I’ve been considering starting to use some type of backing tracks for my act mainly to free up my left hand to play rootless voicings. Also there are a couple of tunes that I haven’t much luck finding styles for. I envision us still using mostly styles along with just a few tracks here and there.

I was thinking audio tracks would sound more natural/less robotic than midi files, but they seem like more of pain to operate on stage. I would need a laptop or iPod on stage- just one more thing to have to mess around with. My wife thinks it would sound too “karaoke” with audio tracks and change our sound too drastically going from styles to audio. She also likes SMF because of how easy it is to change the pitch/tempo.

For those of you playing with backing tracks, what are you using?