The Official TSP2 Bug and other stuff that should work the way i want it to thread.

[Karlos Santos]

What do you mean 'source selection'?
You can chose from where the slot is filled. Or do i misunderstand !!!

[Lundmark]

I have 2 TP2 bugs that really annoy me.

The first is the well-known waveform bug which doesn't render a waveform behind the playhead if a hotcue is used to jump to a particular part into the song. Not very severe, but annoying.

The other one is a lot more critical though. For some reason, tracks play faster in TP2. It's not consistent so I can't really reproduce it, but firing up TP2 and playing a track sometimes make all tracks play faster than they should (compared to iTunes, TP1 playback). Interestingly, starting TP1, playing a song and just quitting it makes TP2 play the song normally. Had this issue a lot when just using TP2 with my internal soundcard and no controller. Have yet to experience it with my Kontrol S4 connected, but that could just be a coincidence.

[Lundmark]

Hi guys,

First off I am brand new to Traktor (got the S4 10 days ago) and DJ Techtools. I've been a Serato user since 05/06 on 1200's and have been through various controllers primarily just to control looping and cue points, so this whole concept of "syncing" and "beat gridding" is new to me, at least from a practical perspective. I'm well versed in modern digital audio hardware and software - I own Logic, ableton, recycle and literally every other product NI has to offer. I had been thinking about Traktor for sometime and the release of the S4 finally interested me enough to begin the painful transition of moving from my library from one platform (Serato) to (Traktor) another.

As I'm sure is the case for many dj converts, the concept of "syncing" was quite foreign from a practical DJing perspective. It seems a great feature provided you can get your grids set up accurately.

I have read all I can find on the matter, trying to find the most effective and efficient way to quickly grid tracks as I have found that the T2 built in algorithm is effectively useless (which I found quite surprising as this is one of the fundamental differences between the two platforms). So that said, beat gridding from what I can make of it so far is going to be a manual process, track by track.

Now I play a cross of styles - Hip/hop/Electro/Dub/D&B/Breaks/Pop/etc - I have ammassed a massive collection of tunez over the last 15 years (traktor is saying some 100,000+ in my collection) - obviously I'm not going to care about immediately gridding all of them - so at the moment I'm just focusing on what I'm currently playing. Over time, I would like to get a good %age of my collection accureately gridded. As already mentioned I have been completely immersed in this over the last 10 days and have played 2 gigs with TP2 and S4 and have gridded at least 100-200 tracks, my experience was that traktor could sync the bpm pretty well but i would have to nudge the track slightly out of phase for it to sound right. Some regridding was required for tracks I gridded initially and then realized were incorrect after learning new techniques. Generally the BPM are fine, but fine tuning the phasing takes a bit more attention.

I tried using the metronome approach - but for whatever reason, be it a bug or the more likely user error - the tick will randomly dissappear for some beats and then show up again. The click is not getting "lost in the mix" as i have reduced the gain of the track as low as possible and it is also sporadic in track breakdowns. However on the few tracks that it did continue to be audible, I managed to get the grid locked down to the internal clock perfectly and in effect I know had these few tracks to use as a reference.

Therefore:

My current approach to beat gridding is this (assuming Traktor has roughly got the BPM right) -
1. Load Track
2. Delete any and all beat grid markers from the auto beat grid process
3. Find the cleanest snare (i find snares more often lie properly on the beat) closest to the beginning of the song, set a cue point, then covert this cue point to a grid marker.
4. From here Traktor lays out the grid, I go back then and set cue point 1 to grid at the beginning of the track
5. I then use the mouse (in snap mode) and go to the end of the track to see how the grid is lining up on snares/claps towards the end and make any fine adjustments to the tempo to stretch/compress the grid)
6. Once I have done steps 1-5 is when I actually play the track against another reference track and fine tune the grid. Here I run the two together and will adjust the track I am gridding with the jog wheels so it is locked with the track that i know is gridded already.
7. As i adjust the jog wheels the phase meter shifts slightly to the left or right.
8. I will then use the grid shift tool to shift the grid left or right until the phase meter is back in the middle.
9. Once it sounds right against another track I lock the grid and move onto the next - always leaving the reference track in 1 of the 4 decks i move on and repeat.

It is quite a process, but so far as I can see is the only way to truly "sync" your beats so that they sound properly mixed?

This is one of those things that I want to get right from the beginning so as to avoid what would amount to a massive amount of re-work in the future.

Therefore, my question to more experienced traktor users out there who have obvioulsy had to go through this - Is this the right way to beat grid? Should it be this much of a process? I can easily spend 2-3 minutes per track getting it bang on, longer for the more problematic tracks.

Apologies if this is the wrong place for this, but I've seen alot of beat gridding chatter in this thread, and I've also been hearing that the beat gridding in TP2 behaves differently than it did in prior versions (which I have never used).

Cheers,
-Brad.

Hi and welcome to DJTT!

Firstly, you can turn off the automatic beat gridding in the preferences. I always do this when I setup a new Traktor installation as I agree with you that it's almost never correct.

I beat grid my tracks using the tick feature in TP2. I place a beat marker on the first downbeat and loop a section of 8 or 16 counts. Then I adjust the grid so that the tick is lost in the track or, if not possible, is almost not audible. I then jump to the end of the song to see if the tick is still inaudible. If not, you will need to manually adjust the BPM of the song using the other two arrows in the grid section. When the tick sounds about right (that is - doesn't sound at all), I lock the grid.

Worth noticing is that Traktor is often wrong about the BPM of my songs. Setting the beatmarker on the first downbeat and pressing the Auto button in the grid section may fix this. If not, you can use the tap feature to tap out the approximate BPM manually or use the excellent and free BPM analyzer from MixMeister. It's almost always more correct than Traktor Pro 1 (Haven't had the time to check out if TP2 has improved).
http://www.mixmeister.com/download_freestuff.html

I've found this method to be really precise. I.e. if the tick is inaudible, the track is perfectly gridded.

[Karlos Santos]

The other one is a lot more critical though. For some reason, tracks play faster in TP2. It's not consistent so I can't really reproduce it, but firing up TP2 and playing a track sometimes make all tracks play faster than they should (compared to iTunes, TP1 playback). Interestingly, starting TP1, playing a song and just quitting it makes TP2 play the song normally. Had this issue a lot when just using TP2 with my internal soundcard and no controller. Have yet to experience it with my Kontrol S4 connected, but that could just be a coincidence.

Reduce the sample rate to 44100 when using the internal card. See if that fixes it.

Otherwise... thats bonkers. I dont see how TP1 can influence TP2 unless it is changing the sample rate on the internal card.

S4 will auto config to 44100.

[fullenglishpint]

The other one is a lot more critical though. For some reason, tracks play faster in TP2. It's not consistent so I can't really reproduce it, but firing up TP2 and playing a track sometimes make all tracks play faster than they should (compared to iTunes, TP1 playback). Interestingly, starting TP1, playing a song and just quitting it makes TP2 play the song normally. Had this issue a lot when just using TP2 with my internal soundcard and no controller. Have yet to experience it with my Kontrol S4 connected, but that could just be a coincidence.

I believe that can be caused by a sample rate mismatch. make sure everything's set to 44,100, in traktor, audio interface driver etc.

[fullenglishpint]

ECHO! echo... echo... echo...

[bradferris]

Hi and welcome to DJTT!

Firstly, you can turn off the automatic beat gridding in the preferences. I always do this when I setup a new Traktor installation as I agree with you that it's almost never correct.

I beat grid my tracks using the tick feature in TP2. I place a beat marker on the first downbeat and loop a section of 8 or 16 counts. Then I adjust the grid so that the tick is lost in the track or, if not possible, is almost not audible. I then jump to the end of the song to see if the tick is still inaudible. If not, you will need to manually adjust the BPM of the song using the other two arrows in the grid section. When the tick sounds about right (that is - doesn't sound at all), I lock the grid.

Worth noticing is that Traktor is often wrong about the BPM of my songs. Setting the beatmarker on the first downbeat and pressing the Auto button in the grid section may fix this. If not, you can use the tap feature to tap out the approximate BPM manually or use the excellent and free BPM analyzer from MixMeister. It's almost always more correct than Traktor Pro 1 (Haven't had the time to check out if TP2 has improved).
http://www.mixmeister.com/download_freestuff.html

I've found this method to be really precise. I.e. if the tick is inaudible, the track is perfectly gridded.

Thanks guys I will keep all this in mind as I continue to go through the motions! Don't know what I would do without all these forums... though I have ordered the traktor bible. It can't come soon enough!

[djchriswoods.co.uk]

found another bug...

again like the filters, this was in advanced fx, tried to use the freeze button on the delay, but just got silence, cant get it to work at all

[Zac Kyoti]

I found a bug, mentioned only briefly in an earlier post. Forgive me if there's already a fix for this, I'll be honest and say I'm not in the mood to read through the whole thread right now.

The beat tick (metronome) is not firing on all four beats. The beats it drops seem random. It doesn't matter if I'm listening to the master or from the deck option. And yes, I've been listening to it from the master clock with no music playing, to make sure I'm not losing it in the music. Has anyone else noticed this yet?

[Paka Ono]

Not a bug but more a feature request.

I want sample decks to auto play when loading from Browse+CUE assign. When in 3 deck/1 sample deck mode.