There are many ways to skin a cat, or so the saying goes. DJ'ing is now very much in the same category as the aforementioned cat, being as there are at least a squillion ways (Skratchworx official estimate) of controlling and playing back audio files so that they make a cohesive mush of music. Traktor has seemingly been kicking around since the dawn of time, and the chances are that if you have thought about using computer software for dj'ing, then you probably have stumbled upon Traktor (or its cooler younger brother Traktor Scratch). Whether this is purely through relentless marketing or word of mouth is unclear, but a key revision to the new Pro incarnations seems like as good a time as any for Skratchworx to take a further look at this popular range of software.
For those who haven't heard of Traktor, disappointingly there are no real links to West Country cider-drinking farmers of any sort (how to alienate your non-UK readership in a single sentence). The new Pro versions fully supersede their non-Pro counterparts, which annoyingly for me happened at exactly the time I finished reviewing the non-Pro Traktor.
Mackie have very generously allowed me to hang onto their d4.Pro dj mixer, which being Traktor Scratch Certified allows me to run Traktor Scratch Pro (TSP) without any extra cabling nonsense. The Firewire link via the Mackie means I can happily route the timecode in and 4-deck audio straight out to the mixer without any hassle, and it is this general configuration that this review is based on.
The all new Pro versions appear to have simplified the overall environment, and the setups all feel comfortable and somehow familiar. There are some default layouts which cover the most obvious permutations; generally whether you are using 2 or 4 decks, with the second criteria revolving around whether you are mixing audio internally or externally. In all of these situations, it is generally the track browser area that gets shunted smaller and smaller – so there are toggles to maximize the browser zone if and when you need to.
I am certainly no fashionable trend-setter or opinion leader, and I actually find endlessly flexible environments a bit aggravating – but Traktor’s graphical leanings and stylings elicit no angry response from me. Clear, logical and functional (insert stereotypical comment about German mindset here).
I would have maybe liked the ability to have more than three default levels of zoom for the waveforms, as well as stretching them a bit more vertically - though on reflection I'm not sure why as it's not particularly like you need to zoom and edit stuff within Traktor.
My relatively meagre library of digital tracks was indexed quickly, with Traktor analyzing and generating waveforms / BPM values automatically. It’s definitely worth constraining the BPM range in the options so that you don’t get loads of half-time readings (though I guess this is easier when you are boring like me and the majority of your collection is within a few BPMs of each other). The auto BPM’ing and beat-gridding is o.k. but not faultless. On a fairly standard set of house and breaks there seemed to be about a 10% error rate, either on the BPM value or by not finding a correct transient for the auto-grid. There also appears to be a slight issue when using FLAC files. The very beginning of the audio appears truncated, meaning you can miss the first downbeat – causing your grid to be one beat late and stopping you from quite getting that perfect start from a load marker. From someone who has spent way too much time warping vinyl rips in Ableton Live, correcting a downbeat or two on a per track basis is not too odious (assuming your tracks are digitally sourced and have solid timing). It’s definitely worthwhile if you are going to use any kind of looping or auto-syncing (god forbid) of your tracks (more on that later). Direct beat-gridding from Ableton .als files would be smart, especially if more flexible beat-gridding of tempo-drifting tracks becomes fully integrated at a later date.
The browser window obeys standard commands such as dragging to rearrange, adding of column fields, sorting etc. without any problems – and there is inbuilt capability to directly edit tag fields. Cover art is also displayed in your virtual deck area as well as the browser. This is a nice touch, and gives you a better visual connection with your music (like the good old days of flipping through your crate of vinyl).
If you are keeping it real (a.k.a. behind the times), timecode vinyl on absolute mode will give you the traditional vinyl setup you are used to (wow and flutter included free). I am usually quite militant about people setting their dj mixer gain controls properly, but Traktor’s auto-gain feature should help ameliorate idiot dj syndrome. It really does work – I haven’t had to move my mixer gain at all whilst using it. Given that most modern tracks peak at the same level I assume it’s working on a perceived loudness measurement of some sort. It’s hardly a ground-breaking feature but appreciated nonetheless. Given that you can track select via the control vinyl, you can be pretty Luddite in your approach and not use TSP as anything more than a playback interface.
Whilst in relative timecode mode, providing TSP has an accurate BPM value for the desired track – you can be semi lazy and have it automatically offset your pitch control (sync) to match the ‘master’ BPM value. The master BPM value can either be derived automatically from an adjacent deck, from a manual user-entered value or from an external MIDI clock source. In timecode mode, it won’t fully synchronize your tracks in terms of downbeat placement, and with vinyl you are still at the mercy of wow and flutter – but it saves you a few seconds of moving the pitch slider yourself (assuming you do know how to mix….!).
For me, the main bonus (whilst using timecode control) about having accurate BPM values / beat-grids is related to looping. Gone are the days of manually hitting loop in and out points on a cd player, you pick your timing interval, click – done - seamless looping from the next beat-grid. Easy, slick and sounds good.
There are two time-stretching (keylock) modes available – a lower CPU intensive mode (ECO) and a higher quality (Hi-Q) setting, both of which are flavours of the Z-Plane Elastique algorithm. You can definitely hear an improvement when using the Hi-Q mode – but there are a couple of problems evident. The Hi-Q mode is currently worthless when using timecode control. It makes your audio sound like 8-bit 11kHz, and not in a cool retro way. ECO mode sounds o.k., but like most time-stretching struggles outside around +/-4% tempo adjustment. However, if you listen carefully, both of the time-stretching modes add tiny clicks and pops to the audio (irrespective of ASIO buffer size). These are both acknowledged problems – and will apparently be fixed in the v1.2 update. Hopefully this is not too far away and definitely worth keeping an eye open for. The v1.2 update should also integrate the best Pro version of Elastique, so a general improvement in keylock quality is on the cards too.
I don’t think the overall scratchiness of TSP is really much different from the original Traktor Scratch (see the Skratchworx review for more in-depth details). A couple of things are worth mentioning though. The new relative mode attempts to eliminate sticker-drift (typically a problem when you don’t have an absolute position to relate to), and as far as I can tell – they have succeeded. Scribbling on the control record for as long as my arm could take didn’t cause any real drift – job well done. There doesn’t seem any easy way to needle-drop when in this mode, so it’s not quite a super-hybrid mode.
Another cool trick, as pointed out to me by Skratchworx associate Johnny 1 Move, is being able to sync any track to the internal BPM clock. This means you can set-up your control vinyl to give a rotation every 4 beats (133.33rpm sync). This would allow easy visual tracking of loop position on the control vinyl if needed.
Driver behaviour for the Mackie d4.Pro was good, enabling me to run at 2ms ASIO buffer size at 44.1kHz sampling rate - this meant total round trip latency was probably in a similar range to the competition, and the scratching certainly felt responsive and accurate.
Although my hobby of pointless dj gear purchasing means I do actually currently have 4 turntables within grasp, I have got no space to set them all up simultaneously (and not enough control vinyl!). Although you can physically assign each deck to a timecode input, this causes a small extra limitation. For some reason, the recording module needs to use up one of your software deck inputs (A to D) for its signal routing. So if you use up all 4 for timecode control, there aren't any spare for to use for the recording feature. It feels like they could easily fix this by allowing any audio interface stereo input to be assigned - but at the moment it is limited. You could capture the feed via another program but this relies on true multi-client driver operation. Hopefully they can fix this in an update.
The Pro versions have also seen an overhaul of the way effects are used and assigned. There are two FX panels and the default mode is that you can route audio from your virtual decks to them in any configuration you like (as an insert). The FX panels have two modes – chain or advanced. Chain lets you bung 3 effects into one panel and gives you a rotary for each effect that does ‘something’ depending on the effect. Each effect in the chain can be freely toggled on and off – so it can be simply used as an easier way to access your favourite effects without necessarily chaining them (providing you are happy with the rudimentary single rotary control).
The advanced mode means you can concentrate on one effect and have three rotaries to have more parameter control.I count 25 effects in total, with a fair amount being your traditional dj fare (reverbs, filters, delays etc.). Don’t panic, there is a flanger! There are some more bonkers ones in there, and overall the quality is high (I won’t be selling my Xone VF-1 just yet though……). I think Native Instruments are right to restrict parameterisation to 3 rotaries max. This should enable a sensible layout with controllers designed with Traktor Pro in mind.
If using an external mixer you can also setup TSP’s effects in a send / return mode. So you route a soundcard input in and the effected signal out again. This would allow a proper post-fader routing that is useful for a lot of things (but remember you will get soundcard latency too). It doesn’t look like you can internally route effects in this way if mixing ‘in the box’ – which is a bit of a shame. Effects inserts work o.k. for most things, but post-fader is essential if adding delay style effects to scratching.
Right at the end of this review I bought a Stanton SCS.3d (the artist formally known as DaScratch) to give me a bit more tactile control in my virtual world. TSP has very extensive (and fairly user friendly too) MIDI learn / mapping functions. There are plenty of MIDI controllers out there, with many already having presets already available (i.e. someone else has done the hard work for you). Even without this, I managed to map the FX controls to various parts of my SCS.3d in a few button clicks. This makes a big difference to the overall experience and I would definitely recommend an extra controller of some description, even if you are a hardcore timecode vinyl type of person.
Because of the master / sync functions of the virtual decks, you can use external MIDI clock data to derive a master BPM value. I didn’t delve too deep into this, but managed to get a stable reading out from Ableton into TSP via MIDI Yoke (http://www.midiox.com/) with no problems.
I have to admit, TSP has finally convinced me that normal beat-mixing with vinyl is a totally pointless exercise. Why bother? There is a strange relaxing quality to it, but other than that – I won’t miss it. There is nothing fun about repetitively nudging tracks back and forth to keep them in time (been there, done that, got the T-shirt). If you move to a controller based set-up, I really think you get the best of both worlds – tactile control and freedom from drudgery. By letting the software keep things in time I could potentially spend more time agonising over beautiful level fading, eq'ing and filtering on the d4.Pro(!). This is probably where the human influence is better spent than religiously keeping two tracks in time (also keeping 4 decks in time manually can be a bit stressful too).
Like most software reviews, it's very hard to test the product in all configurations because of the flexibility of control available. TSP can interface nicely with a range of approaches; timecode control, MIDI control or simply just mouse clicking and hot-keying - as well as whether you choose to go with an external mixer. Four decks should keep most people out of trouble, and the general audio quality of the in-built features are very good and feel nicely polished. My overall experience in terms of program stability was excellent, so if you are interested I'd suggest grabbing the demo and giving it a bash over the course of a few days - you may be surprised at how much fun you have.
Interface
A clean, clear and functional layout.
Sound Quality
The effects sound good enough to stop you lusting after the hardware equivalents. Additional artefacts with the time-stretching.
Features & Implementation
Really is very feature rich without going crazy. Some current issues with the time-stretching implementation.
Value For Money
Not bargain basement price, but if you have a certified mixer I reckon you’d be mad not to splash the cash. Traktor (Scratch) Duo is now available if you only want two virtual decks and can survive on a slightly reduced feature set.
I Like...
- FLAC and OGG support
- Helpful manual
- Beat-gridding / looping / syncing features
But not so keen on...
- No standard audio channel routing to the Audio Recorder module
- Hi-quality keylock mode currently unsuitable for timecode control
- No internal post-fader effects routing
If this is your kind of thing, you might want to check out...
Serato ITCH / ScratchLive
Mixvibes DVS / Cross
M-Audio Torq
Ms. Pinky
djDecks
Virtual DJ
PCDJ
The Bottom Line
The latest incarnation of Traktor feels very mature. The streamlined effects and interface sets it up well to keep pace with controllers coming onto the market. I had no stability issues and generally it was a pleasure to use.Thanks to Mackie for extended use of the d4.Pro and to Native Instruments for supply of the upgrade pack.
