Dubstepforum.com

Hi everyone,

hope everyones had a banging new years, im going to buy a tech tool as i have all my christmas moneys on the go and im wondering the pros and cons of both as i iz clueless! (sure this thread will help others aswell)
aswell as that i wondered if there is any point me buying serato if im new to production/mixing or is it like anything enough research and exp ill get it? (Or you need to be school'd on music tech production to have that knoweldge?

My other question if anyone is able to answer this is say you purchased traktor pro/serato (scratchlive? is there different types of serato!? this is blowing my brain xD) would you need any other components like special needles, cables, mixers and whatever else?

Anybody who can help please assist!

Bizzle

I'd say The first step is to decide whether you want to use cdj's/vinyl to control the decks or to use a USB midi controller. Do some research and try some stuff out to see what you find better. Upside of using cdj's is that you'll have the same setup as most clubs. Downside is that they're expensive and heavier than a cheap midi controller. If you are mostly playing house parties I'd recommend the USB midi controller. If you wanna use cdj's you'll want tractor pro scratch or (I'm assuming) serato scratch.

Im mostly a traktor user, and i love it. The effects are second to none, and it has a really easy to use interface. I just had my first serato experience on new years and found it was pretty subpar in my opinion. The effects were awkward (although toe fair, I was using a guys setup, and he never used effects) and the browser was completelypiss poor i. My opinion. It wouldn't play some of my tracks and the mp3 tags didn't show up on half the tracks.

Anyways, I'd love to hearwhata serato user has to say on the subject, they'd probably be more knowledgable than me on serato.

Never used Serato but have Traktor scratch pro. It just works & works really well. I've had lots of moments when I'm like damn thats nice. Its stable & just works offering tons of possibilities, no confusing WTF moments.

One thing that is a bit annoying is you can't change the quantise value to anything but 1 beat so that's a bit limiting. I woud like to change it to 1/4 or 1/8 beats for triggering samples from q points.

I don't think either work well will old tracks that have bad timing.Traktor does not have any Live style warping features so I sometimes correct the timing in Logic then export it out for traktor. Works great for newer electronic tracks though.

It's interesting, Serato pretty much became the standard in the US while it seemed that Traktor was more commonly used in Europe. I think that's changing a bit now. My vote goes towards Traktor. I've used both, but I think Traktor has more options.

EZ

i know a few heads who use Traktor in the UK and seem to absolutely adore it, but by and large, at the "professional" stage-- serato.

traktor does seem to be a bit, like, 1/2way-to-ableton... and now that ableton has the Bridge between it & serato-- pretty fantastic.

was always interested in the multiple-decks feature of traktor--wasn't it sasha who did some relaly cool shit w/ that? but it gets to a point where it's like-- wouldn't it just be easier to have a single midi controller, rather than 4 cdjs/1200s/etc all sending you time code?

Sharmaji wrote:i know a few heads who use Traktor in the UK and seem to absolutely adore it, but by and large, at the "professional" stage-- serato.

traktor does seem to be a bit, like, 1/2way-to-ableton... and now that ableton has the Bridge between it & serato-- pretty fantastic.

was always interested in the multiple-decks feature of traktor--wasn't it sasha who did some relaly cool shit w/ that? but it gets to a point where it's like-- wouldn't it just be easier to have a single midi controller, rather than 4 cdjs/1200s/etc all sending you time code?

I've always wondered how the Bridge worked. Maybe I should look into it, I wasn't really a huge fan of just using Ableton... too confusing for this kid. I have to say, it would be much easier if everyone just moved to MIDI. It wouldn't even be that hard, if a club had just a mixer you could connect to a different input and seamlessly transfer from one DJ to the next. Each would be using the platform they were used to without having any downtime switching between setups. Unfortunately I can't see any place actually doing this anytime in the future.

Just looked at the bridge & if you couple it with a TTM57SL then you really have great integration with Live, that's a £900 purchase though. When I got Traktor I was like "where the performance recorder ".

http://www.ableton.com/pages/the_bridge/tour/mixtape

A standard would be great but I can't see this hapening, midi is not fast enough to be used for scratching etc the data rate is to slow and not precise enough.

I was thinking about this & a bodge would be to use an audio loopback app (http://myfla.ws/blog/2007/10/10/audio-loopback/) to record your separate outputs into a DAW then record the mixer output on a 3rd track. This was you could go back & edit mistakes afterwards. Not sure if it would work but worth a try one day.

Going back to the 1st question. I don't know if the tone from the vinyl is louder in Serato or Traktor but it drove me nuts to begin with, you do kinda get used to it but it rules out playing back at low levels for listening.


Ahh one big thing, Serato uses the audio interface as the dongle so u can't mix without it. This is a big win for Traktor as you can play around or even mix out using just ur laptop & no sepertate hardaware.

Easy guys, thanks for all the info from what iv been looking into and from what you all say im proberly going for traktor i can always move to serato later if i absolutely need to which i doubt.

If anybody has anymore info by all means post it up as im not buying till the end of the week thanks

I think I'd rather have Serato but you can't ever find deals on it like you can with Traktor. I have Torq and have always defended it because I have personally witnessed Serato fucking up at bad times too but the last gig sent me over the edge. I want to get Serato before I play out again for the sake of sanity. Tractor duo is quite tempting for the price consideration.

I have traktor duo and love it. I've used serato and it's fine too. Both are good programs.