DJ Mixing Software

My brother who operates a sound system dropped his PC at home for repair. The PC boots fine but when he launches the DJ mixing software he was using, the computer suddenly reboots. Took me a few days to shoot the trouble. The problems is a mixture of bad hard disk partition and memory. The hard disk has 2 partitions, the one where the OS was installed is doing fine but the one where the tons of MP3s are stored is damaged. So every time the music software is launched, it accesses the bad partition and crashes. There was also problems in some parts of the memory. So the hard disk and memory were thrown to the waste basket and replaced.

As for the DJ mixing software, I installed a small free software from Native Instruments, whose bread and butter are high-end music software that cost lots of dollars. Fortunately, they also offer a free player formerly called Traktor Beat Port Player but is now called Beatport Sync. The major difference is that Sync has an online capability which enables the user to connect to the internet and buy music. I don't really need the connectivity stuff, just the playing and mixing parts. So I used an old download of the Beatport Player. The player is great. It has two decks and a sync function. The catalog and search functions are also useful. After installing it, I loaded the PC with more than 3,000 mp3s from my collection and have the software load them in its catalog and analyze each song. It took the software 20 hours to finish the analysis which is just figuring out the BPM of each music.

And while hunting for a good and free mixing software, I stumbled upon MIXX which has a white interface and looks promising. I'm still test driving it to see if it fares better than Beatport.

By the way, i'm not really into this DJ thing. My players of choice are - the good old Winamp and VLC.

Recently

The Kite Runner - never read the book. The film is good. It reminded me of my "burador" days back when I was the same age as the kids in the film.

I Now Pronounce You Chuck and Larry - Adam Sandler in a comedy film about same-sex marriage. The last two Adam Sandler flicks I saw before this one were serious ones and amazingly he acts good in serious roles. Check out Reign Over Me and Punch Drunk Love for proofs.

Live Free or Die Hard - saw this one before inside a bus on a trip to the city. I thought the one I downloaded is the Unrated Edition with bloods and cursing. It's the same sanitized version.

I'm Not There - a artsy Bob Dylan flick where he was portrayed by six different actors including Richard Gere, Christian Bale, Heath Ledger and Kate Blanchett. Took me three installments before I finally finished watching it today. I pause the video a lot to check out real bob Dylan videos on youtube.

The Earth is missing on my Google Earth

When i opened Google Earth tonight, i was alerted that a new version (4.3) is already available. I promptly updated to see if my small town already has high resolution image. But when i opened Google Earth after the update it turned out that not only is my town missing but the entire earth suddenly turned invisible. All that remained are the yellow outlines of the countries. Weird.

I tried uninstalling the application and then I downloaded and installed it again but the same problem persists. I miss Earth.

Update: Problem solved. Apparently, my PC is not using the OpenGL 3D engine which is the default setup on Google Earth. So i switched to Direct X. The option is in the Tools menu. Earth is beautiful.