the easiest to control. There are not many effects possibilities though. The few effects that i use are Delay, beat masher, flanger(i use this a lot) and the T2 filter. I thought these are good enough for a small show. You can play around with the T2 filter quite a lot as well as the delay. The only limitation I felt was having to use the mouse every time i wanted to change the kinda effect. Otherwise the effect control are very easy to use.

The best part about this setup is the ability to load songs faster. The middle knob of the Total Control allows you to quickly scroll through the tracks in the view. Pressing the know down preplays it on the monitor o/p. Each deck has its own set of load track buttons. which loads the selected track in the particular deck.

I will post a detailed video of the basics with this setup and a few simple mixes. Hangon till then.

As for any aspiring DJ, I would like to say that this is a VERY portable setup. Its a must have actually.Its worth the money at least.

Cheers till then

The last year has been a crazy spending one for me. I have bought some much stuff. So I wanted to make a list of what all I have bought in 2007. This is how the list goes

1. iPod 80G

2. 2GB Memory Stick Duo

3. Creative E-Mu 0404

4. Sandisk Mp3 player

5. ESP M-200FM Electric Guitar

6. Line 6 Pod Xt Live

7. Sony DHC AZ33D hi-fi system

8. Compaq V3228AU laptop

9. Motorola MotoRokr E6

10. iPod Shuffle

11.A couple of hard drive cases

12. Glasses

13. Lots of booze.

14. A lot more things that I dont remember.

I think I am into another year of spending and I have made a list of things that I have to buy.

1. Numark Total Control USB DJ Controller(already bought and shipped)

2. Numark DjIO USB DJ audio interface(bought and shipped this as well)

3. Another laptop for multimedia(preferably a mac book if I can afford one)

4. Royal Enfield Thunderbird.

5. Lotsa clothes.

6. Gig bag for my line 6.

7. Leather straps for my guitar.

8. Lotsa clothes.

Will post if there is anything else I can think of.

Last week I had a problem, that just drove me mad. This is what happened.

I was defragging my 80Gig iPod, and my desktop at home for some reason froze. I had to hard reboot, but to my horror, all my music, the songs and the videos now do not showup on the ipod. I connected the ipod again and I could see them in iTunes. Even media monkey showed that the music was there on the ipod. The ipod stats also showed that the content was there. Why the hell is the ipod library not able to detect the media. Is it that the library got corrupted. If yes, then there was not way to rebuild an ipod library. So my only solution was to copy all the music off the ipod to my work desktop using Yamipod. After that I had to restore my ipod to factory settings. And then put all the music back on the ipod. I dont use Auto sync. So it was even more tough for me. Things went smoothly until just 2 days back when I connected the ipod again to my home computer. The same thing happened again. All the music appeared to be gone. This time it was nothing that I screwed up. All I did was just update a few albums on my iPod.

This is the time, I had to research on this. I brought out my Compaq 3228AU. Connected my iPod to that and copy just one song to the iPod. Miraculously, the library now showed up on the ipod. So what went wrong??

This is really interesting. What I did not realize was that I had upgraded the ipod firmware from 1.2.1 to 1.2.2 which was the latest firmware for iPod 5G and 5.5G. Now when I connected it to my work comp, the iTunes version there was 7.5 whereas the iTunes version at home was 7.3. There is a major incompatibility between the iTunes earlier to 7.5 and the 1.2.2 iPod firmware update. If you want to stick to an iTunes version lesser to 7.5 you should not update the firmware to 1.2.2. If you want to still use 1.2.2 firmware, you better upgrade the iTunes to 7.5. I think this is a nasty way Apple is forcing the consumers to use the latest versions of software.

I have been able to fix this problem after quite some research. If you are having the same problem, do comment. We will try to fix it together. If you have already fixed it, it would be great if you can share it.

Just a simple list of steps to fix this again:-

1. Upgrade to iPod firmware 1.2.2.

2. Upgrade iTunes to 7.5

3. Connect the ipod to iTunes 7.5 once and disconnect. Or just copy one song so that the library is rewritten.

4. Disconnect the iPod.

Voila!!!!

—–Update——

Just today I noticed that apple has released it Firmware version 1.2.3 for the ipod 5Gs. I have’nt  had any problems till now. but just in case there are any surprises, Will surely post.

So this is my second attempt to stay at home and do nothing. And above all, resist the temptation of going to work. And guess what. At last I succeded. Did nothing, played guitar for quite sometime. was able to get to a 140 bpm on chromatics. Now that is some improvement considering the fact that 120 was quite screechy on my fingers.

Even today was kinda boring. My idea of a perfect leave schdule is just about 3 days including the weekend if wanna just stay back home.

I know that I havent been blogging for quite some time now but its just that there is not much excitement in life these days Same old rock and roll at work, drinkin on the weekens and chillin at home. What do I write about then. As far as the music wandered thing that I was doin previously, that needs some time and more than anything else, it need patience and creativity. And both these things are gapp marofying these days.  Whatever it might be, will try to stay on track.

Off late there are a lot of people asking review about the Compaq 3228au( its the one that I use). I wanna tell anyone searchng for this model that this is one of the best one can have for a price something like 33 grand. I you wanna know more about this then I have one of the posts about the full review of the laptop in my earlier technology posts. Got through them and generate some traffic for me but pointing a link from your blog or ur site. That way I would be able to get the message to a larger group of people.

It is 1:30 am now and I still cant figure out what to do. Want to play the guitar but my mom is asleep in the front room as she sleep like a hen. I shoouldnt even breather to avoid waking her up. Lets see what the nite has in store for me.

At last I am convinced that I have made a really good purchase by buying the HP Compaq 3228AU notebook computer. From the

point I bought this, people have been asking me the specifications of the laptop and the performance details. So I thought

that its not a bad idea to write a post on that. Let me start by mentioning what the laptop comes with.

Technical Specifications:-

1. It comes with an AMD Turion clocking at 2.0 GHz and with a too FSB speed of 1066MHz and 512kb + 512kb of L2 cache. I think

its a pretty good one for a LAPTOP. The one drawback that I found with the Compaq 3228AU is that it does not have a processor

upgrade. So you have to pretty much stick with what its got.

2. It comes with an nVidia geForce 6150 which uses shared video memory upto 128 MB from the system memory. I would say that

little piece of baby even with the shared video memory is good enough to handle all my graphics of Windows Vista Ultimate

version.

3. The notebook by default comes with a 512MB of DDR2 single stick. I was wise enough to upgrade that another stick of 512MB

so that some of my graphics needs are taken care of. This is where I’ve seen that Compaq 3228AU has taken lead over other

laptops. It comes with a defualt clock speed of 667MHz which is quite decent when compared to the other laptops.

4. A hard drive of 80GB spinning at 5400 rpm is good enough for a decent performance.

5. A very handy feature is the 5 in 1 memory card reader.

6. I forgot to mention the one feature that I really like in the 3228AU. It by default comes witha 14.1 glossy look LCD at

1280 x 800. I found the performance of the display next to any other much more expensive ones.

7. And some of the other things that are included with the laptop are the builtin wireless card, ethernet, modem, 3 USB ports, Altec Lansing speakers, an express card slot and another port which I dunno what it is for.

On the whole I would rate this laptop 8 out of 10 for price vs. performace. It costed me rs. 33,000 for the minimum and with the mem upgrade it came to 36,000 with a free HP carry bag. Now beat that price for all the bling out have in the laptop.

Comment on the post if you have any other notebook that you think is worth more for a lesser price.