How about some equipment advice for a noob?

[Scafeets]

I'm a regular over in the musician forums, and you probably get asked this stuff all the time. But since I didn't see any relevant stickies, I'll ask:

My band has started playing a lot of weddings and corporate events. Our deal is simple: We only play what's on our song list. For weddings, we'll learn a special song. What we don't do is the cornball stuff. We've done great by saying we'll play "Electric Slide", "Celebration" and any other requests as recordings during our breaks, and this has worked out really well; but I've been burning mix CDs every time (based on advance requests) and just letting them run on our CD player in the mixer rack.

Being a large (7 piece) band, we have all the sound and lights necessary, but I've been thinking of adding a little more flexibility to those DJ breaks by actually DJ-ing and taking some requests on the gig. Nothing fancy like scratching, etc....just a step up from playing 15 minutes of canned stuff.

So... can I get away with one of those "Rigs-in-a-rack" setups like the Numark CDN25 or similar products from Gemini, American DJ, etc. ? The Musicians Friend reviews are pretty brutal. I just need something simple and reliable.

Thanx.

[MKMO]

If you want to go with cds get a good dual deck cd player that will play mp3s like a denon. Go to mobilebeat.com and look up the top two hundred most requested songs. Get the songs and put all of them on one cd in mp3 format then make a copy. A cd for each deck. As for everything else just plug each deck into those unused stereo ins on the last couple of channels of your board and use your channel faders for going in and out of songs.

[Scafeets]

Thanx!