Well with about 2 days of practicing Traktor Pro keyboard shortcuts and adding a few here and there, preparing a tentative playlist and mentally getting ready I finally did my first gig. I played 6 hours at the party of the Force Lake ultimate frisbee tournament. About 20 people stuck around til the official end of the party at 4am. We then me and about 10 others moved things to the plaza of the EPFL university where I was Djing of off my iPhone using my set of mobile speakers for another hour (man was I tired playing Frisbee at 10am). Overall I am very happy and got lots of positive feedback, though I know that a lot of that was meant encouragement to continue on this. But I think overall the crowd like my selection and very much appreciated my willingness to download tracks from iTunes and play them almost immediately after they were selected. I think the way I organized by playlist really seemed to work out well for this and made sure I was so flexible.
However I of course also did several mistakes. First one was that since I was going through my playlist during the day without the AK1 hooked up, I screwed up my audio setup. So I had my output 0/1 setup for the monitor and nothing for master. Since I had the first few tracks perfectly lined up already I only noticed this when I was already into the first few songs and the crowd started to fill the floor and I noticed that it was time to make some adjustments to my playlist. I then briefly attempted to just play out of iTunes until I could reconfigure Traktor. This obviously failed, since I wasn't routing things through the AK1, which meant that things were way to quiet going into the mixer. Well a short interruption was inevitable then. I need to figure out how to route my headphone out into the mic of my AK1. Of course I could have also send things straight to the AK1 (I use the BetterSound prefpane to manage this), but I did not remember to do this on the spot. With things going into the mic I could have also follow through with my idea of using the daft punk flash movie along with my bluetooth keyboard to launch samples from the dancefloor. So it goes.
Aside from this I learned a lot and have some more learning assignments and tasks to complete. First up I need to learn how to mix rock songs. I also need to create a better OSX friendly keyboard mapping. I also created an iTunes account on the Swiss store, so that I can download all the songs that are not available in the US store. Prices are lower than in the EU stores and the Swiss store should feature the best selection of songs across all of Europe since Switzerland has German, French and Italian as official languages which should affect the types of songs people expect.
Finally I got an idea for a new application build around Traktor Pro 1.2's supposed edition of songs played streaming feature. I used iTunes genius a few times during my gig to find potential new tracks. However if Traktor Pro can export this stuff easily, then someone could write a dedicated apps for this purpose that is a bit more advanced and configurable.