Serato

I think D-Jam had it earlier on. Final Scratch was first, but it was flawed, and Serato bought the first truly usable DVS system to the market. Traktor has come on leaps and bounds in the intervening years, but Serato have always had that foothold of being ‘industry standard’ in the US, at least until relatively recently. I think Serato’s dominance has waned though. I’m not saying it’s going down, just that fewer places are going to have SL boxes as permanent installs.

jezalenko, post: 2619 wrote: no need to manage music libaries in two seperate programs.

Actually ScratchLive and Itch can play from the same library.

Here in the states, Serato got a huge headstart on Traktor during the Final Scratch debacle.

That whole clusterfrack left a whole lot of early adopters sour on Traktor and lot of potential consumers scared.

Who remembers having to dual boot your laptop into a seperate Linux Partition to use Traktor? And then the DVS implementation was buggy at best and downright non-functional at worst.

Combine that with the preponderance of hip-hop in the US and you have a pretty clear market advantage to Serato, which is much more intuitive if you are coming from the vinyl/mixer model.

Most of the clubs I play in have a Serato box permanently installed in the booth and a couple have installed Rane TT57SL mixers. The Rane mixer makes load-in and load out a 30sec affair, and when you have multiple djs, one jock can use the mixer’s built-in interface while another can use his external box. Makes switiching djs a snap.

I’m a SSL guy and all of my colleagues use it as well. I also noticed that every single dj in the last dj competition I was in was using Serato. I was suprised that not one person was using Traktor.

As for the who controller vs DVS debate, on top of my SL3 box, I have a Numark NS6 and have owned both the Vestax VCI-300 and VCI-100 in the past. Itch uses the same library, cue points, and database as Serato Scratch Live.

The things that keep me from switching back to Traktor (for now)

– Around here, Serato is the defacto industry standard, especially if you are playing non-EDM music. Most major clubs have SSL boxes installed and ALL of the DJs have them.

– Itunes integration and library managment in Serato is much more intuitive than Traktor. With Smart Crates in SSL it’s that much better. I can’t understate how important this is for DJs who may spin only 30secs of a song before moving on to the next one. This is probably less important to the EDM guys who have all the time in the world to play with effects and blends, but in the genres where quick mixing is prevalent, you really have to have intuitive, responsive library managment .

– The user experience. When I used Traktor on my VCI-100, I felt like I was spending just as much time doing ‘software management’ as I was focusing on the crowd and the music. Serato’s interface is much less cluttered and during my high intensity sets, it fades into the background and lets me focus on playing the songs. I don’t use a lot of whiz bang effects, (delay, echo, flanger and pass filters are pretty much it for me) and spend more time tweaking the EQs for crowd response that I do playing with effects. In my case Serato’s simplicity is a benefit, not a hindrance.

– SSL has built in video mixing. I am just starting to play with this and it’s awesome.

– For guys like me who play hip-hop, some house/broken beat and lot of un-quantized (read:live instrumentation) music, Traktor and it’s beat grids aren’t really any benefit.

@ Phil

Exactly.

I can imagine circumstances where Traktor’s more powerful effects and its egde in flexibility (oh how nice it would be if ITCH could do vinyl emulation!) would come in handy, but for the kind of music I play, SSL and Itch do the job just fine.

Plus I love the free upgrades for life for both SSL and ITCH.

In the end, everyone should just use what feels good. DJing at the end of the day, is a creative experience and the artist should use the tool that best allows them to bring their voice and artistic expression into the world.

Now that Serato 2.0 has four deck capabilities are all the current Serato controllers kinda useless?

ah, very good