How are ppl liking the VCI-380 with Serato DJ now?

DJ Life & Community General Discussion
1

How are ppl liking the VCI-380 with Serato DJ now?

Looking into getting back into Serato. I loved Itch when I was on the VCI-300. Thinking about picking up the VCI-380 for a number of reasons. Just wondering how those of you with the VCI-380 already are getting along with Serato DJ? Hollaaa

2

I’ve only just started using it again after a year off.

Basically Itch wouldn’t run nice on my win 7 laptop, audio dropouts, crashes, had it fail on me during a couple of gigs. Had basically given up on it and went back to my TSP2 rig.

Before I say anything nice about SDJ, it is very frustrating if you are trying to use a large (read over 12000 songs) itunes library with SDJ and you are on a win 7 laptop. For me basically impossible:

That being said… having it working with a manually reconstructed library, I have to say SDJ with the 380 is a nice experience, here are my reasons for liking it:

  • SDJ’s HID mapping of jogs/faders are all super responsive (proper controller scratching yay!)
  • really liking the izotope effects, simple, covering all the basics and easy to use on the fly
  • i really missed the slicer feature, great to have it back
  • also really missed the elastic beatgrids, wanna sync non quantized funk songs with crazy drumming, no probs (as longs as you are prepared to spend a bit of time ‘warping’ the SDJ grid)
  • full length color parallel horizontal wave forms FTW!
  • SDJs approach to sync, lets you easily tempo sync a 160bpm track with a 90bpm track without having to turn it off
  • it seems to me you can do more in a loop than in TSP, hot cue juggling wise, not sure how to explain it, when in a loop in TSP hitting most functions bounces you out of it
  • IMO best pads of any controller (except for maschine) and hands down best jogs based on the integration ANNND most importantly the led position indicator
  • overall size is still portable compared to any four channel controller and build quality is rock solid

My current negatives on the VCI380 with SDJ:

  • pad fx are still a little tricky to use in a nice way, there really needs to be a way to adjust the pressure sensitivity, maybe it will get easier with practice
  • only two FX units as opposed to TSP2s four
  • no dedicated channel bipolar filter, and it doesn’t appear to be available for mapping
  • no easy way to quickly select a particular type of effect, have to press shift, then turn a knob and look at the screen, this really slows - down some rapid FX changes. Say you want to use a filter and then suddenly change to a delay. Granted I have only been using the controller itself and have yet to experiment with a mapped X1 beside it
  • the UI forces you to choose between recorder/FX/SP6 sampler in focus, this leads to problems, my approach is turn record on, and keep it on FX, this means I ignore the sampler for now
  • the SP6 sampler, doesn’t let you map controls to grab samples and requires that you lose focus of the FX display, IMHO it is only good for firing off one shots at the moment, air hooooorn! etc :wink:
  • feel like the stand alone mixer functionality is wasted, there are still only max two channels, wish there was a way to have a third aux channel, would love to run one other source in, guess it would be technically possible using an attenuator and running another line input through the mic in, it just seems a waste though

anyway, even with with its foibles I find myself using it more than anything else this last week, its simplicity makes me wanna play around on it scratching even after I don’t wanna mix, kinda like how I couldn’t (and still can’t easily) stop playing with maschine, its just fun

3

Awesome response. Thanks a lot man :slight_smile:

4

Great response scooterAdam. I also have tried to use it on a Win7 machine with a big library, to much frustration.

I’ve had the VCI-380 since christmas, and i’ve never used it, really. I use Scratch Live with turntables most of the time,
and I wanted a portable option where i could use my extensively sorted and large (~500GB) library of music. But Itch
would always crash immediately. After quite a bit of digging, i found the method of re-importing folders from scrach, which worked…to a point. But even if i decided that was OK, it would be runing my library if I went back to Live (and I plan on going back and forth).

I really hoped that Serato DJ solved these problems, but after installing it yesterday, it immediately crashed in the same way as Itch.

I really wonder if there’s any patch in the pipeline here. Did you ever find anything that helped scooterAdam?

5

Possibly a future release of Alchemie Zinc may sync itunes playlists to serato crates, that would really help. I’m still using itunes as my one library and creating crates on the fly as I need them by dragging whole playlists in. At least the cue point/grid data persists even if I blitz all the serato crates. Not ideal but hey its working, itunes integration works with traktor and I loathe to buy a mac just to get some marginal memory gain so as to not cross the crashing threshold.

Since I posted above i’ve had a bit more of a play. Some additional points:

Midi mapping
have only used an X1 so far
its really well suited for the 4knob/4button serato FX, using the encoders for FX select, mapped sp6 triggers/bank select, UI mode select and reverse mode
for some reason the FX select buttons won’t toggle properly no matter what I do, i’ve fudged it for now by manually editing the .xml mapping file but there is something weird going on
there is a little lag between turning knob and seeing the value update, its marginal but noticeable compared to using the X1 in traktor or turning a midi mapped knob on the twitch in traktor
switching maps takes a long time, my laptop looks like its going to crash each time I do it

Slip mode
discovered it by accident the other day (shift and vinyl button until it starts blinking)
am kinda wondering what to do with it, cue points and a scratching I guess
given that there is already loop roll, slicer and reverse/censor it seems almost a superfluous feature

UI Switching
i mentioned that it was a pain switching between these, well sp6 you can pretty much load up leave alone, and now that the FX section is mapped to my x1 I can almost leave that alone
unfortunately the way the FX are at the moment they don’t let you map FX select for individual FX only the scroll function, which means having to stare at the screen while picking effects
also, should you delve into the video plugin then you are constantly switching back and forth

SP6
when you play a sample from the sp6 and switch banks it cuts that samples’s audio off which is not ideal
still no midi mappalbe way to grab a sample from the playing decks into an sp6 slot

Video plugin
only just played with this now, awesome, got it going HDMI into my tv and its rocking
just makes you realize how hard it is to get good videos tho..
adds another dimension of preprep to do for each track (associate video, video FX, transition etc)
and adding in a bunch of movies would probably rapidly increase the size of the library that Serato trys to load and risks crossing the large library crashing threshold

In general though, i’m having a lot of fun with this setup. Gotta stress test it a bit more before I would feel confident taking it out anywhere tho (video might be pushing it…)

6

You can have 256 gb of ram, but if there’s a memory leak the program will crash no matter the quantity of ram.

7

indeed you are right, was just mentioned that according to some other users on the Serato forum it runs using slightly less memory on Macosx, it is still 32 bit tho and it still evenutually crashes at some size threshold

check the thread, its pretty tough to diagnose, i’ve given up, am just creating small crates on the fly as needed draggin them in from itunes. If AZ ends up providing sync for this it would def help speed this up.