Last night me and my friend synced up our 2 S4’s by Midi. We followed the Traktor Pro Bible tutorial to do this (http://bit.ly/hnX2g7) and got the whole thing kind of working. Unfortunately we stumbled upon a couple of strange things. I wrote down these things during the process of setting up and playing, and I really hope you guys can help me out. Excuse me if some of my questions are already somewhere in this forum..
Question 1:
While setting up the S4 Slave, the tutorial tells you to select ‘Traktor Kontrol S4 MIDI Input Port 0’ at the in-port field in the Device Setup. This option didn’t show up in our Traktor’s and instead we choose ‘Traktor Virtual Input’ as the In-port section (this seemed the best option). What does this Virtual Input mean, and was this the right choice? And why doesn’t ‘Traktor Kontrol S4 Midi Input’ show up like the tutorials says?
Question 2:
After setting up all the preferences and the Midi-clock the S4’s where connected. But for some strange reason when I (the master) changed my tempo and clicked on sync, the tempo of the Slave didn’t automatically change too. We had to do this by hand and then it worked… What’s going on here? I red this should work automatically.
Question 3:
When trying to get the master and slave in sync we used the ‘tick’ function in Traktor to get beats matching. To get our two ‘ticks’ in sync we tried to use the ‘sending offset’ function on the Master. But for some reason it seems this doesn’t make any sense, and doesn’t speed up the ‘tick’ of the master track. I seriously have no clue here.. Why does this ‘sending offset’ doesn’t seem to work?
Question 4:
Finally after manually setting the ticks of the S4’s and pushing sync at the midi-clock section it all worked fine and we spinned tracks in sync for like 1 hour. All tracks in sync and we had no problems. But out of nowhere the S4’s were not in Sync anymore and we could start all over again. I kept pushing sync button next to the midi-clock for like 10 times, but it didn’t sync anymore? When preforming live you off course don’t want this to happen..
thanx for the help Chris. Today we tried again and still no result. The strange thing is the clock doesn’t fluctuate like in your movie. This means the slave isn’t able to sync to the master. When we try to match our tick’s by changing the offset this doesnt effect anything..
I also think it is strange everytime we set up our preferences in the controller mananger screen and re-open this, Traktor switched the device back to ‘Generic Keyboard EN’ or is this normal?
We did it exactly as written in this tutorial: Master > Midi Out, Slave > Midi In (http://bit.ly/hnX2g7). Do you have any idea why the midi-clock of the slave doesnt sync up with the tempo of the master / fluctuates?
I just fear there’s not a whole slew of people trying to sync up two S4’s yet. Have you tried a different cable or confirmed the cable you’re using is good? It sounds like you may not be getting the signal from one to the other and that could be a potential cause.
thanx jojo. The cable is working, that’s for sure. I think I am missing something in my preferences. I think the whole problem would be solved if the midi-clock of the slave starts fluctuating / gives a sign of life.
Are you sending MIDI from the Master S4? Make sure the option is ticked in your preferences. This is for Question 1. You need to get Question 1 solved before anything else will work. The Virtual Traktor Midi is just the internal clock. So you are syncing your slave S4 with the computer’s internal midi clock. The Virtual Midi Clock is used to sync Traktor with Ableton on the same computer.
Today I went to my friend to make some screencaps, and while setting the thing up, we kind of fixed the problem! I connected the midi cable and for the first time we were able to select ‘traktor control s4’ at the in-port field in the Controller Manager settings of the Slave. Now the slave’s midi clock started fluctuating for the first time and we could adjust the offset at the master to sync the S4’s.
How to get this working:
First turn on the master S4 Master and connect the midi cable.
Now turn on the slave S4 > select S4 Traktor at in-port field
Restart the Master S4 and than hit sync at the midi-clock.
It feels like some kind of trial and error thing, and starting up the S4’s in the right order seems to be the solution for fixing the midi-signal. After the first time we tried this again for 2 times to make sure this was the problem and it worked out again.
The only really annoying problem there is left right now is we have to fix the offset every time we restart Traktor. When we found the right offset for the master S4 the first time today, we saved our tsi’s files so we could use this settings again the second time. After restarting Traktor the offset of the first session (72) wasn’t correct anymore and we had to find it again. Now it was 27. And the third time it was another number. Is there a way to always use the same offset number for the master S4. This is not something you want to fix over and over again on a party… (The slave’s offset was always on 60 and we didn’t change this)
