Welcome to the The DJ Groove!

For those of you future bride and grooms, Crate and Barrel is now holding a $100,000 Ultimate Wedding contest to give you the wedding of your dreams.

Enter Crate and Barrel's Contest

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SuperDance in the suburbs of Chicago was one of my favorite places to shop for vinyl.   Meet Aaron and many other awesome DJs.   Some people have been asking me, "what happened to them?" but since I now live out in California, its been hard to stay in touch with the Chicago scene.

Here is their explanation from their MySpace page:

Big thanks to all our customers for supporting Superdance Records over the years. We wish the store could have continued. Unfortunately technology has taken huge leaps in the DJ industry allowing digital music to take the lead. There are very cool things happening in the DJ industry. Our hope is that those who bought and played vinyl will never forget what it's like to touch a record. We still believe every DJ must experience playing with vinyl before he or she can call themselves a true DJ. Vinyl will always be apart of our history. The customers allowed Superdance to have a 15 year run. We appreciate your support!! Electronic music will only get bigger from here.!!!

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You can now receive a $5 Credit with Amazon MP3 when you purchase a minimum of $25 worth of product from their Music CD, Audio/Video, Camera, Photo & Video, Office Products, PC or Wireless stores in a single order!

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Check out this video where Human beatbox James "AudioPoet" Burchfield performs an intricate three-minute breakdown -- sexy, propulsive hip-hop rhythms and turntable textures -- all using only his voice.

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If you ever pick up an M-Audio Firewire Sound card, you might become one of the no-so-lucky customers that experience distortion when playing music through iTunes or WinAmp.   There are numerous recommendations on the internet that may not work for everyone.

Here were my symptoms and what was happening to me:

1. While playing an mp3 in iTunes, any large data transfers like syncing your iPod at the same time may cause distortion.    Shutting down iTunes and iTunesHelper.exe sometimes helped but required a reboot most of the time.
   
2. While copying large amounts of data from an external hard drive, my M-Audio Sound card would disappear from the Device Manager completely.    Re-scanning for hardware didnt work so rebooting was required.
3. If at anytime any of the above occurred, the same problem existed within WinAmp.

Various Recommendations from the internet:

1. Adjust Quicktime settings
2. Rollback Quicktime and/or iTunes
   
3. Turn off the EQ within iTunes
4. Turn off the Sound Enhancer within iTunes
5. Update drivers for M-Audio Firewire series
6. reinstall firewire card drivers.
7. etc, etc
   

After days of troubleshooting, I determined that it was basically a problem with either the M-Audio Firewire sound card or the Firewire bus itself.   Since my Dynex firewire expansion card was brand new from Best Buy...I figured it were the sound card drivers.   Nope.   Even the latest sound card drivers didnt fix it.

My Solution/Fix:

1. Return that P.O.S. Dynex Firewire expansion card
2. Replace it with a card that had the Texas Instruments (TI) Chipset. 
   

Voila.   Problem fixed.   Yea it costs a little more when it has a TI chipset but you get what you pay for and when you need stability for DJing, Studio Recording, Mixing, or Video editing via Firewire, using a name brand card with a reputable chipset manufacturer will be beneficial.   Why would you put yourself through the stress of trying to perform live with a possibility of distortion?

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