Okay, so I wasn't sure which board to post this in, and you ladies have been super helpful, so I figured I'd start here.
Our ceremony/reception venue is a private home with a gorgeous backyard, and their package was an amazing deal (and the only thing we could afford really). With the booking we have the ability to use their "sound guy", Sam. He's not an actual DJ, but he is the sound board technician for the
church that the venue owners go to, and he has done the music at all of
the weddings they host at the venue. They have all the necessary music equipment, we provide the music we want to play (through CD or MP3 or even our phones), and he plays what music we want when we want it played. At least, that was my original understanding of how it would work.
The problem is that FI and I want a lot of swing music, which we haven't been able to find to put on a CD or MP3 player, without spending a ton of money purchasing the music at least. So we came across the program Spotify. It's kind of like Pandora, but I like it much better. Through Spotify we have found all of the music we've been wanting, and we can even put the music into playlists like "Ceremony", "Dinner", "Dancing". All he would have to do is play our Spotify playlists off of a computer or a phone (both of which can hook up to his sound system).
However, when we asked about whether he would be willing to use Spotify through our computer or phone, we were told that he prefers to work off of a CD and that he wants us to put all of the music we want on a CD, in the exact order that we want the music played in. So basically he would just hit "play" on the CD and let it go through the order of music. The problem that I have with this, is what happens when the day of timing is faster/slower than we thought it would be? For instance, we will start playing pre-ceremony music at 4pm, and the ceremony will start at 4:30pm. So if we put exactly 30min of pre-ceremony music on the CD, followed by what we want played for the ceremony, what happens if our ceremony starts ten minutes later than planned? I don't want just silence if there's a gap like this. So I'm not sure what to do now.
All of this conversation has been through the venue owner as a middle man, but she has finally given me Sam's number so that we can speak directly about everything. I was just hoping to get some opinions or insight from you guys before we talk. We never met with any actual DJ's, so I have no idea how they work. And I'm not sure how best to handle this situation.
Any thoughts?