A history of violence (upgrading to TSP andbeatgridding without a decent result)

[sine143]

By skimming the the above posts I gather you are playing music that was ripped from vinyl? If this is the case, you may be having issues because the tracks themselves are not 1 tempo, but rather, suffered from Flutter during encoding. If you cant beatmatch it to a metronome by ear, then traktor cant either. It doesnt know how to deal with warps.

[luca78nero]

By skimming the the above posts I gather you are playing music that was ripped from vinyl? If this is the case, you may be having issues because the tracks themselves are not 1 tempo, but rather, suffered from Flutter during encoding. If you cant beatmatch it to a metronome by ear, then traktor cant either. It doesnt know how to deal with warps.

the fact is that i had no warp in traktor scratch (previous version) and when I imported the music and playlists into traktor scratch pro everything (well the older tracks) looked so wrong.

Now, thanks to a few precious advices which i got here (see previous posts), everything looks much better... although yesterday i did not have much time to check it carefully...

[patjuh90]

Do you still have the sync problem? It doesn't stay synced in a way that the sync button on your deck is not lit yellow? I had that same problem when traktor automatically setted my beatgrids. In breaks there would be no white bars at all and some would be way to close. I now let traktor set an auto grid, then i put a beatgrid cue point on (most of the time) the first beat. Then put tick on and check if the track is good.

[luca78nero]

Do you still have the sync problem? It doesn't stay synced in a way that the sync button on your deck is not lit yellow? I had that same problem when traktor automatically setted my beatgrids. In breaks there would be no white bars at all and some would be way to close. I now let traktor set an auto grid, then i put a beatgrid cue point on (most of the time) the first beat. Then put tick on and check if the track is good.

yesterday i did not really try playing so i cannot tell you if the button stays yellow or nor (do not remember). I think the answer is no, because what i can tell you is that if I press the sync button the bpm of the slave deck equals the bpm of the master deck and the tracks stay in sync but the sync itself is not "locked". I never use sync because I use timecode and move the pitch with the physical faders of the turntables/cd... i needed the beatgrids to be in place for loops and to have not only an audio feedback but also a visual feedback on the sync (thanks to the horizontal bar which is on the top of each deck, do not remember its name sorry).. but i basically sync the tracks on my own....

[gfocus]

As far as I recall, when there's no beatgrid marker, there is no beatgrid per se. Traktor will sync to the spikes (i.e. kicks) in the waveforms. TS wasn't better at gridding your tracks, it did not grid them at all. TPro on the other hand lays its strict, unwarpable beatgrid on top of your ungriddable tracks per default which causes this unwanted behavior.

[luca78nero]

As far as I recall, when there's no beatgrid marker, there is no beatgrid per se. Traktor will sync to the spikes (i.e. kicks) in the waveforms. TS wasn't better at gridding your tracks, it did not grid them at all. TPro on the other hand lays its strict, unwarpable beatgrid on top of your ungriddable tracks per default which causes this unwanted behavior.

assuming that what you say is right (that those white lines are different from the beatgrids lines), well I do see these "white vertical lines"... do not know if those are beatgrid or not... they are less, true, they are just on the beats, true, they do not appear in the breaks, true, they are similar to the ones which I had in TS previous version (which make me feel really at home ), true... but they do work with loops in snap and they do give a sync feedback through the horizontal bar which is on the top of each deck (again, somebody tell me its name!!!) so that is enough for me.. it's automatical, it's on the beats (where i mostly do the mixes) i really do not feel the need to "really beatgrid", especially if I get a headache with old songs due to drift...

might be not enough for somebody else though.

but this raises a question. If you are right, and those are not beatgrids, why do they place themselves exactly on the beat and work fine even on drifted vinyl tracks, while the automatical beatgrid option is not able to set beatgrids correctly and avoid this problem?

[DvlsAdvct]

It's the phase meter.

They aren't beat grids. They are beat markers. They are where Traktor thinks the beats are. In minimal songs (the style, not the genre) those lines will be more accurate because there's less going on and Traktor can accurately map the tempo. But if you throw on something more chaotic, yet still 4/4 there are a LOT more occassions of it going wrong.

And if you're using loops and not gridding your tracks manually it's only a matter of time before something goes horribly wrong.

I think it's more than likely that something is wrong with your BPMs or grids if it's drifting that bad. If it's drifting within 5 beats then I can almost guarantee your tempo is wrong.

Also, the thing with TS is there was a Slave function which just matched the tempo's and didn't do anything with the actual grids. I always Slaved when using TS.

But TSP doesn't have that feature, or at least didn't the last time I looked, and instead they kind of used Sync as a Slave as well now.

[luca78nero]

It's the phase meter.

They aren't beat grids. They are beat markers. They are where Traktor thinks the beats are. In minimal songs (the style, not the genre) those lines will be more accurate because there's less going on and Traktor can accurately map the tempo. But if you throw on something more chaotic, yet still 4/4 there are a LOT more occassions of it going wrong.

I think it's more than likely that something is wrong with your BPMs or grids if it's drifting that bad. If it's drifting within 5 beats then I can almost guarantee your tempo is wrong.

i'll just check that beat markers are on the beat... this would be sufficient... i hope. The BPM is exactly the same as detected in TS (where everything worked fine for years with beatmarkers) so I do not see a problem of BPM detection.

At least now, thanks to Curious People and you, I do not have beatgrids off-set, which made playing impossible, I do not have beatgrids at all, I just have beatmarkers, but for now, that appears to be enough (like it has been for ages with TS). I still have to deeply check if everything is really working better after the modification suggested by Curious People though, I just made a few tests this week (half an hour)... I guess I will have some time this weekend.

Fingers crossed and thank you.

[DvlsAdvct]

Alright, let's just get our words straight so no one's confused.

when you load a new track into a deck and remove all automatically placed beatgrid markers, the little white lines are beat markers.

When you put in your own beatgrid marker those little white lines will snap to the beat, pending the BPM is correct and the marker is placed properly.

Now you have a beatgrid.

Just making sure we're both on the same page.

[luca78nero]

Alright, let's just get our words straight so no one's confused.

when you load a new track into a deck and remove all automatically placed beatgrid markers, the little white lines are beat markers.

When you put in your own beatgrid marker those little white lines will snap to the beat, pending the BPM is correct and the marker is placed properly.

Now you have a beatgrid.

Just making sure we're both on the same page.

got it!

if I understood correctly you warned me because if I use beatmarkers (and not beatgrid) for loops and so on it might be risky since is something which is first of all not locked and secondly automatically generated by the software which could leave me "in underpants" (we say so in italy) during a set.