How to Throw An iPod Wedding

Introduction
Whatever your digital musical interface, you no longer need a DJ at your wedding playing music you don’t want! Now you hold the control to making your wedding a truly individual occasion.
Instructions
Difficulty: Moderately Challenging

Things You'll Need
iPod (Buy Now)
digital music collection (Buy Now)
venue resources
Steps

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Step One
Begin Planning: Long before you do anything, you will need to introduce this idea to your potential wife. She will no doubt be doting on things like flowers, seating arrangements, and other boring, albeit necessary, topics. If you tell her in one breath that you will save hundreds of dollars in DJ expenses and get involved in the planning with her, she will undoubtedly love it.

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Step Two
Find out What Resources Your Venue Has: Once you have selected a venue sight to have the affair at, don’t assume anything. Make sure that your venue has got microphones, speakers, CD players, monitors, and go in and test these items out when you are allowed to tinker around.

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Step Three
Set the Bar Low: Don’t think that this wedding will be like any other wedding you have ever been to. You are going to need to assign someone to monitor the iPod, stop it at agreed upon spots for things like the Father/Daughter dance and the Mother/Son dance. Once you have programmed the five hours of music don’t think that your job is at all over.

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Step Four
Mix It Up: You also want to be sure that there is a wide variety of music being played. While you probably don’t want Justin Timberlake and Timbaland Bringing Sexy Back over appetizers, you also don’t want Robert Goulet Dreaming the Impossible Dream smudged in between Britney and Madonna.

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Step Five
Sans Lights: The one problem with having an iPod wedding is that the DJ typically controls and provides the light packages for dancing and such. If this is going to be a small affair with friends and family, this may not be such a problem. However if you are inviting hundreds of people and you’d rather mask yourself in the fog machine, then an iPod wedding might be something you need to reconsider.

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Step Six
Improvise: When all else fails, improvise. At my own iPod wedding I didn’t follow my own instructions and was assured that everything would be taken care of, only to emerge thrilled from our nuptial vows to realize that there was nowhere to plug in our iPod at this venue. We had been speaking for weeks and weeks from afar and on the day in question, they looked at me like I had three heads. Never fear, my best man came up with the idea of plugging in a microphone to the speaker on my laptop and everything was fixed. While it then turned into an “iTunes on my Laptop” wedding, it was successful nonetheless.
by Jesse Schmitt