How to Use a Laptop with Good Speakers for Wedding Music

Weddings are one of the most expensive events that you host in your lifetime--a wedding dress alone can cost hundreds of dollars. For this reason, you may want to find areas to trim your wedding costs. Using a laptop with good speakers (known as laptop wedding DJing) for your ceremony is one way to save a bundle. Of course, this only works if you know how to hook the laptop up to the speaker system, set the audio settings correctly and get music onto the laptop.

Things You'll Need

• Laptop
• Audio cable with mini-jack connection
• Speakers or amplifiers
• Internet connection (optional)

Instructions

Music

1. Download music files you'd like to use from a legal music download site or program such as the iTunes store or Kazaa. If you already have the songs you'd like to use on CD, then use a music software program such as Windows Media Player to rip the music you want from the CDs onto your laptop.

2. Create a playlist (or playlists) of the music you'd like to use for the wedding.

3. Save the playlist(s) if your audio software will not automatically do so.

4. Close all open programs on your laptop.

5. Shut down your laptop and transport it to your wedding location.

Setup

1. Connect the male ends of the mini-jack audio cable into the audio ports on your speaker system.

2. Connect the female end of the mini-jack audio cable to the headphone jack on your laptop.

3. Turn on your laptop.

4. Turn the audio volume on the laptop and the speakers as low as it will go.

5. Open your audio software and choose any song from your playlist. Start the song playing and gradually bring up the volume on the laptop and the speakers, adjusting as needed to eliminate any feedback. Stop the audio and start the playlist again at appropriate points in the wedding ceremony.

Tips & Warnings

• You will need someone to start and stop the audio on the laptop during the ceremony. Give this job to someone you trust but who may not make the wedding party cut.

• Use files that don't have a high rate of compression (e.g., FLAC files) so that the sound quality of the music stays high when the music is put through the speakers.

• Depending on the speaker system, you may need to put the speakers on auxiliary input.

• If you don't want to trip on audio cords, see if you can find wireless audio hookups. These basically turn the audio data into signals that can be read by a receiver connected to the speakers.

References

• Hooking Up Your Stereo to Your PC or Laptop