All your advice about running from MP3's is well stated and good. Wisdom borne no doubt from experience. Advice I will take.

However, I really do like running live from a laptop, and have been doing it for over 5 years.

My gigs are relatively low stress and informal, usually restaurant or small parties. The players are me (classical guitar) and usually one friend, a career professional guitarist. Mostly we play great american songbook standards where we've tweaked the changes to our liking. Arrangements are easy, one of us takes the head, then we switch off improvising choruses, then head-out. Our work load is also pretty casual, 3 or 4 gigs a month. With Real Tracks as our rhythm section, sounds great and we can control the loudness so people can talk while having dinner. Doesn't pay a great deal but we get lots of compliments and tips aren't too shabby. I've showed the rig to a friend (sax player) who now has pretty much the same kit and using is to play out.

We certainly could work from MP3's and charts, but it's sure easy and convenient to work from a small (bright) laptop. Easy to see where you are in a song (though admittedly I do sometimes wonder if I've become overly dependent on following the cursor). And as I said before, we've been doing this for quite a while. Laptops really have become pretty rugged, and operating systems far more stable over the last few years.

There is very little in life more rewarding than friends making good music together in comfortable settings. Thank you BIAB.

John