Tracktor S4 or Ableton Live + Serato + bridge ?

[The Carpet Cleaner]

All right, so I haven another question :
what about using tracktor pro with timecode with CDj and a regular mixer.

Cause when you DJ in a club, there is the CDj and the mixer already.

I've never tried this solution (the timecode stuff). How does it feel, isn't it better to have 2 real CDj and a mixer, controling tracktor so you don't have to burn millions of CDs, and you can had a X1 as well.
This solution is not new, but I'm just wondering what's the best between that and the S4.

[pheilus]

Here's my S4 review, maybe this helps:




Just thought I'd give a quick run down of the new Traktor S4 system, since I was able to get one pretty early once they came out. Probably won't be covering the more in-depth features since i'm still getting to grips with those, but it'll give you an overview of my first thoughts and day of use.

On first look it was pretty much what I expected, solid but not super heavy, good feeling knobs and buttons, decent faders, and sized just about perfectly I'd say. It's large enough that everything is spaced out well enough to be easy to tweak, but there's not a lot of wasted space either. The unit itself is plastic, but with the aluminum top plates of the X1 on the left and right sides of the unit where the jog wheels and cue controls are. In the center the top surface is glossy plastic, but it seems very hard and does not look like it will scratch easily.

All the buttons are illuminated, and you can control the brightness of the on and off states in the preferences. This is nice, since having a very faintly glowing button when it's off makes it easier to find them in the dark. Too bad that the lettering doesn't glow, or is brighter too. In darker settings, it was hard to see what some of the buttons were.

The knobs and encoders are identical to the Kontrol X1, so no surprises there as I'm already a fan of those. The channel and pitchfaders are alright, not the best, but they have the right amount of resistance and don't feel too cheap. Precise is a good word for them. The crossfader is only so so, I'm not a huge turntablist or anything, but while it slid well, it felt a little too light in the hand too.

The new magnetic jog wheels feel pretty good, well at least one of them did on mine. The right one was very scratchy feeling with notches randomly, not at all the smoothness of the left jog wheel. So, back to the store where I swapped it for another that was not defective. The wheels have a very interesting resistance to them, if you close your eyes it does almost feel like you're controlling a much heavier and larger platter ala a 1200. The little fake record surface on top of the wheels is a little too plasticy for me, I'd have rather had a nice grippy rubber top, but it's not a huge concern.

Connections on the back are what you'd expect, mainly RCA connections though the main outs and mic input can also be 1/4". There's two sets of inputs you can connect external gear to, which will then be routed to channel C and D in the software mixer. This can be drum machines, CD decks or turntables, and the appropriate input level switches are present (line versus phono). There's even a grounding post on the back for turntable ground leads. One neat trick is that the input for channel D can be switched to pass straight through the S4 (though still with gain control) even if no computer is connected. So if you have a CD deck connected and your laptop needs to be restarted, you can bypass the IO in the S4 and reboot without stopping the music. Nice touch.

All of the connections feel solid, especially the USB socket which is a special one I've never seen before. It's really grippy to ensure that the USB cable doesn't come loose accidentally. Sadly there's no such provision for the power supply cord, which could still be a little easy to remove. Rounding out the back is a power button, and the MIDI in and out ports.

One the front of the unit is the headphone socket, along with the controls for volume, cue mix, and mic volume. I was a little worried from the pictures I initially saw of the S4 that they stuck out kind of far in a bad place, but happily you can press the knobs in after making any adjustments, and this retracts them into the chassis. Press them again to make them pop back out. Very nice, though it's still a little odd for me having the headphone cord coming from the front of a piece of gear!

Software installation is the same as with anything else from NI, a multi-step process of initial installation, running the authorization and update software, then getting walked through a set up wizard. If you use Traktor Pro or Scratch, you've given the option of copying your Collection Data into the new S4 installation. Not sure if this means you have to maintain two sets of Collection Data for each version of Traktor now (Pro and S4). So far it looks like everything was ported over to the S4 installation successfully.

My first go at using the software and hardware together was a bit frustrating to be honest. I kept running into issues I couldn't solve, things like certain decks randomly not playing, the EQ knobs jumping around, levels not sorted right. It was clearly something wrong with the program, I just couldn't figure out how to fix it. Finally discovered a way in the preferences to reset the software to a default state, and a calibration routine for the knobs, faders, and jog wheels. After doing those, everything was working like it should, so I wonder why NI doesn't make a bigger point to have the calibration run as part of the install?

If you've used Traktor Pro, using the new S4 software is really not much different. The coloring of things is different, and I say much better now. Gone is the yellow of the Pro version, things are much more greys and greens in the new version. The obvious difference is that by default Decks C and D are preloaded as the 8 sample players that are new to the S4 software, though you can use a 4 deck set up if you want instead.

There's also a new Loop Recorder in the center of the software and the controller, and this can be set to record from the main mix, the aux channel, or the Cue channel. Once you have a loop going, there's a wet dry control that determines how much of the main mix and how much of the recorded loop is heard at the main mix. Think of it as a crossfader between your main mix, and just the loop.


One of the best things about the S4 combo, is that the software and the hardware are laid out almost identical, so it's really easy to find things. Doubly so since they both follow the standard DJ set up, decks on the sides, mixer in-between. The integration between the two is so well done, and the controls are so nice, that there were more than a few times it reminded me of using a DJM600 + turntables like in days past. Not sure if that's a good thing or not! Anyway, the key point being that yes the new controller removes all need to touch the laptop, and other than looking at the waveform displays when going to your cue points or checking how much time is left in a track, you can almost just focus on the controller itself.

I set up mine with a latency of 384 samples, which gave me a round trip latency of less than 10ms. Combined with the high-resolution control mapping, it really does feel like a strictly hardware device. Sound quality is really good, exactly like the Audio4DJ I also have. Actually, with the modeled EQs and filters, it sounded a lot better than I expected for DJing entirely "in the box". The Main Outputs are super hot as well, so make sure you have the master volume down all the way before pressing play the first time.

One downside of the controller in terms of sound level, is that the meters on the S4 are still a little vague in how well they can tell you overall loudness. The blue led's look cool for the channel faders, but you only get a single "Over" LED to tell you it's too loud. When things are too loud and you start to clip the master out, it get's pretty poor sounding very quickly. I don't use the limiter in Traktor, so I was having to turn down the channel gain to about 2-3dB to make sure I didn't clip. If I used the Auto gain function when loading new tracks, then Traktor was routinely setting the channel gains for these same tracks to +3 or +4dB. As a result it was almost impossible to mix the tracks together without clipping the master and causing distortion, never mind adding additional loops to the mix too. All of this is further compounded by the fact that the master meters on the S4 and in the software are really small. Not very accurate, so you're better to play it safe to make sure you don't clip, and back off the channels gains.

While the S4 doesn't really let me do anything new compared to my previous Xone62 and Kontrol X1 set up, it's definitely nice to have all my volume, EQ, effects, track collection, and navigation all in one place. And the sound quality is good enough that I don't instantly miss my Xone like I thought I might. It's interesting having a system where I can auto-beatmatch tracks via the sync function, or mix by manually beatmatching with the pitch faders and jog wheels. While those won't won't fool anyone into thinking their using a Technics turntable, the motions are so similar it's not that hard to do without any time spent getting used to things.

Likes:

- Build and sound quality, both are higher than I expected at this price point. Doesn't feel cheap like a lot of controllers, I don't have any hesitation spending the time to learn this like a proper instrument.
- Design, lots of well-thought out ideas like the recessed cue volume knobs, or the hardwired input in case of a laptop crash. You can tell this was made for real gigging DJs.
- The loop recording and sample decks are really well-done for on the fly looping.
- Browsing and previewing tracks in the browser is much easier with the S4 than with the Kontrol X1. You'll actually use the preview player now.
- The different 3-band EQ emulations are different enough that you'll actually want to switch them up once in awhile.
- The layout. Everything that needs to be tweaked is easily accessible with plenty of room around it. Illuminated buttons everywhere.

Dislikes:

- No way to disable the crossfader, it's always active. Kind of a pain given it's location, not everyone mixes with one.
- Currently only 3-band EQs available, the Xone 4-band from Traktor Pro is not in S4.
- Not possible to use most of the S4 in high-resolution mode, but remap only a few of the controls. You're either in S4 native mode, or midi mode.
- Would have liked longer channel faders, and better metering.
- Still no way to specify your own effects parameters to use for controlling in group mode.
- Still have to waste a cue point on a grid marker, which is more disappointing in S4 as there's only 4 cue points immediately accessible. You still have 8, but the other 4 are normally hidden.


Let me know if you have any specific questions and I'll try to answer those.

were you sreiously bored and said im going to write this longwinded shit?

here is a simple answer...ableton has no fucking business being used for djing and ableton+serato is biggest mistake.
what a waste of resources that could have been better used to make ableton more ..efficient and live.

everyone just needs to use a loopbox, effects and traktor pro or fuck it get real skills and use vinyl if u have any balls

[beats me]

or fuck it get real skills and use vinyl if u have any balls

And any accountant with balls should use an abacus instead of a calculator or computer program.

[Khazul]

All right, so I haven another question :
what about using tracktor pro with timecode with CDj and a regular mixer.

Cause when you DJ in a club, there is the CDj and the mixer already.

I've never tried this solution (the timecode stuff). How does it feel, isn't it better to have 2 real CDj and a mixer, controling tracktor so you don't have to burn millions of CDs, and you can had a X1 as well.
This solution is not new, but I'm just wondering what's the best between that and the S4.

Personally, I would go for the S4 - with the sampling it just seems a much more flexible and performance orientated system. I like my tracktor scratch rig, but more because I like my decks but it all gets a bit combersome with my VCI-100 controllers controlling tracktor as well (so I have an X1 and timecode combo). For playing live, I would choose an S4 any day - even not having touched one yet (just based uon my experience with a VCI-100 and tracktor 3).

The main reason I have tracktor scratch however is it provide me with a nice way for integrating the 4 decks I have at home (via an audi 8 dj) with computer based production rather than live DJing without havign to try to squeeze another large controller around the existing decks and mixer. For inspiration, I simply prefer to get away from the computer and mess about on physical decks, but for a planned (or even semi-ad-hoc) live set, these days I actually much prefer to use tracktor in a more focussed way - far less to lug around, and get damaged etc.

As for the actual feel of the timecode - Im not a hamster type dj, just a house/trance DJ, so I dont scratch, but I personally find the timecode handling a little bit sluggish, but then I find the latency of playing a software synth from a midi keyboard mildly distracting as well when several people dont even notice the same latency and slowed responsiveness etc.

I should think the S4 would be way way tighter, and certainly from watching some youtube it does indeed appear to be way way tighter than timecode. I would also expect it to vastly superiors to say even using a high quality controller like a VCI-100, just because of the much more direct interface and hugely increased resoutionn that doesnt have to go over midi. However, for folks who are familar with CDJ-1000 for eg, then the resiolution of those things aint actually that great anyway, and yet we all generally manage just fine with them

[timothyallan]

were you sreiously bored and said im going to write this longwinded shit?

here is a simple answer...ableton has no fucking business being used for djing and ableton+serato is biggest mistake.
what a waste of resources that could have been better used to make ableton more ..efficient and live.

everyone just needs to use a loopbox, effects and traktor pro or fuck it get real skills and use vinyl if u have any balls

3phase with marginally better english skillz?

[3phase]

or fuck it get real skills and use vinyl if u have any balls

And any accountant with balls should use an abacus instead of a calculator or computer program.

certainly when he plans to go on stage with it

[Eudawg]

\
Hope this helps..http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LDoKgQU-a8A

Great review!!!!

I've had number of issues lately with running both Traktor Scratch Pro & Live 8 - most in support don't seem to know the answer unless they can look it up in a manual. That said, Ray has been great, very patient and thorough.

Reason for my post is that it seems the main aim with Ableton Support is to draw Traktor users to looking at Serato. Crazy!!! Stick with your Traktor guys, Serato is pants and just because the bridge is introduced don't let that sway you to spending double the cost of traktor so that you can run your decks into Live. It would be waste of money.

Traktor Scratch hasn't given me any trouble at all, I run it through the Allen & Heath Xone 4D and the level of control and sound quality is the best I've ever heard, downside is that I cannot seem to get any solid advice with routing my Traktor audio out into Live channels and record it. Maybe Ableton will realise that they have dropped a clanger partnering with Serato and start talking Native Instruments to write a 'bridge' for Live & Traktor connectivity.

[beats me]

or fuck it get real skills and use vinyl if u have any balls

And any accountant with balls should use an abacus instead of a calculator or computer program.

certainly when he plans to go on stage with it

Nobody gives a fuck what he uses on stage other than other accountants. All the board members and share holders care about is the numbers being solid and accurate.

[timothyallan]

And any accountant with balls should use an abacus instead of a calculator or computer program.

certainly when he plans to go on stage with it

Nobody gives a fuck what he uses on stage other than other accountants. All the board members and share holders care about is the numbers being solid and accurate.

The first, and perhaps the most perfect accountant analogy I've seen!

[lasersounds]

All right, so I haven another question :
what about using tracktor pro with timecode with CDj and a regular mixer.

Cause when you DJ in a club, there is the CDj and the mixer already.

I've never tried this solution (the timecode stuff). How does it feel, isn't it better to have 2 real CDj and a mixer, controling tracktor so you don't have to burn millions of CDs, and you can had a X1 as well.
This solution is not new, but I'm just wondering what's the best between that and the S4.

Personally, I would go for the S4 - with the sampling it just seems a much more flexible and performance orientated system. I like my tracktor scratch rig, but more because I like my decks but it all gets a bit combersome with my VCI-100 controllers controlling tracktor as well (so I have an X1 and timecode combo). For playing live, I would choose an S4 any day - even not having touched one yet (just based uon my experience with a VCI-100 and tracktor 3).

The main reason I have tracktor scratch however is it provide me with a nice way for integrating the 4 decks I have at home (via an audi 8 dj) with computer based production rather than live DJing without havign to try to squeeze another large controller around the existing decks and mixer. For inspiration, I simply prefer to get away from the computer and mess about on physical decks, but for a planned (or even semi-ad-hoc) live set, these days I actually much prefer to use tracktor in a more focussed way - far less to lug around, and get damaged etc.

As for the actual feel of the timecode - Im not a hamster type dj, just a house/trance DJ, so I dont scratch, but I personally find the timecode handling a little bit sluggish, but then I find the latency of playing a software synth from a midi keyboard mildly distracting as well when several people dont even notice the same latency and slowed responsiveness etc.

I should think the S4 would be way way tighter, and certainly from watching some youtube it does indeed appear to be way way tighter than timecode. I would also expect it to vastly superiors to say even using a high quality controller like a VCI-100, just because of the much more direct interface and hugely increased resoutionn that doesnt have to go over midi. However, for folks who are familar with CDJ-1000 for eg, then the resiolution of those things aint actually that great anyway, and yet we all generally manage just fine with them

umm? maybe traktor lags with timecode but serato is spot on no lag at all. do you have your latency settings turned all the way down?

i dunno how this bridge thing is gonna pan out. theres no posts from anyone thats used the damn thing. i just bought 8 and DLed SL 2.1 and im gonna make a video on youtube this weekend and try to point out what it can do and shit. i havnt even used it at all really(but neither has anyone else) so hopefully i can make something cool with it.

i just think its so wierd theres no youtube videos or forums posts or anything about actually using it!

[gizze]

Here's my S4 review, maybe this helps:....

were you sreiously bored and said im going to write this longwinded shit?

here is a simple answer...ableton has no fucking business being used for djing and ableton+serato is biggest mistake.
what a waste of resources that could have been better used to make ableton more ..efficient and live.

everyone just needs to use a loopbox, effects and traktor pro or fuck it get real skills and use vinyl if u have any balls

Post up your mixes then Mr. Superstar DJ!!

Obviously they will be something really special, I can't wait!




Loads of shit DJs using ableton, loads of shit DJs using vinyl, also loads of people who know how to blend tunes together and they can do that with anything.

I don't get this love of vinyl, it takes 20 seconds to beatmatch a tune, so who cares what the DJ uses?
All the DJs that I know who bang on about using vinyl tend to be shit! They listen out for mismatched beats and don't hear the important bit, like records in key and actually work together.