synthet1c

if you want control for serato so you dont need to touch your keyboard unless you have to search for a track, you cant go past the denon hc1000

there isn’t much on offer in that price range but

pro’s
small
led feedback
every control you need

con’s
small
hard buttons
jogs not touch sensitive

I definately wouldn’t recommend the behringer with vdj based on bad user experience on the vdj forum though, it is supposed to be okay in traktor… for a soundcard get an audio 2, should be able to pick one up for under $100. Although in the case of vdj you need pro to be able to use the soundcard.

The most basic, most solid, smallest 2 channel controller that doesn’t have a million controls and lights is probably the vestax vci 100, it’s definately not the best though as it is fairly old technology and you have to use sync to mix as the pitch faders are small and only 7bit (not very accurate when the pitch range is higher than 6%)

It works with traktor and vdj, but not serato

get a black skin form styleflip or paint it black if silver isn’t for you. they look like older quality mixers, and you can probably disable the jog wheel light if you need to.

that black one comes from jesus himself though…

don’t get a $25 soundcard it won’t have low enough latency to do anything but basic mixing and it will more than likely have distortion when you turn it up, spend a little more and get an audio 2 and you will be able to scratch aswell.. that and a mixtrack is easily better than a mixtrack pro if you already have vdj pro, but honestly I use a reloop digital jockey in vdj, it works great and has a much better construction than the mixtrack, It’s natively supported and just needs the registry tool tweek for top scratching performance.

If you have a pro licence, I have mapped the bejesus out of an icon idj… it’s set up to play songs but has an extensive amount of functions & effects mapped to it, 22 it ended up being, you can enable jog fx and the jog will no longer operate as a jog only as an effect controller with 9 variations. It’s cheap at around $90 – $100

drawback is it doesn’t have led feedback from the software, I can’t upload the instructions here probably due to it’s size, give me your email and i’ll send them to you if you want..
http://www.virtualdj.com/addons/14306/icon_idj.html

Iceman sorry to be the bearer of bad news, but you don’t know how to set your beatgrids mate, what the sync button does is allign both the bpm and the track position to the nearest beatgrid marker. your example only works for things with broken beats like hip hop, rnb, drum n bass, breaks, dubstep etc… this is because the sounds and the frequencies of the sounds are different to regular 4/4 dance music.

In the broken beat genres the kick drum is generally short, sharp and low in volume, so it gives space for more kicks in the rthym and the bassline (the primary element in the lower frequencies) the snare in broken beats is also usually a much lower frequency than 4/4 beats and louder than the kick. for this reason software that is built to detect regular 4/4 dance music mistakes the snare as the kick drum.

Regular 4/4 has a very defined kick louder than any other sound in the track in most cases, so the software can easily determin the correct sound as the kick… If you press sync with this type of music 99 times out of a hundred it will lock to the correct position. And it should take no longer than a day to learn to drop a track on the downbeat, and another day to figure out to drop it on the first of 32 beats, then another day to learn to drop it where it feels right. then you have competition for your residency as kids want bass music now not rnb, and they will work for less than you are willing to accept and attract younger customers more willing to part with their money.

The reason you got it the first time is you pressed sync before the track started playing so you could freely drop the track where wanted it. For a solution in vdj to your sync problem you have a couple of options available to you..

1 – you can remap the sync button to “match_bpm” which will do what it says, it will match the bpm to the other deck, only with this it can work when the track is playing.

2 – you could map the play button as “play_pause & match_bpm” or “play_sync”, this will sync the bpm when you press play.

3 – you can right click the bpm button on the skin to open the cbg adjust window to so it manually/

4 – you can adjust your beagrids. you could map a button or key to “adjust_cbg -0.0125” which will move the grid backward half a beat… because the snare is the constant this should set the grid position perfectly.

5 – If you want to get in depth you could do a macro command on your play or load button to set a cue if you have reset the grid position, then if that cue exists the grid will remain where you set it next time you press that button. eg

for the play button
“hot_cue 79 ? play_pause : adjust_cbg -0.0125 & set hot_cue 79 & play_pause”

or for the load button
“load & hot_cue 79 ? nothing : adjust_cbg -0.0125 & set hot_cue 79”

there are a few other sync option available as well, but that can be left for another day

I have a reloop jockey 2 and use it with vdj pro, with the jogwheel latency fix it works great, soundcard is fine… it’s not an audio 8 but it gets the job done. the eq knobs are a little wobbly because they are push to kill, that’s not to say the quality of them is bad, it’s just the nature of the beast having that extra functionality…

the volume faders are a little cheap.. they work fine but you shouldn’t slam them like you would on a vestax or ns6… but they are better than the mixtrack… the crossfader is amazing for a cheap controller allowing sharp precision cuts, jogs are smaller but higher resolution, pitch slider is small but 14bit, transport buttons can give way when abused, It isn’t the best controller on the market by a long shot, but imo it is the best in it’s class above the mixtrack. That said I have never had my hands on a vms2/4/4.1 to judge the quality.

If I were you and wanted to focus on turntablism I’d go for the stanton 150ST, they have the best bits of both, look of the technics, torque of the numark, straight tonearm which is better at staying in the groove, they are line level so no annoying ground hum ever and they have on board key correction if you are ever spinning real vinyl, they are really everything the mk5 should have been. you can get the techs or stanton’s second hand and get the picth recalibrated for a few dollars, or you can rebuild tech’s for a couple of hundred.