Started pulling in gigs quickly. Have a few questions to keep my setup stable.

Hey guys,

I started DJing a few months ago and things have started to pick up for me pretty quickly, played my first gig last week and it went amazing. I'm booked to play another show next week, and I want to make sure that my gear performs well.

I use an S4 and Traktor (on a Windows 8 laptop) and did have a few problems with occasional CPU load spiking and small audio dropouts. My laptop is only really used for production and DJing.

Laptop Specs: i5, 8GB, hard drive is clean.

Here's what I've done/noticed:

In Windows:
-Disabled Wifi
-Disabled Background Applications
-Run Power Settings in High Performance
-Disabled Sleep Modes

In Traktor:
-Disabled Multicore support in Traktor
-Haven't really messed with latency settings.

I'm playing music directly off my laptops hard drive. Is there a performance gain with running an external hard drive? I need to pick up an external hard drive in the future, but would it be better to run my playlist off of a flash drive for the time being? Does Traktor even recognize a flash drive?

I'm running my effects in Chain Mode. So 6 effects ready to go. Could this cause drop outs?


Also, just a tip for anyone running Traktor and going on your first gig. When I went to start my set, my gear was working, but no audio was coming out of the master. I was scheduled to play in the middle of the night, but because my gear wasn't working someone else had to go on. It sucked

After spending 45 minutes messing with routing, restarting my computer, all this BS, I quickly googled and found that the problem ended up being the Master Gain Knob in Traktor (software) was turned all the way down. The Master Knob on my S4 did not control the knob in the software. Once I leveled it out, everything was fine. After that, I ended up closing out the night, and everything went great. If you use an S4 and ever see a blinking Triangle above the SNAP button, it's an indicator of your master knob being either too high or too low, or your laptop not being plugged in.

Your specs are well beyond the point that you should be having audio dropouts of any kind. I'd guess that something is directly interfering with your audio performance (i.e. virus protection or some rogue program/service).

Just out of curiosity, have you run the latest updates/patches for both Windows and Traktor?

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I'm playing music directly off my laptops hard drive. Is there a performance gain with running an external hard drive? I need to pick up an external hard drive in the future, but would it be better to run my playlist off of a flash drive for the time being? Does Traktor even recognize a flash drive?

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Yes, Traktor will recognize it... but no, typically your internal drive will be the fastest access to your music.

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Originally Posted by Landsnark

Your specs are well beyond the point that you should be having audio dropouts of any kind. I'd guess that something is directly interfering with your audio performance (i.e. virus protection or some rogue program/service).

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It's possible Windows Defender was running in the background. Although, I am running Classic Shell if that makes a difference.

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Originally Posted by Landsnark

Just out of curiosity, have you run the latest updates/patches for both Windows and Traktor?

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Yup, Traktor and Windows are both updated.

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Originally Posted by Landsnark

Yes, Traktor will recognize it... but no, typically your internal drive will be the fastest access to your music.

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Even if it's the same drive that is running Traktor? I've heard a lot of conflicting reports. Some people say definitely run an external, some say not too.

Well, this is only anecdotal evidence of course, but I will say that I've run Traktor for about 8 years now, across several different iterations (Traktor 3.x, Traktor Pro, Traktor Pro 2, and most recently Traktor Scratch Pro 2); across several different platforms (Dell D610 running Windows XP, several MacBooks), using several different interfaces (MOTU Traveler, Xone:2D, Kontrol S4, Audio 8, DN-X1600 mixer) and have always run directly from the internal hard drive. It's never given me so much as a hiccup.

Traktor is going to run in memory once it's started up, and (as far as I know) only writes to the hard drive when making changes to your collection (i.e. tagging, etc.). So there shouldn't be any real bottleneck there unless I'm missing something.

It seems weird to me that your machine is having dropouts, considering I've had flawless performance on machines specced way lower than that. Have you noticed audio dropouts in other applications (just playing music to listen to outside of Traktor, for example)?

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Originally Posted by Landsnark

Well, this is only anecdotal evidence of course, but I will say that I've run Traktor for about 8 years now, across several different iterations (Traktor 3.x, Traktor Pro, Traktor Pro 2, and most recently Traktor Scratch Pro 2); across several different platforms (Dell D610 running Windows XP, several MacBooks), using several different interfaces (MOTU Traveler, Xone:2D, Kontrol S4, Audio 8, DN-X1600 mixer) and have always run directly from the internal hard drive. It's never given me so much as a hiccup.

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Anecdotal evidence is good enough for me! I just started DJing within the past 6 months, so I'm having to learn a lot of this stuff as I go. The pressure of already getting gigs is forcing me to start thinking about this stuff a lot more seriously.

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Originally Posted by Landsnark

Traktor is going to run in memory once it's started up, and (as far as I know) only writes to the hard drive when making changes to your collection (i.e. tagging, etc.). So there shouldn't be any real bottleneck there unless I'm missing something.

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Makes sense to me. I take a lot of time and prep my tracks and playlists before. So generally there isn't any editing happening on site.

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Originally Posted by Landsnark

It seems weird to me that your machine is having dropouts, considering I've had flawless performance on machines specced way lower than that. Have you noticed audio dropouts in other applications (just playing music to listen to outside of Traktor, for example)?

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Yeah, it's strange to me as well. I've been a PC person my whole life, and a lot of people are feeding me the vapid "should have bought a Mac" line. I produce with Ableton, and the only other time I've experienced CPU load problems or audio dropouts is when I'm working on a really complicated and heavy project, but other than that the computer has always ran flawlessly.

Could my latency settings in Traktor be a factor, or possibly heat?

I'd look into your latency if all other things are fine.

The CPU spikes could be because your latency is too low. Increase the buffer a bit and see if that smooths out the CPU spikes and fixes the dropouts.

Make sure you're not running any services, etc. that you don't need. Someone here created a script that disables a lot of the commonly used services in Windows. (not sure if it's applicable for Windows 8) I added a number of services I know not to be necessary for audio playback as well. For my setup, this script doesn't make much of an impact, but upping the latency buffer a bit to find a happy medium between CPU load and true latency did the trick.

This might be a silly question, but why did you disable multicore support in Traktor? I would have thought you'd want this.

Try setting your audio to 192 samples and 3 milliseconds of buffering and let us know what happens.

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Originally Posted by ImNotDedYet

I'd look into your latency if all other things are fine.

The CPU spikes could be because your latency is too low. Increase the buffer a bit and see if that smooths out the CPU spikes and fixes the dropouts.

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+1

I suspect that the latency and number of buffers is cranked way down. Increase both by one notch. Then load up four decks. On three decks crank the effects to the moon, then turn them down (the CPU activity is still happening). On one deck, leave it clean. Listen to the clean track while the others grind away on an endless playlist. It is actually important to load new songs from time to time in the test.

If you don't hear any drops in an hour (or four)...you are good.
If you do hear something drop, increase the latency by another notch and keep listening.

You can do this in the "background" provided you pay just enough attention to hear the drop.

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Originally Posted by RajMahal

This might be a silly question, but why did you disable multicore support in Traktor? I would have thought you'd want this.

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It's actually recommended to turn this off if you're experiencing snaps, crackles and pops. Seems counterintuitive, but...when in Rome...