Marco Solo

1. Actually knowing the track. Or at least checking the intro and outro length before playing it. You can put this info in the comment section of the track’s ID3 tag.

2. Well, practise basically. It takes getting used to, but it can be done. You can also mix master and cue on the headphones. That way you hear the same thing on both ears. The more ways you can do it, the less it matters what venue you’re playing at. At that point you don’t care what they have or don’t have, because you can adapt.

3. That’s the thing, don’t try to know thousands of songs by heart. That takes a while. Moreover, in the vinyl days dj’s used to be able to take up to 80 or so 12 inches with them and they managed to play entire evenings with that. Plan your set in advance and you’ll have a lot less to worry about. Even when you own thousands of tracks. And by the way, nothing is cheating if you are the one creating it. Use whatever tool you need to make things easier. Just don’t go the way of recording the set in advance and then pretending you’re actually mixing.

I learned most from ellaskins on youtube. I also took the beginner course, but it wasn’t nearly as useful as the ones from ellaskins. Like not even close.

Those are decent, you’ll get a lot out of them.

I can’t really define why exactly, but I just categorise them as pop in my head. I see other people doing the same. But I admit that I have seen tracks on beatport that I would put in the pop box. Nobody has the same criteria, and you kind of showed that in your investigation. I think that a better distinction would be if they were widely available, although it would be a pain to test that.
Beatport can do whatever they want and if they don’t see it as a beatport kind of track, they won’t provide it.

Maybe you can ask them what their criteria are for putting tracks up for sale. That would be interesting information.

To offer another angle, I use a five year old laptop with a centrino 2 by intel and Serato works just fine on that too. You don’t “need” a mac at all.

I wouldn’t buy either, but that’s just me. I agree with Terry, I don’t get the whole extra screen thing either.

You can buy a cheap effect box and use it in a loop on your spare channel. You cannot route the effects of traktor anywhere. You wouldn’t want to either, because they are pre fader.