Pat, Notes and others make some excellent points for using a laptop. In fact in an earlier post,. I also extolled the laptop/netbook virtues. However, recently I've had problems with it. Initially, I thought it was the mp3 software player that I was using so I switched to Windows media player. It does the same thing with wmp also--sort of like some buffering process like when you send something to the printer.

The problem is this.....When I push play for the 1st song, it doesn't play and the little circle just keeps spinning. This only happens with the first song. I use playlists for the types of gigs we do. So far, the only way I've found to combat this is to get everything setup and then put the netbook to sleep. I wake it up when we get to the gig. I've had this happen twice and the last time was with an audience of a couple hundred people. Well, that's pretty embarrassing. I'm going to check and see if the same thing happens if I don't load up a player pgm and just double click on a tune in a folder instead. In the mean time, I've ordered a little Phillips mp3 player to use as a backup. There's really no time to futz with this kind of stuff in the middle of a church service. The sound quality is fine. I only use single play. My ears are wide open to suggestions. Oh yeah, I also have a Nexus 10 that I haven't tried for gigs since I'm not certain of it's reliability.

Stan

Cornet Curmudgeon