The wife's asked me to DJ her birthday party, I'm thinking of doing it off my (Vista) PC, how can I get gapless playback? My music is all high bitrate mp3s encoded in Lame, mostly a few years ago.

Just enable the crossfade feature in your player application.

If you're actually going to DJ, then you'd use some DJ software where you can manually cross-fade. Independent output and volume control for at least two playback streams, that way you can monitor one stream on some headphones as you queue up the next track.

If you're just going to set up a playlist, then yeah, just turn on cross-fade in your favorite music player and set the fade duration long enough to cover up any silence at the start or end of the tracks you've selected.

Will take a look at cross fade, never done it before. Not looking to do anything fancier than stringing together a few different playlists.

iTunes DJ mode might be worth a look then. It allows you to create some quick mixes to play, and easially allows you to rearrange what is coming up. And if you have an iPhone or iPod Touch around, you can let people vote up tracks to play next.

I've not played with iTunes except briefly when I decided that something small and light like WinAmp was better for me. I'll d/load it again.

Back to the real DJ experience I mentioned... You can also use one of these little Pacemaker devices (mentioned here before) to do all your DJ business line beat matching, pitch, bass and treble adjustment on two virtual decks, allowing you also to fade between each deck at will.

http://www.engadget.com/2009/05/08/video-tonium-pacemaker-in-action/#continued


I saw this thing previewing on a different blog last year, but it looks like it may finally be available for wide-consumption.

Now that is FAR too complex sounding for my needs