dougtek99@yahoo.com

Well. First, serato is a good program. It seems to be the program many vinyl djs gravitate to. lIm a traktor guy. Having used both, to my personal taste, traktor just has more versatility to it. Where im living serato has unwarranted street cred, in my opinion. Having said that for what you are planning to do either of those programs would be fine.

The controller you are looking at is an advanced controller, with a lot of bells and whistles. And its expensive (or maybe im poor). Though its exactly the kind of controller I would want, if you are just starting out Id suggest something like the mixtrack pro. It also has a soundcard (audio interface) with similar controls (no touchstrip though) That way if it doesnt pan out you wont be out a grip of money. And if it does pan out you can use your dj earnings to pick what you really want, with the practical experience to choose wisely.

Dont know how well versed you are so I hope im not insulting you, but every controller can be made to work with all the major dj interface programs. You dont have to limit yourself to a package deal. There are files called mappings that will make a controller work with whatever, and at least in traktor (i dont know about serato) you can customize the mapping (or make your own), meaning you can make any button or fader do whatever you want it to do. Pretty cool.

The one thing you will want to spend coin on is a mac (pc lovers dont hate!). They crash waaaaay less often, if at all, and just seem to lend themselves better to this kind of thing. Get an external hard drive, load your music on to that, back it up, pack it up, and have fun. If I can elaborate or help in any way let me know. doug

If you already have a tsi file (that is if you can already control some parameters of the program with your xone) go to preferences, click on controller manager at the bottom. When that window opens drop down the list for device at the top, and click on whatever line says allen and heath xone. You have now accessed your tsi file (the file ending in .tsi that contains the mapping for your xone). Click add in (if you click add out you can assign a light to whatever button has a light on your controller, but first things first) find the pitch fader function, choose it, click learn, move the slider, CLICK LEARN AGAIN TO TURN THE LEARN FUNCTION OFF, choose the type of control it is (button, fader/knob, or encoder). At this point you can set how you want the slider to respond, choose relative and if you mess around with the settings you can change how it reacts. Assign the slider to a deck. I move the window over so I can see the deck im working with and therefore can adjust the response on the control until its where I want it.
If you dont have a tsi file find one online somewhere, download it, and in the controller manager click add under device, import, find the tsi file and add it. This will add that file to whatever other tsi files you are currently using. Now you can do whatever you want with the file, if it does things you dont like erase them, add what you want, etc. A hint, once you get your settings where you want them export the file and keep it saved. You can put it on a flash drive and go to your buddys house and add it to his Traktor program to throw down if you dont want to bring your computer.
It seems kind of tricky at first but work on it, Ive completely customized all of my controllers and its a plus for sure. Hope this helps