Reply to Started pulling in gigs quickly. Have a few questions to keep my setup stable.

Hey guys,

I started DJing a few months ago and things have started to pick up for me pretty quickly, played my first gig last week and it went amazing. I'm booked to play another show next week, and I want to make sure that my gear performs well.

I use an S4 and Traktor (on a Windows 8 laptop) and did have a few problems with occasional CPU load spiking and small audio dropouts. My laptop is only really used for production and DJing.

Laptop Specs: i5, 8GB, hard drive is clean.

Here's what I've done/noticed:

In Windows:
-Disabled Wifi
-Disabled Background Applications
-Run Power Settings in High Performance
-Disabled Sleep Modes

In Traktor:
-Disabled Multicore support in Traktor
-Haven't really messed with latency settings.

I'm playing music directly off my laptops hard drive. Is there a performance gain with running an external hard drive? I need to pick up an external hard drive in the future, but would it be better to run my playlist off of a flash drive for the time being? Does Traktor even recognize a flash drive?

I'm running my effects in Chain Mode. So 6 effects ready to go. Could this cause drop outs?


Also, just a tip for anyone running Traktor and going on your first gig. When I went to start my set, my gear was working, but no audio was coming out of the master. I was scheduled to play in the middle of the evening , but because my gear wasn't working someone else had to go on. It sucked

After spending 45 minutes messing with routing, restarting my computer, all this BS, I quickly googled and found that the problem ended up being the Master Gain Knob in Traktor (software) was turned all the way down. The Master Knob on my S4 did not control the knob in the software. Once I leveled it out, everything was fine. After that, I ended up closing out the evening , and everything went great. If you use an S4 and ever see a blinking Triangle above the SNAP button, it's an indicator of your master knob being either too high or too low, or your laptop not being plugged in.