Syncing Traktor Pro to Ableton 8

[dirkd]

Apparently as stated this is Mac only, well that sucks for PC users.

And yes I love my Mac

[Zac Kyoti]

It's not just mac, just use midi ox/ midi yoke to route the clock signal. The concept is the same otherwise. Remember to dial in that midi clock offset in Live, otherwise it'll sound off. If your beatgrids in Traktor are not spot-on or are drifting, it will sound off. If the grids are tight, you should only hear very miniscule drift against Live if any, and it should always be self-correcting every time the Live loop repeats. I sync these programs, and it sounds solid.

[Villinus]

Bump!

I just tried syncing the two today with Traktor as the master clock. I got it to sync but Ableton was drifting on me (I haven't messed with the midi clock offset yet, hopefully that will fix it.)

Anyone have video of the two working together in a set?

[BennyJ]

Ive got mine working but ableton will drift a lil. its gonna take some tuning really. Oh and im running a pc

[mostapha]

Syncing Live to Traktor is easy on Mac, and it seems basically worry free. I'm told that the windows version of Traktor doesn't have virtual MIDI I/O, which might be a problem. On a Mac, it doesn't even take extra software.

A week or two ago, I had them synced at work and listened to the two ticks together for about half an hour waiting for them to drift. I got bored before they did. I wasn't DJing, but I was going about my normal work life. So–in other words–terminal, emacs, Safari, my mail client, adium, Stickies, and Pages were all up and running alongside Traktor Pro and Live Suite 8, both through the internal sound card on my old Macbook…no issues.

Even changing the tempos at reasonable speeds (i.e., not trying to follow scratching…) worked well enough…Live caught up within a measure or so and was never that far off. No biggie. You can't change the tempo willy-nilly, but it takes almost no thought to do it so it's not audible, regardless of which program is actually playing audio at the time.

Syncing Traktor to Live was less successful…Traktor takes forever to catch up when you change Live's tempo.

It didn't seem to make a difference whether I was using Traktor's internal clock mode or auto deck master…performance seemed exactly the same.

As far as actual audio…it should be a lot more forgiving than the ticks as long as your stuff is warped and beat-gridded properly.

If you hit Traktor's "sync" button (in the midi clock section, not the deck section), Live resets playback to 1.1.1 and fires the first scene if you're in session view. So, when it does start to drift, you have to not be playing in Live at the time. And it might be a good idea to have a dummy scene 1 with nothing in it just so you don't get surprised.

Seriously…I don't know what everyone's problem is. I'd still advise being able to monitor a click in case something goes wrong, but if I cared, I'd use them together and not worry about it. Honestly, I'd be more worried about my 2.5-year old laptop overheating than anything to do with a midi clock.

[DennisHuiberts]

Try syncing Ableton (slave) to Traktor (master) and then record you audio from Traktor in Ableton. Then you will hear what all the fuss is about. Because of the drift in clock Ableton fucks up your audio and causes pitch bends which kind of sound like latency problems (stuttering in audio).

So for live use (not recording) midi-sync works just fine. But when you want to record the drift in clock is a no-go. I can still use the effects in Ableton over the audio coming from Traktor (as long as the bpm in Ableton is manually set to the same value as that of Traktor), but firing clips in sync is not possible. The only solution is to turn quantization off and fire the clips in time yourself (no sync).

If your system is set up so that Ableton is the master and Traktor is the slave, this problem would be solved. But as Mostapha said, Traktor takes ages to sync back to Ableton when the bpm is changed.

[Villinus]

So for live use (not recording) midi-sync works just fine. But when you want to record the drift in clock is a no-go. I can still use the effects in Ableton over the audio coming from Traktor (as long as the bpm in Ableton is manually set to the same value as that of Traktor), but firing clips in sync is not possible. The only solution is to turn quantization off and fire the clips in time yourself (no sync).

That's disappointing if this is the case. I sync'd the two, and I do get a slow "wind up" of the clips sounding like a record player being turned on... although that was when I went from like 127>120 bpm, so I'm sure smaller BPM changes would work better.

Has anyone tried syncing the two w/ an actual midi cable? Any chance it would be better than a virtual cable?

[mostapha]

It shouldn't make a difference whether the midi cable is virtual or not…with just 1 computer, I think the virtual interface should work better.

Also, I'm not exactly sure why you'd want to record like that. I mean…I can see it, but…I also see a lot of problems. Both Traktor and Ableton are a bit resource hungry just by their nature. And Live is not really a great recording platform anyway (recording != production) unless you're using it by itself and doing things Live. Especially if you're doing somewhat random disk reads in traktor (playing tracks) and trying to do constant disk writes in Live (recording), that's a LOT of disk I/O and a good bit of processing. The stuttering you're hearing might just be from that and have nothing to do with midi. I mean…constant disk writes are constant disk writes. Hard drive buffers aren't big enough to keep recording while also using the buffer to pull an mp3 into ram and let the mp3 codec decode it to something the sound card can interpret.

That sounds like it's just asking for trouble without even considering syncing them.

Have you tried doing it without recording traktor's output into Live? You know you can monitor the signal without recording, right? You just select the input and turn track monitoring to "in". Or you can use something like soundflower to manage the audio interface so you don't need 2 of them but it's still getting output from both programs…or you can just assign the channels correctly and not worry about both applications using the sound card…that works too.

It seemed fine in my tests just DJing between them, though I didn't have my controller with me and wasn't doing anything crazy. Firing clips worked perfectly as long as I was sure to either set the quantization to 1/4 note or to just be right about where downbeats were in Traktor. But, I wasn't going nuts with it…just starting tracks and firing clips.

If Ritchie Hawtin et al. could get it to work over ethernet for the Kontact shows, you should be able to get it to work for this. I honestly don't see any real problems as long as you're not going crazy with disk I/O (i.e., not recording). Also, keep in mind that the fact that Traktor can record off an input while spinning does not mean that using Ableton will work like that. You're sending at least twice as much data to the disk the way you described. I haven't tried recording in Traktor like that, but I'd imagine that Traktor does some buffering of the recording input on its own to even out these issues while it's reading tracks. Live wouldn't know to do that…I'm positive the programs don't talk to each other that way, so even if Live does buffer the recorded signals, it won't know when it can't do disk writes…which leaves it up to the OS…which probably don't know that it should give priority to Traktor's reads. You might be able to change that behavior…or you could just not record like that.

You spent at least $115 on Traktor and at least $400 on Live. Spend another $150 on a little recording device. GC has specials on them all the time. They probably don't suck.

Oddly enough, I'm starting to think that this may all end up moot when the new version of traktor hits. I mean…who really uses or changes samples that quickly. Obviously, Live's effects are better…but that part is almost trivial (on a Mac).

[tekki]

^^^^MAC ONLY^^^^

@dirkd MAC ONLY

you get the idea macs pwn!

It does.

[DennisHuiberts]

Also, I'm not exactly sure why you'd want to record like that. I mean…I can see it, but…I also see a lot of problems. Both Traktor and Ableton are a bit resource hungry just by their nature. And Live is not really a great recording platform anyway (recording != production) unless you're using it by itself and doing things Live. Especially if you're doing somewhat random disk reads in traktor (playing tracks) and trying to do constant disk writes in Live (recording), that's a LOT of disk I/O and a good bit of processing. The stuttering you're hearing might just be from that and have nothing to do with midi. I mean…constant disk writes are constant disk writes. Hard drive buffers aren't big enough to keep recording while also using the buffer to pull an mp3 into ram and let the mp3 codec decode it to something the sound card can interpret.

I route my audio from Traktor into Ableton with Jack OSX. Traktor is for trackloading/-selection and transport. I think Traktor's gridding options are way easier and less time consuming and the waveforms give me a nice view of my cuepoints and loops. On the effectors I have Xone:92 filters for every channel (4 decks). Everything is in WAV. Then it goes to Ableton in which I mix, EQ and apply effects. Because of the whole loop-based DJing, you're missing the buildups and breakdowns. So in Ableton I have a few clips with looped white noise with different effects on it to create whooshes and such to make the music more interesting and to make transitions from one loop to another one.
Because I mix etc. in Ableton, recording in Traktor isn't sufficient anymore. That's why I record in Ableton.

Have you tried doing it without recording traktor's output into Live? You know you can monitor the signal without recording, right? You just select the input and turn track monitoring to "in".

This is the way I use it yes, because this is the only way to recieve audio from Traktor in my setup. I'm not recording twice at the same time. Only once in Ableton when I'm making a new mix.

Or you can use something like soundflower to manage the audio interface so you don't need 2 of them but it's still getting output from both programs…or you can just assign the channels correctly and not worry about both applications using the sound card…that works too.

In Traktor, Jackrouter is the soundcard. Ableton recieves it's inputs from Jackrouter and outputs it to my Duet; not back to the Jackrouter. So only a one way stream of audio; from Traktor to Ableton. No conflicts.

Oddly enough, I'm starting to think that this may all end up moot when the new version of traktor hits. I mean…who really uses or changes samples that quickly. Obviously, Live's effects are better…but that part is almost trivial (on a Mac).

True. Traktor alone isn't cutting it for me at the moment. Preferably I'd go for an only Ableton setup, but everything works in Traktor: my whole collection is gridded/has cuepoints and loops etc AND I have sight of each waveform. Perhaps the new update gives me enough tools (and ReWire goddamnit) so I can drop the whole Ableton thing for DJing, but I don't keep my hopes up...