Is VCI-300 popular or a bomb?
I was wondering if you think VCI-300’s are selling well and becoming popular or is it not the best selling unit & people prefer the VCI-100 or other controllers? The unit seems solid and nice and has a good sound, but not perfect and there are no effects in Itch (yet??)
What do you think or know?
Well I had been looking to buy a VCI-300 for a couple of weeks and all the local (Australia) retailers sold out of their fist few shipments of stock almost immediately. I have heard similar stories elsewhere. Luckily I managed to retry calling a retailer yesterday and they just got a new shipment in, so I grabbed one.
I intend on giving Itch a go, but my heart (and experience) lies with Traktor, so I’d say in the coming months I will be investing in a copy of Traktor Pro and a Korg NanoPad or Novation Nocturn as a dedicated effects controller.
One of the downsides with itch is that you can only (atleast i think so) use two decks, and lack of effects. Effects will probably be run on an external unit or some clever setup on the VCI-300 itself. But that means i have to get an extra unit besides the VCI-300!!"##one. Well yeah but you had to get an extra sound card for the vci-100 now didnt you?
HOWEVER i don’t see these 2 things as a big problem, since they will probably add some more stuff to Itch later on. Itch is very new and just go back and look at Traktor 1.0 or whatever the first release was and compare it to the latest version.
Im really not a Vestax/itch/vci-300 fanboi i have just seen to many posts that compare such a new product (itch/300/insert-just-released-hardware/software) witch something that is more or less a industry standard.
It really comes down to how you want to use your hardware, and for the love of god think before you buy 
Step it up 1
Try before you buy
Yeah that is important to probably most important.
I was just on the phone with a rep at a popular music online store called Thoman .de and he said they cannot even keep the new 300’s in stock, and they are now out selling the VCI-100. They are back ordered.
They are nice units and Itch is not bad..best thing is the layered visual waveforms.
Sound is very good too. Itch is new, but sure it will be very solid in next months when V2.0 emerges and Ableton work together with Serato.
i hear you about the layered waveforms, i wish traktor would have something like that. deckadance has both layered waveforms and colored waveforms but they are in two separate areas but it is better then nothing.
Well the UK has now a huge supply problem for both the 300 and the 100. Not because of popularity really, but the main distributor in the UK has gone down or something.
I initialy ordered a 300, because i liked its blackness, and its nice big jogs. Then the store rang me to tell me they would be some time in ever getting some.
So i thought about the pros and cons, and the added flexiblity of the 100 just made me think, did i only want the 300 because it was newer/more pricey.
I decided to get a 100 and a AK1 in the end. A day later the shop i ordered that from told me they have no 100’s and they wont have until maybe end of jan!
So i went on the hunt this morning, ringing loads of stores. I eventualy found one…and its on its way to me!
Fingers crossed its pleases me as much as i thought the 300 would.
We will just have to wait and see if ITCH gets effects etc, but seen as they go on so much about controler software intergration, and there are no effects buttons or blank buttons on the 300, i dont see effects hapening that quick.
Obviously people will work around it, Rout through ableton etc, but that really isnt an offical solution to the issue.
Meh, who knows. Its early days for the 300 yet! But it does seem to have some serious work to do if its gonna leave as big a mark as the 100 has!
Hey Chickenfish,
I do not think you will be disappointed with the VCi-300. I really like mine. It is a solid machine. I really like the long mixer faders and no indent on the pitch. Also the platters are larger. Maybe less buttons than its’ cousin, but also more free room for your hands. The built in audio is an ease too and sounds quite powerful. Serato is a cool company and they are working with many dj’s to make Itch rock. It needs to mature quickly, but think it will soon. I do not think it will ever have the fx like Traktor does, but think it is still very stable and easy to use. I still am interested in get a VCI -100 someday. Meanwhile, Ean is hopoefully making a dope TSI for the 300, that will give its’ users a choice of which program they want to use.
This was my thinking as well. The 100 requires an external soundcard, but the 300 benefits from an extra device for controlling effects. Either way, I would end up with a 2nd device, but with the 300 I can hold off for the moment, play around with Itch and upgrade my set-up later when I have the cash. Also (as claudek pointed out), the 300 has the benefits of longer faders than the 100, larger platters, more room to move, etc, but most of all in my opinion it has the higher resolution midi signals. That was a major deciding factor for me, because the low resolution of the pitch controls on my BCD3000 is one of the main things that frustrates me and why I’m looking to upgrade.
Yes, the 14 bit midi controller signals on the pitch and platters are great, but at this time only supported by Itch. They are a bit tighter
you seem to have other reason for chosing the 300 over the 100, but this argument:
doesnt really make sense IMHO.
cause a 100 + the required interface are still cheaper than a 300, and you already have the extra controllers.
saying:
100 + interface ~650€
300 + extra controller ~850€
to achieve the same.
so even if you can live without the extra controllers, you’re still cheaper with a 100+interface.
as long as one neglects the high res data and other reasons you mentioned of course.
well, if you take the vci-100 or the vci-300 is basically just a question of what you like best i think. each unit has some advantages and some disadvantages, but they are both made very well (high quality).
sure, you are cheaper on a 100 with an external soundcard, but i own a 300 and in my opinion it’s really nice to have the soundcard built in, so you don’t have to carry an extra soundcard around. that fact also makes your setup easier. but that’s just my case while others may not be disturbed by the extra thing to carry around.
the 100 has a dedicated fx section which is very nice, the 300 has more space between the knobs so you can grab a knob quick and easy. but again, if you need extra space or if you need a fx section depends totally on your own style of mixing.
the 300 also has 14-bit midi, so it has more precise jogs and pitchfader. but as all pros and cons - if you don’t do manual beatmatching (worst case is you use traktor with sync and don’t ever touch the pitchfader/platters) then this doesn’t really come in handy.
as i said, i own a vci-300 and for the extra controls i bought a korg nanokontrol, you can easily use those knobs, faders and buttons for fx, on the fly beatgridding, hotcueing and stuff like that.
i really like the combination of these 2 controllers, they are small, light, easy to carry around and it’s quite enough to use the whole functionality of traktor.
hey Morbido,
I agree with many of your points. do you have a nice tsi for traktor? or 3.4?
actually i’m still mapping 
it’s really a lot of work if you want to cover all given functionality of traktor pro… and i got a nanokontrol too, so i want to combine the to to cover missing controls (i really don’t like it to have fx on the eq, because you have the problems of picking up the values or setting to absolute/relative mode and all that stuff - so i think extra knobs are much better)
currently working on a 4 deck + fx + cueing, looping + live beatgridding + setting cues tsi file…
and as you can imagine it’s really really much work (and one of my bigger problems is that i haven’t got very much time for playing around with mapping 
)!
True, the 14 bit signals are only natively supported by Itch, but from what I have read here on DJTT the midi.translator makes it possible for Traktor to understand them. Have you tried using the midi.translator+Traktor with your 300? I hope that NI will update Traktor Pro at some point to natively understand 14 bit signals, we’ll see..
Huh?
All those other reasons are why I chose the 300 over the 100 and am willing to pay more for it, I thought that was self evident.
What made you decide to go for the NanoKontrol over the NanoPad? I am very interested in having a similar set-up to yours, but I can’t figure out which is the best unit to control effects. The NanoKontrol seems like it would be a more sensible choice, with its combo of faders and knobs, but I like the idea of the NanoPad’s trackpad mainly to try and emulate the tactile feel and style of a KaosPad. Thoughts?
i think the best availible combo would be the nanokontrol AND the nanopad 
the nanopad must be perfect for triggering cuepoints and the xy-pad certainly is a lot of fun (i own a kaoss pad and that thing really is a nice piece of gear).
i think i will get a nanopad sometimes in the future…
why i chose the kontrol over the pad is because you only have one xy-pad on the nanopad, but you have 9 knobs, 9 faders and 18 buttons on each of the 4 scenes you can assign on the kontrol.
so with the kontrol you can e.g. manipulate 2 effects at once, while with the pad this will be very hard to do…
what i have done with my kontrol:
i assigned the knobs on top to the fx-banks in tpro. the buttons underneath are for changing fx and the faders manipulate 2 or more fx at once.
with that setup fx are really fun, because by using 2 faders you can actually control 2, 3, 4, 5, 6 fx at once! i rarely use more than 2 fx at once, but i like that setup, there are situations where this comes in handy.
scenes 2-4 are used for live beatgridding, setting cuepoints and loops, …
i think there are enough buttons on the vci-300 if you layer them, but there aren’t enough knobs. so imo the pad is a little bit of extra gear. you don’t necessarily need it but you can have a lot of fun with it.
oh, and on word with the 14-bit midi signals:
you can use djtt’s midi.translator to get the midi signal of the 300 into traktor, but it’s getting downgraded, so it’s only standard 7-bit signal if you use the translator.
but i read somewhere that NI is planning to release an update for traktor pro somewhere around the end of december and they plan to add support for 14-bit midi. (i hope they will update those nasty sound issues when using sync too)
Haha yeah having both the NanoKontrol and NanoPad would be sweet! But I was hoping to use the VCI-300’s own buttons for cue jumping, and keep it to one extra device for effects.
Your mappings for your NanoKontrol sound great, you have me re-thinking my preference towards the NanoPad. What is the quality of the NanoKontrol’s knobs and faders like? I suppose it’s hard to complain considering how cheap they are to buy.
Thanks for all the info
if you just wanna have one extra controller, then imo the kontrol is the better one.
the knobs and the faders really feel not too good, but as you said, if you consider the price of the unit there’s not very much to complain about.
compared to the knobs and buttons of the vci-300, the knobs and buttons on the kontrol really feel cheap. but imo they are fine to use. and there are many of them, considering you have 18 buttons, 9 knobs and 9 faders per scene and 4 scenes. another advantage of it is that the unit is so cheap that if you spill some beer on it while you’re doing a gig it’s nothing you really have to worry about
i’d advice you to just try the kontrol if you have the possibility, just to see if it feels right for you.
when it comes down to cue juggling i also wanted to use the buttons of the 300. i don’t know why exactly, but they just don’t feel right for me. they also are a bit too small for me. i don’t want to do some crazy arcade button mod on my vci, so i think the best way for me is to save a few bucks and invest them in a nanopad.
Sounds like a good idea.
Well I haven’t even receive my VCI-300 in the mail yet (such a painful wait), so I can’t say whether or not the cue jumping buttons suit me or not. I would like to make a decision about the NanoKontrol vs NanoPad soon though, so I can ask Santa for one 