Whats a good place to start in Traktor?

I would start with double-clicking on the Traktor icon on your desktop. Be sure to have any necessary equipment, like external harddisks, controllers and sound cards connected properly before doing that.

Then find somebody who know what the h*ll he is doing and let them guide you.

Greetinx,
C.

The fact that there is actually a full-size, 374-page paperback book (yes, physical paper) called the Traktor 2 Bible, with accompanying website for updates, is an indication of the magnitude of the program. This is both a plus (many, many features available that you can choose your ideal mix from) and a minus (too much choices, draconic settings menu).

I used Traktor for quite a while, but it never fit like a glove and I got tired of having to read up on stuff. I prefer my tools a bit more intuitive. I never used the sample deck thingies (no F1s), so that wasn’t a selling point either. No stacked waveforms as pointed out and no flex beatgridding.

Recently I made the switch to MixVibes Cross and I have to say it’s more intuitive, does have stacked waveforms (and track waveforms in the players) and flex beatgridding. Harmonic mixing (very good) and beatmatching (not just word but even phrase matching is available) have all been done in a very nice way.

Goes to show that you need to find the tool that fits your way of working best, not make the best of whatever tool you happen to have. At the current pricing levels (think the non-DVS version of Cross is 49 euro or something) there is no real reason not to try out a few and see which feels best.

We have no qualms about spending hundreds of dollars (or more) on our hardware and then just accept whatever LE version comes with the hardware and perhaps upgrade to the full version. Lot’s of thought and (forum) discussion goes into picking the “right” controller and often the controller choice then dictates the software choice.

I think it should be the other way around. The software is the actual tool, the hardware supports that tool with physical control surfaces. If you know what software best fits YOUR needs and way of working (there is no best software, it is different for everyone I think) THEN you can make a list of the features you are looking for in the hardware and set out to find the (closest to) perfect match for your software.

Greetinx,
C.

Coltrane09, post: 44138, member: 2800 wrote: Chuck – Have you used MixVibes Autoplay feature yet? And how was set up for your Denon MC6000?

Hey Coltrane!

Yes, I used autoplay the first night out as I was having a bit of “downtime” in between the walkers/runners leaving and returning to the castle. I just stuck a few songs in an ad-hoc playlist, opened both my faders, set my crossfader midway, hit the appropriate button, adjusted the channel faders a bit and went to the toilet. As far as I remember it worked as advertised.

I hadn’t set up the MC6000 in advance. I started the night for several reasons with my normal Traktor on Mac situation. After the official part I was dying to use the software, so I went into settings, picked the MC6000 (all this while playing a CD from the CD-players I had with me as usual back-up precaution), loaded a track in deck one (all the browse, full screen browser, load A/B and such buttons working correctly). Hit play and off it went.

As I said earlier on the forum, you might want to remap the Play and sync buttons. Now hitting the play button invokes regular play, hittting sync starts synced play according to the settings you made. I have to say I love that. Call me lazy, but just hitting sync at ANY GIVEN POINT in the track and it waiting til the first downbeat of the new phrase before actually starting to play. I mean, seriously, the amount of time you can spend with your audience. Amazing! LOL.
If you want to use that sync button more than the play (and it’s such a tiny little button too) than switching the two mappings would be in order.

Other than that, as far as I could tell, it worked fine right out of the box.

Greetinx,
C.

Just keep in mind that the demo is computer only, i.e. no hooking up your controller. It will give you a good idea of the workflow and everything. So definitely check it out.

Greetinx,
C.

If I were a salesperson for MixVibes, I’d be ear to ear smiles now and saying “thank you for asking!”.

It’s a documented fever. MixVibes doesn’t work like Traktor and others in that there isn’t an actual sync button. What you get is two play buttons. One behaves like a regular play button, starts at the point of the cursor. The other one behaves as a SYNCED PLAY button. You hit it and it will start beat, word or phrase synced. So, by choosing the right play button you can have it as you like. I think it is da bomb that way personally.

So, rather than telling the software first I want to play this song in a synced way, you just select which way you want to do it by picking either of the play buttons.

Did you notice that you can give the cue/loop points a name in the locator bar? No more thinking “what was flag number 3 again … mmmmm …”, nope it says 1. drop intro 🙂

Coltrane09, post: 44241, member: 2800 wrote: … BTW, how does the SYNC/PLAY button behave on the Denon MC6000? Are the Sync buttons on the MC6000 mapped to behave like the software, or is the SYNC/PLAY button only enabled via the software?

Nope, the little white button labelled “sync” is actually your sync/play button. That is why I said before, if you use sync/play more than regular play (which I can see happening very easily), it is wise to swap the play and sync button mappings.

I did notice that the beat grids (and I’m assuming here) were just a tad bit off after importing from Traktor into MixVibes. It took me a second to figure it out, but I noticed that after about 7 seconds of trying to beat match a couple of tracks that one of the tracks fell out of sync where the beat grid appeared to have shifted some. In Traktor, I believe the beat grids were fine and didn’t shift.

Let me do some assuming here too. I don’t believe import from Traktor takes Traktor’s beatgrid info into consideration. This is (usually) in a proprietary format and not easily shared. I know it DOES take your cue points, loops and such.
So, what you see is the beatgridding that Cross did on your tracks. The good news is that it is incredibly easy and intuitive to adjust the beatgridding in Cross. Just hover your mouse over the wave form, click the pencil icon and use the available tools.

Well, I took to Youtube to figure out how to beatgrid a track and trashed the one currently set in MixVibes. I then allowed MixVibes to redo the beatgrid and everything was fine in Candy Land. I wonder if I need to trash the current beat grids rolled over from Traktor to MV before re-analyzing, or if I can simply re-analyze the tracks altogether. Hmmmm….

I’d go for a full re-analysis. :-).

Greetinx,
C.