Issue concerning visualization, software, line in, and phonographs!
 

I'm pretty sure this is the right forum section to ask this, if not, ignore my ignorance and just answer anyways :)

On Saturday my brother and I will be DJ'ing my uncle's 50th birthday party. We are going to be using two sources of input for the music, vinyl (my parents 30 year old collection) and mp3s, with the theme being that these are the formats of music that bookend his 50 years on this planet. We are also going to be using a projector to show winamp visualizations (winamp being the preferred player of choice for this party ;)), and that will be easy enough for the mp3s. But we als want to do it for the vinyl input as well.

The sound card we are going to be using can handle the line-in from the turntable just fine, we just tested last night. But we want to know how to handle the winamp input plug ins to allow winamp to be the "receiver" of the phono input so we can play the old Bowie records with corresponding visualization. If this doesn't work, one option would be to play a "dummy mp3" and mute the computer sound while playing the vinyl standalone through speakers, thus mimicking what we are trying to accomplish. But that's a last resort.

Any walk through of what we need to accomplish would be most appreciated, and also any suggestions on what the best visualization to use is. My uncle has done some research and has found milkdrop, tripex3, jet and r4 (although r4 is a resource hog) to be good to use.

Any help would be much appreciated, and any clarification you guys need I can provide. Thanks for all your help!

Press Ctrl+L and type "linein://" (without the quotes) or there's Jasper's LineIn plugin.

As far as visualizations go, personally, Milkdrop and G-Force are my two favorites.

I had a question regarding the dispaying the visualization on a 61 inch tv. I tried it and it didnt work. Is there a specific s-video cable that I need?

Concerning the Jasper plug-in: will this plugin work with in Play mode, or must we Record the line in to use all the features? If it can work in Play mode, what are the settings we need? My uncle tells me he's only found it available to use if we are recording the turntable, which we might be able to do if necessary, and only if the HD space required is reasonable. Thanks again for any info.

For details on line and visualizations go here

http://forums.winamp.com/showthread.php?&threadid=64973

As for the best visualizations that is entirily up to you. :) You have a reasonable selection R4 is the newest of that colection if your machine can handle it.