a bad night.

[key cabin]

well let me tell you about my worst night of dj'ing ever,
turned up to do a suprise 65th birthday party, as usual i got there 30 mins early so i could set up in peace.
Got set up no problem untill i switched my computer on,ots loaded up no problem but i could'nt5 get any of my tracks to load into the play area, so i thought "relink them all that should sort the problem out, the birthday boy was 15 mins away and i had 140,000 tracks to relink.
well as you can imagine i only had a couple of cd's to help me out untill everything had relinked.
It took a good half hour the birthday boy was there the tracks had just finished linking and i finally started to pannick.
The hall was now full and everyone was looking at me to get the party up and running, i hit the save button and tried to drag some tracks into my play area, NOTHING
After another hour i finaly got things up and running, what a night i never want another one like it.
Now i have an ots av with thousands of little blue ots men on my computer, how do i get rid of them all ?

[DJ Postie]

mmmmm that does suck - I always take along a backup computer (cheap $300 netbook) just in case of things like that happen................. Don't forget to test-run-load your main pc at home before ya gig just in case.................... 

[milky]

Oh dear. Were you using an external drive? If you are not careful, Windows will allocate a different drive letter and this will then not agree with the Ots database. You should allocate the drive letter yourself (I use "O" for Ots), and then, if ever it comes up with nothing to play, go into "Disk Management" and change to the letter you normally use.

[key cabin]

Yep it was an external hard drive, it was probably the worst night of my life, i felt a complete prat stood up on a stage with little or no music.
However the night did go OK, the lady phoned me next day to thank me for a good night and she would be booking me for future functions.

[Jumpin' Jeff]

When you plugged in the external drive, did you plug it into the exact same port you had it in previously? If not, it would most likely assign it a new drive letter, and unlink your tracks as milky stated. It's good to know exactly what drive letter is assigned to your Ots library, and check it on boot after you set everything up at a new location. It would take much less time to go into your admin tools, and reassign your drive letter than to relink 140k tracks. Less than a couple minutes if you know what you're doing.

[Lane]

I don't personally understand the whole 140k tracks thing. That's huge.

For my station, I have a smaller library of emergency music I keep on a USB Thumb Drive.  A 16GB thumb drive still gives me lots of tracks.

[Darryl]

I use the two laptop approach myself - two laptops, two external hard drives.   The only thing I don't have two of is amp/speaker/mixer.  It's going to let me down one day so I'm going to invest in the smallest decent powered speaker I can find - it won't sound as good, but it would do the job.

[whisper]

i keep about 40 gig of music on the laptop itself with the media library on the desktop...
that way if any problems with external drives...a quick click will load it up immediately.

[milky]

i keep about 40 gig of music on the laptop itself with the media library on the desktop...
that way if any problems with external drives...a quick click will load it up immediately.

Yes, I do something similar. I have two copies of the OML file - one for the total collection on external (NAS) drive O: and one for the internal drive C: I've only used it on-air a couple of times when the network failed and the NAS became unreachable, but it was a lifesaver.

[nextgen1]

Backup Computer, Backup Hardrive, And in this case arriving a little earlier may have helped you. These are the types of things that drive me to bring and do all these things. All the things you talked about are the nightmares that I actually have. I had a ceremony were something odd happened with OTS. I know now it was my fault but at that time I had no options but to close out ots and use the small ots player to finish the ceremony and cocktail hour. The client knew nothing about my problem that I was having. But to say that I wasn't feeling a little pressured was an under statement. Never let them see you sweat. )

[Jigger]

After another hour i finally got things up and running, what a night i never want another one like it.
Now i have an ots av with thousands of little blue ots men on my computer, how do i get rid of them all ?

Do you mean grey ots icons
If this is the case they may be unavailable in your media library click the drop down you will see unavailable items select that then right click and select all right click again and click remove.
With what has happened to you if the above is the case you should have Yellow Ots Icons and Grey Ots Icons in your media library the grey ones are the unavailable ones, Make sure this is the case before removing anything.If in doubt post back with more details.

[milky]

Do you mean grey ots icons
If this is the case they may be unavailable in your media library click the drop down you will see unavailable items select that then right click and select all right click again and click remove.
With what has happened to you if the above is the case you should have Yellow Ots Icons and Grey Ots Icons in your media library the grey ones are the unavailable ones, Make sure this is the case before removing anything.If in doubt post back with more details.

Note that you MAY lose your categories and last played information if you delete the original tracks and leave the newly scanned tracks.

[key cabin]

I have only been a member of this forum for a couple of months but the help that i have recieved has been invaluable, and once again you chaps have come to the rescue.
Thank you for all your help and sugestions. i personaly like the idea of popping some music on a memory stick or a nights worth of music on your hard drive.
I will be sorting this out before this weekend.

Cheers lads.

[Vinny H]

I don't personally understand the whole 140k tracks thing. That's huge.

For my station, I have a smaller library of emergency music I keep on a USB Thumb Drive.  A 16GB thumb drive still gives me lots of tracks.

I actually like this idea and will be looking into this emergency backup.  Was wondering what songs would be included on this emergency music drive.

[Lane]

you probably know your most requested tunes. and what you think would keep folks happy. i'm a radio guy, not a mobile DJ, so I don't need to worry about requests so much anyway. i personally put a whole lot of extra canadian content on mine, giving those people a bit of a bump during a maintenance cycle at the station.