I love Traktor and have used upgraded from LE to Pro spending my hard earned money buying midi controllers along the way.
I started DJing with records and want to go back to the tactile feel of them. Whats pissed me off is the price of Traktor scratch 2. IMO its far far too much to pay. They have stopped the crossgrade option and I dont want an audio 8 or 10 as ive got a very good soundcard. You try and contact NI and here sweet fa back.
So what have I done? Ive gone over to the darkside and got myself a copy of Torq with the DVS for £70. If its any good ill upgrade to 2.0 and Native Instruments will be no more.
Anybody here use Torq and Traktor? Id be interested in their opinions. Also anybody know any good Torq based tutorial videos?
I really didn’t like torq when I tried it, but I’m sure some people do.
Re. The price, unfortunately you do NEED the NI sound card, as if you didn’t the software would be even easier to pirate than it already is. However, since it usually takes the hackers a matter of days to release pirated copies of every new version of TSP, arguably they should allow you to use 3rd party sound cards anyway to cater to a wider audience. But then they’d have a mountain of hate mail on their forum and in the support inbox from people trying and failing to use timecode with a shitty $20 sound card.
I am aware that I put forward no coherent argument there lol. The price also has to include a licence for the timecode system, which is owned by a company called N2IT, not NI, and is therefore out of NI’s control.
Basically, if you like torq, go for it, but there are reasons for traktor being expensive.
but know what your saying, i’ve got to shell out for either a really expensive traktor certified mixer or one of their sound cards to have a dvs. which i’ll eventually do, but it’d be nice to be able to do it on a budget or at least let me give the dvs feel a go with a cheaper card before i shell out for an official card.
Well your £70 investment is worth about £70 I’d say, having tried out Torq 1.x a couple of years ago… not tried 2.0 which is meant to be a little better
tbf, TSP is top a top of the DVS - the other one is around the same price, and if you flogged your whizzy soundcard and Traktor Pro license, I daresay you it’d only be a couple of hundred quid … and considering Torq is £70 …
What soundcard have you got. If its not an NI A4,6,8,10 then its not enabled for NI DVS… thats standard.
I often read posts like this where people assume that there is a price point up to which they are prepared to pay and then after that they are convinced they are being ripped off.
"i bought Traktor this and traktor that so why do i have to pay for Traktor blah blah’
I agree that the Crossgrade should be brought back. (although its not that simple now that the Audio card have been updated)
I think the older and newer versions of Torq have some pretty significant differences. I would download the 30 day trial of 2.0 before I spent any more money. Not sure if there’s any feature limits in the trial or not.
I’m not a fan of Torq…I think it’s too cluttered for the features it offers. But people do use it.
As for TSP being expensive…yeah, it is. IMHO, it’s not worth it. But I’m kind of over the DVS thing in its entirety. If you’re not scratching, I don’t see how it adds anything compared to using a controller (and I’ve owned FS2 and SSL at various points).
And, well…music stuff is just expensive. That’s the way it is. The weird thing is that it’s a lot cheaper than it used to be. A basic TT setup in the past would cost you between $1000 to $2000 with a mixer that wasn’t terribly reliable…and you’d be paying $10/song for vinyl. Now, a good setup can be had for around a grand and entry level’s down to a couple hundred. In the production/recording world, things are even more ridiculous. Top-end sound cards cost upwards of $5,000, good software packages are $500 to $1,000, synths can cost a few hundred, and good DAW controllers more or less start at $1500. But that’s still a bargain compared to consoles that could cost 7-figures and didn’t actually record anything.
And TSP costs, what, $600? SSL can be had for under $500 if you’re good at haggling or buy used.
Frankly, I fail to see where “expensive” happens. If your’e not buying CDJ-2000s, DJing is effing cheap.
Previous Torq’r here and while Torq is user friendly and the assignment of functions to MIDI control is very simple, but limited (at least as it pertains to 1.0), the scratching ability of Torq is not nearly as good as TSP. Not sure what sets the scratching in TSP apart, probably myriad reasons, but on the same setup that I was using Torq I noticed immediately a truer vinyl response when I began using TSP. I miss the simplicity of Torq, but the aesthetics and features do not match TSP, IMO.
Also, Torq creates a file for each track after it has been loaded into the program, which contains all the relevant data for that track (i.e., BPM, cue points, etc.). On their own, the file is very small, but if your library is large, they can add up fast and losing that file means you lose everything you’ve associated to that music file. I was not sad to delete them once I had finally integrated TSP and free up the storage space.
It’s funny that you were enraged at NI for not allowing you to crossgrade. One of the things that irritated me about Torq/M-Audio, was that I purchased when it first came out and they still wanted me to pay $50 for the upgrade to 1.5! Not only that, they were sooooo slow to finally release 2.0 that I gave up waiting for an upgrade worth paying for and last year said bye-bye. If you think users were miffed at M-Audio’s lack of tech support/upgrades, you can only imagine how upset their “DJs” were. Just google DJ Revolution and Torq, you’ll find he couldn’t wait around any longer and finally left for SSL.
To be fair I don’t know why NI have got rid of the crossgrade option. Now it’s a bit of a hassle 'cos you’ve got to sell your Traktor Pro license and buy a TS Pro license - which means:
less people buying the TSP license from NI
more people buying TPro licenses 2nd hand - for which NI don’t get any $$$
The Original Crossgrade offer was for people that already had T3 and wanted TS as well.
The difference was that there was 2 different versions of Traktor out there:
Namely, Traktor 3 and Traktor Scratch.
T3 was DVS enabled when you bought the Crossgrade.
That does make a difference, however, i completely agree that there should be a crossgrade for the current version in fact, i have long been a proponent of a more modular route for all traktor users.
Its a lot of money to shell out in one go and ive always said that Traktor DVS should be something that the new DJ should be able to build piece by piece.
not that i agree with your decision, but ive known the guy that runs the torq program at avid for years.
his name is shawn parker and hes quite possibly one of the most gifted dj’s ive ever met. sadly he doesnt play much anymore and when he moved into software development he basically gave up on making a name for himself as a dj.
but hes special. in a john digweed, sasha, taylor (los angeles), doc martin kind of way.
i have no doubt in my mind that torq is in very very good hands.
Emphasis is wrong -I think it’s more of a case of If you want to UPGRADE from TP to TSP you can flog one license and buy the other, you can’t crossgrade anymore
Nowt wrong with owning both if you want (though I’ve no idea why you’d need both)