a bad night.

[Vinny H]

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.

And I use Ots for DJing so yeah, I'm sure I could come up with something.  The radio station where I work we use totally different program.

[tower]

I guess most VJ's using Ots have the collection on an external drive when using a Laptop, for unless you add a 1TB internal drive (and only the top end laptops are large enough to let you do this) you will not have room for your collection.   I too do not understand how anyone can have more than say 38,000 Tracks in an Ots Collection without major duplications.   My collection, which started the year I got my first gig back in 1967 is 38,300 or so tracks of which only 7500 are Video, 12700 Karaoke and the remainder audio only, but there are less than 0.1% duplicates left and all the rubbish has been weeded out, except of course the current stuff.    The collection is growing at between 5 to 10GB per month depending on how many Promo Only or MixMash DVD's and CD's come in.

I have managed to upgrade an Acer 8943 to 1.75 TB internal hard drive space so the collection fits in side the laptop which gets round the drive not found error you must of had before Ots did not let you load any song into the decks or play.    YOU must check before the gig by looking at the file window on your external drive that the drive letter is what it was when you indexed the collection on Ots.   Drive F is a fav letter but it can change to say G if you have for example a USB flash drive in one of the ports, or have changed the external USB port your hard drive normally plugs into, or altered your laptop in any way, for example making a Virtual DVD drive or something like that.

Then it is a lot quicker to use windows Administrative Tools/Computer Management/Storage/Disc Management to change the external drive letter back again to F or what ever letter it should be.   Setting it to O is a very good idea by the way.

Quickest way to find the above is:

START then enter in the search box Disc Management then look at the list and click on create and format hard disc partitions   DON'T worry you will NOT be doing that.   From the graphics display find your external hard drive from the list and then use the CHANGE drive Letter and Paths option and set the external hard drive back to F or whatever letter is was before when Ots refreshed or indexed your collection then re start Ots and Volla your collection is back again.

Best thing to do is practise this a few times at home when the pressure is off.   Change your external drive letter and then load Ots and see what happens... Yeah the exact same problem you had at the gig... Then change it back again (The drive letter that is) and bingo... you are becoming a computer whiz... or nerd..  Be very careful as nerds can have a tough time at gigs hi...

[DJ Nikki]

We had ours all on a rocket pod external harddrive and rarely had an issue, but we followed the advise of veteran DJ's here and made backups of every song we owned in ots format, in case something crashed and we had to completely reload. Those CD's came in handy to pop into the CDG triple deck and let them run til the pc issue was fixed. Dave also went ahead and cataloged all of the music by catagory then by artist on paper so we would be able to function completely without the pc if need be. Our couple of issues was purely the PC...not ots itself.