Originally Posted by
frankle
So having used Traktor for over half of my 21 years of DJing I’ve invested an extremely large amount of time and money into my tracks and gear, and my workflow within Traktor (importing/grids/cues/playing) is fairly seamless, even when downloading and/or playing tracks for the first time at a gig. I manually grid all of my tracks first by zooming in, setting grid marker and then adjusting by ear if needed. Playlists are mostly manually sorted folders or previous gig history lists, it’s not the best system but I make it work.
Obviously with Traktor not really moving forward, and Rekordbox 5 actually adding features along with mild upgrades to players (CDJ-2000NXS2/XDJ-1000mk2) and DDJ-XP1 being able to be used as a controller for both Rekordbox DJ and more-so Rekordbox via USB sticks into players, I’ve been using a variety of formats lately.
I’ve used Mixed In Key for a number of years now, it’s much better than Traktor at detecting keys, and I like that it writes to the Comment field as well due to Traktor at times doing what it likes with both of the Key fields.
I now have Rekordbuddy 2. Good little program with some great potential ... especially when the “search” feature is implimented (I’m told it’s coming). I never got into iTunes and it’s smart playlists but over time I think that I’ll use Rekordbuddy’s smart playlists, and the ability for them to sync to both Traktor and Rekordbox will be handy.
Which brings me to Rekordbox. Having all of my grids and hot-cues come across from Traktor has certainly make it easier, although there are some tracks that don’t seem to be working correctly and they go into an Emergency Loop when being played from USB on CDJ’s (I need to explore this more). Being able to have the majority of my playlists and tracks on a USB has been handy in tight booths, and although I don’t have issues with Traktor crashing or dropping out, there are some venues around town who don’t like laptops in the booth (not an argument I want to have here, but unfortunately yes it happens) and so being able to use USB has opened some doors ... I do however still have my laptop in my gig-bag, lol.
So, my workflow goes like this:
- Download new music.
- Analyse in Mixed In Key.
- Move to Music Folder (setup in yearly quarters - 2018-Q1, 2017-Q4 etc, once something is a number of years old it gets moved again to genre based folders).
- A-Sync in Traktor - Special, Tick BPM, Un-Tick Set Grid, Un-Tick Key, Tick Gain, Un-Tick Replace Locked Values, Tick Parallel Processing if at home, Un-Tick if at gig.
- Load up track, Set Beatgrid manually (not saved as hotcue), lock track, set Hotcue 1 as load marker, set other Hotcues as required.
- Get out of Traktor, load up Rekordbuddy 2.
- Sync Rekordbuddy 2 - this is setup with Traktor as my initial library, unprotected so that Smart Playlists can eventually be pushed into Traktor. Everything in Traktor goes to Rekordbox XML.
- Get out of Rekordbuddy 2, load up Rekordbox 5.
- Goto Rekordbox XML, select All Tracks, drag them all to “Collection”.
- Goto XML Playlists, right click and “import playlist” to any I don’t yet have.
- Plug in Samsung T5 USB SSD - setup to import History - right click recent History “turn into Playlist”, rename Playlist to something useful
- Goto Collection - export all tracks from Collection to T5.
- Sync any new playlists.
So ... issues that I might have solved:
- getting MIK keys to show up correctly in Rekordbox - yes they show up in Comments but it’s much easier when they’re in the Key section! Work in progress but I’m now doing import/Async into Traktor before MIK, the after MIK it’s a Consistency Check to make them show up correct. And Traktor doesn’t seem to be re-writing in the Key field now. I’ve tested with 1 folder, seemed to work so I’m currently re-analysing 5000 tracks in MIK!
- getting all 8 cue points to show up in Rekordbox - this is a Rekordbuddy 2 setting in case anyone else needs it, I guess I should have RTFM ...
And ... issues that I currently have:
- getting History/Playlist from USB gigs back into Traktor from Rekordbox - really not sure of an easy way to do this besides having both programs open and creating the playlist from scratch by searching for the songs and putting them in order. Once the playlist is in, set it to auto play over night so it becomes a “History” and then I can go into Finder and re-name the History file to the gig name. The benefit of this is that even if a track is removed from my Traktor “Collection” it will still have a record of it in the History. Very handy for later as tracks in Playlists that are missing from your collection get removed after Consistency Checks.
- some tracks being played via USB want to go into an Emergency Loop, sometimes it can be avoided by jumping to a Hotcue so I need to look into it further to see if it’s a corrupt grid or cue point. Not sure here ... the same tracks work flawlessly in Rekordbox Preparation and Performance mode, and in Traktor.
- I’m sure there’s more but they’re not coming to mind ... I’ll add them later :)
If you’ve gotten this far and not fallen asleep well done!
If there’s anyone who can help out with making this workflow better I’d like to hear from you.
Thanks!
