Ableton vs Serato

[felipescalador12]

I truly dont know what to expect?? I use Ableton live to dj.. as many of you use. Since the tracks are all pre-warped how would you use serato?? I mean if you are just transporting your set to serato youdont even have to look for cues.. so how would you use serato & ableton? Is it more for people who are into turnablism??

share your knowledge!!!

[Green Lemon]

I have recently begun to use Serato's Itch to DJ.

I DJ'd with Live for years, but in the end the amount of prep you have to put into a track (and a set) just turns me off. I have to say, Itch has really blown me away- the experience of using it is so easy, and fun. It takes all that is great about turntables and a mixer and gives great visual feedback which is surprisingly helpful. That said, of course there are aspects of the analog technology that I miss but that's another subject.

If you are happy with Live for DJing, I'm not sure there's any reason to get a Serato product- all it will add for you is scratching, and that is apparently only on audio which is in Serato, not in Live (although I'm personally still crossing my fingers on that one).

The Serato integration is great news for those of us who have a significant commitment and interest in Live, but were really missing the ease of workflow of a classic DJ format. All I can say, is not having to warp my tracks (or warping on the fly, as it were, which is what beatmatching is...), a library which supports tagged browsing with multiple views for display and organization of large numbers of tracks, scratching and a DJ mixer format for the control hardware are really fun for me in a way that Live just isn't for DJing.

Of course there is a much broader field in which Live completely excels, and the integration of the two looks quite promising. Although I am disappointed that there is no audio send from Serato into Live (yet?). Is Itch perfect? No, but the experience of using it manages to be much more than the sum of its parts. If you already use Live to DJ and you are fine with that, I'm not really sure that Serato offers you much.

[felipescalador12]

thank you very much, it was very helpful..


so.. if you are using serato to dj which involves cueing etc.. what could this partnership add to your performance?
what could ableton add to your djing? I mean like maybe to trigger some loops from ableton??

what kind of itch hardware are you ussing?

[Green Lemon]

Yeah, let's keep in mind that we don't know exactly yet what the Bridge will do since its not out yet.

Triggering loops, sure. As they say in the video, "A super-deluxe sampler". And recording my Itch sessions in Live format = completely nondestructive editing of my DJ mixes. Those are both pretty plush. (Itch only records WAV or AIFF files today- it's very heavy to record my nightly mixes!) Basically having Live's production inside of and locked to a deck in Itch. That's what we know it will be able to do. And there's some doubt about this, but I don't see how you could not be able to scratch the master output of Live- since its locked to a deck in Itch, if you scratch the deck, it should do the same with the audio stream from Live (according to me).

Then, I also hope to use Max to grab an audio stream from Itch and get it back into Live. But I am not so hopeful that will work. I hope that eventually one can send audio from Itch to Live in realtime. But who knows if that will come to pass.

I use the VCI-300 with Itch.

But really, I use Itch because Live wasn't filling my needs as DJ software (which is normal, since it wasn't designed to DJ with). Itch does that quite well, and whatever the Bridge brings down the pipe will only make that better.

[Tarekith]

Keep in mind you can only back scratch the Live deck, not forward scratch it.