Serato dj. Worse than vdj?

[Polygon]

Not to be that guy but you have contradicted yourself. You say sdj beat detection sucks and wave display is hard to read. Then go to say you don't mix visually..... In my experience alot of serato hate comes from people that can not mix without sync on and are lost without beat grids or quant.

Hey no don't worry you're not that guy
by beat detection i meant bpm detection, just the number.
You see, i don't really have an organized library, mainly because i always used bpm scanning to choose what to play next. I just clicked the bpm tab to sort the songs, and i increased the bpm as the gig progressed, and decreased as the crowd got tired. No i didn't just play same-bpm songs one after another after another, i know what song to put on and when, it's just that sorting by bpm really helped me with that.

The waveform i look at to see where i am in the song, if it's the first, second or third chorus, how much approx. until the track drops again etc. etc. So it's still an important part in my mixing, but not for beatmatching (also, i find sdj's waveforms, even though colored, less indicative of where the beat is than the ones in vdj)

I totally hate quantisation. Mostly because before i started djing i produced, and trained my fingers over the years using an maudio triggerfinger (4x4 velocity sensitive pads, basically a maschine without the additional screens and options)
I used sync in vdj since the hercules had an enormous amount of latency, and i just couldn't sync tracks properly by hand.

[haze324]

Poly --- are you using beatgrids in SDJ?

I think they are great, even if you don't use sync. Hell I use them in Scratch Live. I find that if you drop a grid marker on your first beat (and they are very easy to idenfity) the grids are marked in bars....they are numbered. So you can glance up and see numerically where you are in an intro, breadown, etc.

[jprime]

I'd like to add that you can use the left and right arrow keys to adjust the grids...I know some people overlook that

[Polygon]

Poly --- are you using beatgrids in SDJ?

I think they are great, even if you don't use sync. Hell I use them in Scratch Live. I find that if you drop a grid marker on your first beat (and they are very easy to idenfity) the grids are marked in bars....they are numbered. So you can glance up and see numerically where you are in an intro, breadown, etc.

I use them only in tracks where the slicer could come in handy, for the others i mainly set my own hotcues.

They're also really easy to set with the jogwheels and the controls on the far sides on the left of the jogwheels

[Polygon]

I'd like to add that you can use the left and right arrow keys to adjust the grids...I know some people overlook that

Yeah i found that out by accident, i left my hand on the keyboard and the beatgrid went berserk :P it's funny that in the same gig it helped me set a beatgrid on the fly on a track that was playing

[beisi]

SDJ/Itch have flexible beat grids and IMO a cleaner UI as well as hands down the best jog implementation for scratching (VCI300/380/DDJSX)

SDJ and Itch both suck at dealing with large itunes libraries
http://serato.com/forum/discussion/837589

Serato in general is painfully slow at releasing updates/fixes (i.e. midi out/vci380/twitch/bridge and the list goes on...)

Can't speak for VDJ as I haven't used it but I hear that it's scripting is extremely flexible and like what I see coming in the new version (should it ever be released).

Traktor is great software but it's supported controllers (i.e. S2/S4 not DVS) are not ideal for proper scratchy jog wheel bizniss. That being said is OP really gonna wanna do scratches and spinbacks? or just scrubbing and cueing in which case there are already heaps of options