if you play (on a average) every song for 3min or almost 3min, that would be approx. 20 songs per hour. Easy math = about 100 songs in 5 hrs.

If you play songs longer than 3min then you would need even less tracks. But don't sell yourself short man.

The average video should compress down to, let's say 65mb. 1600 x 65 mb = 10,4000 mb or 101.56 Gb.

Add in a 20% overhead (approx 20.2 Gb. Do you have an internal drive with 125 Gb of free space in it? Perhaps more if your videos are longer or use less compression.

thanks for the replies. i normally spin a video anywhere from 2-3 minutes. no longer than that. i rahter play from the laptop than the external but if i have to, it won't be a problem.

500 gig is plenty unless you have a ton of filler video. I have over 1800 right now and I know I probably play more than half of them or maybe 3/4 but if you just keep the ones you know you will play on your laptop, you'll save space. Obviously don't delete them for good, just keep them off of your gig laptop.

lvmez come on man u know u need tbs of video everywhere u go like me lol jk

On the real it depends if u know ur crowd n what ur facing and what u have to spin then 200 to 250 videos will suit u fine for between 2 n 3 hours so multiply by 2 n a half for 5 500 to 750 will be fine however if u r going into uncharted territory then u might want to bring more based on the variety of genres but hey if u have 125 ambients then well u can bring mp3s and what not and really get clever...

just my 2 cents pay no mind lol

dont forget you will play some videos more than once if not 5 times.

that's a good point. i'm trying not to do that buti think it's impossible not to play some new videos a few times.

I haven't yet, Still on the fence about it. I think once a night is good for any song/video, but I do know I get requested for the same hot hot song more than once a night.

Then this must depend on crowd and access to dj. Man I'm from what the call the dirty south and whatever is hot on the radio they want to hear it almost every 15mins just like they do it on the radio. I try to space the shit out but after a while give them what they want so the will stop bugging me. Ur the only dj I know that can the whole night without playing a song more than once. Then again since you edit videos I bet it's the same but 20 diffrent ways. : )

I thought that was one of the cardinal rules of dj'ing u only play a song or video once per shift (party, or whatever u want to call it)

That's what I thought, also the spot I spin at is nice because the booth is elevated and no one can really get to me to talk if I catch them out of the corner of my eye I might lean down and see what they want.

i don't mind playing the video twice but it will have to be hours later.

yeah, I pretty much have HAD to do that...
on the rare occasion I have 2 different crowds... a post work crowd that will leave
by 11, and a party crowd that doesent show up til 11

I have a 500 gb thats at just under 4000 videos.
I rip mine to a 80-150mb file for your average at 4000kb (I was doing 3000 for so long)

when you do multi-genre its easy to not have to repeat songs...
but even still... i try to never play a track twice.
more often than not I walk out of a gig saying "fuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuck I forgot to play ______, _______ & ________"

kk josh that almost a different scenario, thats lik a 2 shift night <at least in my book>

totally...
depending where your gigs are, and the times this is a anomoly for sure.

That is what I end up doing sometimes. I hate that.

puma good crates prevent this

I got one crate.

The "crush it" crate

haha, no.
I'm trying to do that with video crates now, but I feel if I'm in the old school crate I might miss something in the root video crate that would blend will with the currently playing track.

Well here is my rule,,,,I will play anything twice or even a million times if people will stay on the floor..

For my on entertainment I let people request songs but I tell them that if nobody dances I will stop the song and say such and such requested that. Boy I have so much fun with that because it stops request for the rest of the night.

I tried that once...it ended in a first fight.
thank god for the dj booth bouncers.

lol. I will not comment on my outcomes...

I'll play an original version early, then a remix later.

Like last night, Lovegame around 10:30 and then the crooklyn uptempo edit around 1:30

But in answer to your question, a lot more than 20 songs per hour!

The snipz versions are nice, keeps things fresh. Typically I'll only play those, so each song lasts about a minute and a half....so several hundred songs in one night.

i went through about 400-500 videos. i was actually over prepared. thanks guys.

how many hours did u play for lou?

ok so i kind of looked up n saw the headline please exuse me am extremely tired lol

I play 168 songs over a five hour period - roughly 2 1/2 minutes....but thats doing RnB/Hip Hop....Dance music doesn't require such a tough routine

Sorry...I mean I play 168 songs over a seven hour period - roughly 2 1/2 minutes per song....but thats doing RnB/Hip Hop....Dance music doesn't require such a tough routine

Less is more in my opinion, I'd rather have 1000 videos or music files that I will use, than have 10,000 to sort through. Being able to find stuff and just having a decent selection in front of you affects your selection, if you're looking at loads of irrelevant/junky videos then you're likely to play a few of those...

How you organise your files/crates/filter folders or whatever is important.

A 5 hour gig shouldn't need more than 100 videos.

quote]Less is more in my opinion, I'd rather have 1000 videos or music files that I will use, than have 10,000 to sort through. Being able to find stuff and just having a decent selection in front of you affects your selection, if you're looking at loads of irrelevant/junky videos then you're likely to play a few of those...

How you organise your files/crates/filter folders or whatever is important.

A 5 hour gig shouldn't need more than 100 videos.

Yeah i feel the same way but it is nice when people come up and ask you for something and you got it. That would not be the case if you reduced your library. I have coincided to having two drives one with my most popular for sure going to get played stuff and then another drive has the fluff and old stuff. Besides you can add every video you have to the libary and set creates up you would not even know those videos that you don't ues are there because I'm sure you didn't add them to the crate.

I would keep likely requests in the main folders, as the majority of requests are recent hits and classics. I delete stuff that I know I would never need, I keep usable videos in a different section of the harddrive, they wont come up in a search but I can do a folder search and the relevant content will appear.

The main thing is to avoid too much scrolling in the browser - there's nothing worse than spending the last 30 seconds of a song still hunting...

Yeah when I 1st started video I was more interested in building a huge collection (which I have now) but I have since limited it to my gig only videos on my internal HD on the gig machine.

To answer your question though. A good start is 500 videos.

i have over 10k videos but i wanted to be safe so i transfered about 1500 videos onto my mac. i ended up using mostly top 40 and hip hop mostly. i was over prepared. i think 150-200 videos is good for a 5 hour gig. i play about 2 minutes of a track.

I havent played a track twice in a 5 hour gig since probably 99 lol I just simply refuse I dont care if I played it @ 10 and its 2:15
In my opinion as a Dj you should be able to control your crowd and keep them intrested without playin the same huge songs time and time again

Amen DJnak.

I don't think there's anything wrong with playing the top 5 twice, especially if the first/second time round you play some kind of remix.

I agree as well. I don't make it a practice to do that, especially since I play more Top 40 mixes. In a residency you have time to "train" your crowd to show up early if they want to hear certain songs or types of music.

Another good post!

how many needed? all of them. =P

how many songs ... If I play Hip Hop/R&B, then I cycle in and out of songs quickly so I play roughly about 90 to 120 seconds per song ... that's about 30 to 45 songs per hour ... at the most, I'd want at least 225 songs for my night.

If I'm playing house, the rate at which I cycle through tracks is much slower so less songs are needed