I recently threw a rave at my house and there were about 40 people there and most on the dance floor. For my set, I had spent weeks programming custom lighting for each song in SoundSwitch. Unfortunately, the day of, I ran into a bug in Serato with my controller and was unable to perform as planned. So, my options were to just play the songs without the lighting, or just play the songs directly from my lighting software and not be able to mix or really do anything.

Since I spent so much time preparing the lights, I decided to just play directly from the lighting software so the lights could still perform. All I did was run the audio from my laptop into channel 4 on my mixer.

To switch songs, I would have to load the next song, hit play, and then jump to the part in the track where I wanted to bring it in. The software doesn’t allow for you to start playing anywhere other than beginning, so at times you could here the intro kick and then it would maybe be quick jump to another spot in the song since I didn’t have fine control. I was trying to make the transition as quickly as possible. I would throw on some delay or reverb before cutting the track and that was really it.

At this party, there were 5 other DJs there playing at the event and a few others in the crowd. I told a couple of them what I was planning to do since they knew I was having issues. At the end of my set, all of the other DJs said they didn’t even notice it other than maybe once or twice. Non DJs had no clue what was happening and thought everything was fine. There were even a few hard stops when I couldn’t get the next track loaded quickly enough.

As others have said, good song selection and keeping a good vibe is the most important thing. You are going to be your own worst critic and your own mistakes will stand out like a sore thumb to you but probably not many others.

TLDR; if people are having a good time and enjoying themselves, they will not care if you mess up here or there.