Quote:
Originally Posted by Skybird74
 I hate to sound really stupid here! But I don't understand the discussion about sound cards. I just take the sound directly from the speaker output of my laptop & go directly into my Yamaha mixer amp! What other way is there? |
Your laptop has an internal sound card and the speaker output is the output from that internal sound card. You could also run an external USB type sound card. The reason to run multiple sound cards or sound cards that have multiple outputs is so that when you are running the dj side of your show, you don't have to wait until a song is finished before you can start the next one. Or you can monitor (listen) to the next song you are going to play while another is playing. You could make the next song start at exactly the place you want by monitoring it and hitting pause on your player as you know some songs have a different lead in such as "Baby Got Back". The first 15 seconds or so of that song is just talking. Singers may want to listen to a song they think they want to sing to make sure it is what they thought it was. If you have multiple sound cards or sound cards with multiple outputs you could let them do that while playing a fill song. I believe in version 4.0 or after, Hoster will allow the use of more than one sound card. At the present time it only allows you to use the default sound card and if you have more than one sound card you can choose which card it uses by setting which sound card is the default. If you have a laptop you can have two sound cards by using the internal card and an external card. I use an internal card and an external Extigy sound card and I have a rackmounted PC not a laptop. Whether you do something like this depends on how versatile you would like to be when you do your shows. I like as much versatility as I can afford. My rack has a mixer (Behringer), peak limiter, equalizer, cd player, dvd player and a tape player. I can play almost any kind of Karaoke music. I do not have a lazer disk player. So, if someone asks me to play their disk, I can play anything but a lazer disk.
Hope this helps!
gpayne