Questions about moving from Torq to Traktor/S4

1. I always felt limited by Torq’s 5 cue point limit. Traktor has 32 cues with 8 assignables. However, the S4 only has 4 cue buttons. I read you can use shift to get an additional 4. Is this reasonably easy to set up? – There is a row of 4 sample buttons above the 4 hot cues on the S4 – you can set Traktor up to use those as hotcues 5-8, it’s one click in the preferences.

Can you access Traktor’s non-assigned cue points to quickly move to musically useful area of a song on the fly? Like back/next buttons on a DVD player? That could come in handy for spontaneous situations. It’s really unclear how you can use the other 24 cue points. Through a few midi commands this should be very simple to set up.

Where are all Traktor’s cue points stored? Torq had separate .tqd files. Its hard to know how I’d file manage a Traktor mp3 library in case I needed to move it to another laptop or external HD. Traktor writes cue points as tag data of your Mp3s. Traktor all has a .nml file for the overall library (or “Traktor Collection”) This library also stored track metadata that is not handled by the mp3 metadata schema.

I like iTune’s smart playlists to organize genre categories. Torq recognized my iTunes comments & custom genre tags, but I had to switch between iTunes and Torq, a bit of a pain. Is Traktor the same, better or different here? I dont use the iTunes intergration too much (though I should). I don’t believe Traktor support Smart Playlists. If it recognizes them (I’d have to check) they would be presented as static playlists which means they won’t synch any changes made in itunes. I am not 100% sure on this so you might want to do more research.

There are Comments1 and Comments2 tags in Traktor and I believe Comments1 aligns with the Comments in iTunes. There is no concept of the Group tag on Traktor. Essentially, whatever tags Traktor has that are standard MP3 tags will be saved to the NML file. There is a lot more/better info on this out there. If you want to know EVERYTHING, buy the Traktor Bible. Its not cheap but worth every single penny if you are the kind of person who really wants to take full control over Traktor.

Does Traktor have auto looping features similar to Torq? i.e., press a key to put the currently playing track into a 32/16/8/etc bar-based loop? Yes – Traktor’s looping is pretty extensive – again lots of video and articles out there – go have a poke around.

6. Probably impossible, but . . . . anyway to import my torq cue points to traktor?
No idea on this one. Torg uses a file, Traktor uses tags. No idea on how Torq defines cue point properties within those files and how that does/doesn’t relate to Traktor. There are some Torq users on here that may be able to comment. You never know, someone may have written a tool to do this…