Joining the dark side

DJ Software & Apps Serato
1

Joining the dark side

I am an avid traktor fan, being completely happy with my 1210’s + Xone 22 setup + X1 setup but I have decided to get on the itch bandwagon.

For no other reason than there is no lightweight portable controller in the traktor camp.

I wanted,

Fully bus powered
Lightweight
Small dimensions
Durable
Tight hardware integration with software
FLAC support

The only thing I miss out on is FLAC support which really pisses me off but over the New Year break someone at Serato confirmed that they were indeed working on FLAC support for the future.

I really needed a portable controller and after weighing on options for many months I decided to bite the bullet and join the serato crowd. Abe Duque’s review on dubspot sealed the deal for me.

Haven’t even opened the box yet but looking forward to exploring some of the cooler functions like slicer.

In the future I might run two copies of Traktor side by side, never ended up selling my second copy. Might come in handy after all.

2

Opened the box and had a bit of a play. I found that the interface was not entirely intuitive so I decided to read the manual.

Only to find that the manual is wrong in a lot of cases… seems like itch 2.1 has really changed a lot of things.

I really couldn’t live without flac support so instead of playing with the dang thing I’ve been spending all night converting my flac library to alac, reimporting it into traktor to analyse, do beat grids and import any missing covert art (which happens to randomly convert sometimes and not other times).

I had already started making my library a hybrid of mp3/alac but getting the twitch has pushed me to just mass convert everything.

My plan is once I have my library sorted for traktor I will copy the files over to my MBP from my desktop and then do the analyse thing all over again for itch.

This is not going to be fun trying to keep essentially 3 libraries in sync (PC traktor, OS X traktor, OS X itch)

I have to keep double copies of some files too as I’m finding there is a really nasty alac bug in traktor, which meant it won’t read the damn file, even though it was originally a wav!

So a rocky start, I have a house party tomorrow, so i hope I will have absolutely everything done before then.

3

are you for real? I love my twitch and everything, but Traktor really is not short of small controller options…

4

Joining the dark side

My friends reloop digital jockey 2 is smaller i think but heavier and sucks.
The ddj-ergo is actually huge.
Kontrol s2 is much heavier.

My main concern was weight more than dimensions. I only have 7 kg available for carry on luggage.

5

S2 really doesn’t weigh much

6

3.4kg to be exact…

“Heavy” doesn’t really come to mind.

7

I’m trying really hard not to be “that guy” right now, but I’m working on a Twitch mapping for Traktor that will blow away the Serato mapping and (hopefully) give us Twitch owners a viable means of competing with the control powerhouse that are the S2 and S4. I’ve implemented tons of features, just about everything I can think of. Should be out soon :slight_smile:

8

Welcome to the dark side :slight_smile:

Sometimes minimalism is stronger in my experience, and I think you’ll enjoy yourself. Playing around with something fresh also has some great value to it as well.

9

Welcome to the light - with both dj and production software I’ve grown so damn sick of constantly mapping and tweaking. Its nice to just turn on and go. Thats why I dig serato itch.

10

:confused:

11

The s2 doesn’t way anything at all. In fact, its pretty damn light in my opinion. I’m not like a fanboy or anything, but if your looking for weight and a compact controller, the s2 would be the way to go dude. Its pretty rad

12

S2 for Traktor or VCI-300mkII for Itch man! I think the vci-300mkII is more portable between the two.

I had the money ready for the ddj-s1 but portability was the winning factor for me and that’s why I chose the 300mkII. Best decision I’ve made thus far in my dj career :slight_smile: I love Itch!

13

Okay I seemed to have hit some kind of strange pro S2 nerve with my weight comments… I just don’t like lugging stuff around, I find the S2 unacceptably heavy and too big as well. Worrying about the jog wheel getting damaged in my backpack is also annoying.

The twitch being 1.8Kg’s or 4 pounds is what I was looking for in terms of weight. I have a MBP at the moment but I plan to downgrade to an Air as soon as the Ivy Bridge Airs are available. I hope to have a full travelling DJ setup for less than 4 Kg.

I only just finished tidying up my library last night, took forever, I now have a unified library for Traktor, Itch and Meta.DJ so I am very happy about that.

I’ve also had an opportunity to seriously evaluate the twitch and itch.

Stuff I like>

Elastic beatgrids.. holy shit, I got a few old school tunes which I can now beatgrid with relative accuracy, why does traktor not have elastic beatgrids ???

Beatgrid detection. Itch does a better job of detecting transients. I analyse my library and I usually don’t have to do much after. I always have to tidy up the beatgrids traktor places. Traktor Pro 2 was a real step backwards in this regard.

Touchstrip > jog wheels. The touchstrip appears to be velocity sensitive in itch. Move your finger faster and it will pitchbend more. Move slower = less. I find the touchstrip very nice. I like it more than jog wheels. I still prefer a real rotating technics platter to either but I sacrificed that for portability.

Big performance mode buttons. I really don’t like the dingy little hotcue/sample bank buttons on other controllers. I like the bigger buttons to whack on the twitch.

Stuff I didn’t like>

Effects, they are horrible, especially the filters ugh they sound so bad. I put the whole output into my Xone so that I can get some decent sounding filters.

Low output volume. It is true there is a lower output volume, it isn’t a big problem, using an external mixer to boost the signal is easy. The only time I’ve had issues is when I’ve needed to plug it directly into a home stereo. It is just annoying that it is another issue I have to think about when setting up.

Cramped EQ section. The EQ section is very cramped. they could of easily used more of the space around the faders to space out the EQ knobs more. Plus they are ridiculously tight on my unit, so they are difficult to twist.

Overall I am not a very advanced DJ, I’m excited about exploring the controllerism aspect of the twitch but I don’t have suitable music for that.
I think I am going to have to look for some new genre’s to get into to enable learning in that aspect.

14

I fixed the stiff EQ knobs by pulling them out and reseating them. I read about this trick off the serato forums.

Even though I do not like dubstep very much. I went onto zipdj and downloaded a bunch of dubstep tunes and had a play with them on the twitch.

Despite not liking the music, I found that the twitch made it incredibly fun to mix this genre. I was able to fully make use of the slicer mode, hotcues and loops to create glitchy effects and new sounds. I felt like I was working with the track to create something entirely new.

I didn’t feel like I could do this with the usual genres I play so now I feel I can appreciate the twitch a lot more.

15

way to go!

16

I played out again with the twitch last night and it was incredibly fun.

I was DJing a Latin party. I had no prior experience mixing Latin music and so I am pretty sure I didn’t do a great job of it.

The host though told me I did a fantastic job and that the crowd was commenting that I had great tunes.

Anyways I got to play live with the performance pads and fader fx.
I didn’t over use them, sprinkled them onto my tracks as an occasional condiment but they were super fun.

They certainly have their place in my arsenal of dj trickery now

17

I have now got my new track workflow down pat…

  1. Purchase and download track
  2. Sort into genre/label/release
  3. Import into itunes
    3a) Import artwork (zipdj doesn’t have artwork :disappointed: )
    3b) Fix tags (zipdj doesn’t always have correct tagging)
  4. Import into collection in traktor
  5. Analyse file
  6. Fix beatgrid

All that just for traktor lol,

now currently I copy the files to my MBP and then reanalyse in itch and fix beatgrid in itch,

I am wondering whether I can use Windows Live Mesh to automagically copy the files over to my MBP, have it analysed in itch and then automagically synced back to my desktop so I have a backup of the itch analysed files. I was using rsync previously to do this but I found that OS X & windows file sharing actually has some bugs… it causing windows to use 100% CPU for dllhost.

One thing I was fearing was that itch would over-write the bpm values I had already set in traktor, thank god for the set auto bpm checkbox!

18

people knock itch, but i feel the workflow couldnt be more simpler and perfect.
grids are easy to set initially; if you have a “live” track, drunk drummers and sloppy timing are easy tame; whenever i buy tracks i just make a new crate for the date i bought them on, listen to them a few times to set the grids and cues, and i am done. just DONE. traktor for me felt like nothing was ever right and i was constantly tweaking cues, or grids,or loops, or mappings. too exhausting to just share music you enjoy.

19

Installed Windows live mesh onto my PC and mac. Got them syncing my drum and bass folder for the moment as a test run. Seems to be alright. Need to do things a little slower to allow the program to detect that I have made changes so that it can be synced back and forth.
Taking great care to lock the files in both itch and traktor once I have them the way I like it.

This is saving me a lot of wasted time having to manually copy stuff back and forth, or updating directories.

20

Okay here is a big tip for anyone trying to make a combined itch and traktor compatible library!

DON’T USE ALAC

After having converted my entire flac collection to alac and thinking everything is sweet I’ve now encountered a serious problem.
ITCH and traktor overwrite each other’s beatgrids. WHen you analyse the file in itch, the beatgrid for traktor is lost.
I didn’t find out about this issue until later, because traktor appears to also keep a copy of the beatgrid in its settings.

Therefore I thought everything was fine until I fired up my traktor on the MBP and found that all the files I had gridded after converting from flac to alac, they were missing :disappointed:

I couldn’t believe it, I didn’t know what the problem was so I had to do all manner of testing, eventually I narrowed the problem down to traktor and ITCH overwriting each others beat grids.

Now this problem did not occur for any of my mp3 files. They were still fine, they had an ITCH grid and a traktor grid in their metadata.

I did a little more digging around and it appears that traktor is not fully compatible with alac files. I also found out that the reason some of my alac files were not playing was because it had a 24bit sample rate. These files don’t play at all in traktor.

I find this issue very strange. With mp3’s both itch and traktor metadata is retained. With alac, they over-write each other. How stupid!

So now I am converting my alac files to aiff files. I redid my tests and it shows that it’s tagging is completely compatible. It appears that aiff is the ONLY lossless format which is both traktor and itch compatible.