When I let you know I found an app to handle our iPod wedding, a few readers asked me to review the app after the wedding. I’m happy to say, it went well!
Before I get into the details of the app and how it worked for us, I have to tell you about The Missing iPod Problem. A few days before we left for Brockville, Mr. Dragon formatted his old iPod Touch so I could fill it with wedding music and get the app ready to go. Once it was set up and charged, we made sure to put it away carefully, along with the cable Mr. D Frankensteined together, to make sure we had everything we needed to just plug and play with my dad’s PA system he was bringing from Ottawa.
So we get to Brockville on the Thursday before the wedding, and Dad Dragon arrives. The first thing he wants to do is check out the audio setup to make sure it’s all in order. Mr. Dragon looks for the iPod, can’t find it, then asks me where it is.
What followed was half an hour of rummaging through boxes, exchanging “you must have moved it!”s, and frantic scurrying until I declared that it was either at home or in the truck, back at the rental car parking lot 24 hours away, and we couldn’t do anything about it, so too bad.
Luckily I had Dropboxed all of the playlists, zipped, just before I left work on the day that we set out on our road trip. I downloaded all of them to my laptop, but one was damaged, so I had to call our cat sitter and walk him through zipping then Dropboxing the broken list. Then I had to clear all of the music off of my iPhone, which I was reluctant to give up, and set everything up all over again. Mr. Dragon had to go to a tech store to find two new cords to splice.
Bridesmaid Andrea arrived the next day to help set up. Unfortunately, the rain threatened in the forecast meant we couldn’t set anything up until the day of, so she had nothing to do. She’s a bit of a neat freak, so she started cleaning, piling boxes, that kind of thing. I forget exactly how it came about, but after being there for a few hours, she asked, “Did someone say you lost your iPod?”
I said yes, and explained the whole thing, to which she replied, “And it’s not in the box that says ‘iPod and cord’?!”
Not only did I pack it, I LABELLED it, and I still lost it. Go me. Crisis averted, though!
[Photo by Rozy Seitz]
As for the app, it was a success! We had a strong core of dancers at the wedding, and the My WeddingDJ app made it really easy to keep things going.
During the prelude portion of the wedding ceremony, things went a bit weird with the groomsmen being late, but from what I understand, Isaac was able to use the app to loop some of the music over again until we were good to go.
For the cocktail hour and dinner, all I had to do was walk over and slide the app to the play position, and everything looped and faded just as we had set it up days earlier. We had a bit of a delay getting the music for us walking into dinner going, but that was because too many things had to happen at once—the music had to be paused, then a speech made, then played again, and in the meantime, the lock code on the iPod came up and Darren, who was emceeing, had to punch it in before he could slide the app over to play.
Nothing skipped, though, and nobody played around with the music. The app and the iPod lasted all night, without any problems. Nothing stopped accidentally, and it was really quite mistake proof. We did have one weird moment where the intro to a song just kept on playing, but when I walked over to switch it, it shook itself out of whatever was happening.
To make it fully foolproof, my suggestion would be to listen to all of your music, all the way through, before the wedding, in case a song itself is a bit weird. Also, check to see if any of your tunes are DRM protected, because the app won’t play them, and you might end up scrambling to find replacements (which happened to me). Lastly, I’d take any kind of lock code off of your device before the wedding day—I intended to do that, after we realized it held things up during the rehearsal, but totally forgot to remove it after that.
Any other tips from successful iPod brides?
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