Serato dj. Worse than vdj?

DJ Life & Community General Discussion
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Serato dj. Worse than vdj?

Good day :slight_smile:
I hope this isn’t gonna be a tl;dr post :stuck_out_tongue:

I have been djing for about a year now, using a friend’s (here comes the hate) hercules dj mp3 e2 and virtual dj. I started out in my bedroom, and only in the past month and a half me and a friend (we’re a duo) have gotten quite a lot of attention locally
And the money i got at gigs, i saved up to buy a serious controller and give back the already pretty beaten up hercules to my friend.

I went with the pio ddj-sx. I mainly chose it because i needed something big and sturdy, and i just was too fed up with small jogs (of the hercules) to buy the kontrol s4.
I loved the controller at first sight. It was just the thing i needed. When i installed the software, however, my feelings changed drastically.

Serato DJ disappointed me a lot. Beat detection sucks, waveforms (even tho they’re colored) are harder to visually beatmatch when compared to VDJ, auto gain doesn’t work and i have to keep my SX at redline volumes to cope with the volume changes, waveforms are sluggish and stuttery on my quadcore i7 laptop (CLEAN windows with nothing on but chrome and serato), and i get occasional audio stuttering and audio dropouts, along with sluggishness in both the computer and controller.
I performed a clean install of windows on a new disk, with the purpose of having it run perfectly, with no bloatware at all, optimizing windows for audio processing, and this is what i get?

Now for some aspects of the software that really surprised me (in a negative way)

-There’s only a couple of good effects imo. Why put hp, lp, and combo hp/lp filters in the software fx section when most controllers have an integrated filter in the mixer section?

-The slicer is quantised to 1/8, ok, but why can’t you turn quantisation off in the settings? Or even just set it to 16ths or 32ths.. Like this i find it useless… and sometimes it gets stuck in an 8bar loop with no apparent reason.

-The sampler. It seems to me like it’s made to just drop goddamn air horns and “pump it ups”, instead of actually getting creative with it

Now yes, there are some gains when using serato. Of course the slicer isn’t even present in vdj, and the sampler is just as bad. But when compared to traktor ( a software that i’ve used at a couple of gigs with the s4, and i really really liked), serato really seems lacking to me.

I actually seem to do better mixes on the $60 hercules and vdj than on the $1000 ddj-sx and serato…
To those of you who suggest using traktor with the SX, i tried, but the lag on the jogs is so bad i really can’t work with it (call me spoiled, but it really bothers me… )

What should i do? Return the beast that the ddj-sx is and get an s4, letting go the beautiful jogs?
Return the ddj and wait for the s4 mk2 and traktor pro 3?
Or simply live with the constant feeling that i’m not “at home” with the software i’m using?

Thank you and i’m very sorry if i sounded harsh, it’s just that i’m quite confused right now..

Luka

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You sound confused over gear, and with that thought you will always find things you don’t like in a controller. None is perfect.

What is it that you are trying to do with your controller and SDJ that you can’t do? Would the S4 fix that, all of that, provide you with another issue?

Not being a smart ass with you, but I went thru so much gear…never happy always finding flaws that this piece of crap couldn’t do this or that, etc. and in the end I am most happy playing on two turntables a mixer and Serato. No Frills…just fun times.

I have an NS6 and use it with SDJ. It’s not a bad software…I had an S4 and after using Serato could never go back to using Traktor.

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Hopefully Pioneer releases a DDJ-TX or NI gets their heads out of their ass and releases an S6 etc.

Your predicament is why I still use the same Vestax VCM-100 I started with 4 years ago.

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If you arent comfortable with it, then return it.

Or suck it up and grow to love it. They are your 2 options I can see. (Personally I would return it as $1000 is alot of money) and maybe get a cheaper Traktor controller in the mean time

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Use your ddj-sx with VDJ. Map it how you want, download the effects you want.

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Return it and get the S4. The jog wheels are just fine, there’s people that even scratch with them. Just because they’re small doesn’t mean they’re like the Hercules jogs. And if your relying on wave forms to visually beat match, you might as well be using sync. The remix decks in Traktor sounds like something you’d use as well as maybe the loop recorder, and the effects are way better than Serato’s or Virtual DJ.

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The Numark 4Trak is supposed to have excellent jog performance in Traktor, and its physical jog wheels are much nicer than those on the S2/S4.

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Even if pioneer released a ddj-tx, it still would comunicate with the software thru MIDI, which is the problem of all traktor controllers i tried except the s2/4/x1/f1 etc…

I really hope NI makes a nice big-jogged 6channel controller ( 2+4remix or 4+2remix), with booth out and better faders…

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yeah, i’m pretty confused… and no, you’re not being a smartass :smiley: someone with more experience than you is always welcome :slight_smile:

The s4 would fix some of that in the form of remix decks, live loop recording&playing, and more effects (for example, gater+echo+highpass), but it would provide me with the issue of clutter on the surface (buttons and knobs too close together), and the jogs/xfader would be worse, since i do scratch (practised a lot on a pair of turntables and a couple of records i borrowed from another friend).

The thing is that (at least on paper) traktor has so many more features than sdj…

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thing is, i really am in LOVE with the sx hardware, the velocity sensitive pads, the faders… everything.
so it would be hard to let go for the plasticfantastic s4…

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Have you tried the jogs on the 4Trak yet?

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i tried the s4, and everything’s just so tightly packed… it’s not just the jogs.
I don’t use waveform beatmatching, i used it in the beginning since the hercules doesn’t have cue out, i use a lot of stereo separated tracks, so split mono isn’t gonna cut it (summing doesn’t work, too, since it distorts the sound). This was until i discovered thet you could plug two sound cards to one computer.
I use waveforms to see what’s going and what will be going on in the song. And that microstuttering is just plain painful to look at.

Sync to me takes out the fun of mixing :slight_smile: and yeah, remix decks and loop recording are the main things that i miss in serato :slight_smile:

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i tried it, and it’s not nearly as tight as an s4 connected to traktor thru the NHL protocol…
and yeah, its jogs are phenomenal (better than sx), but the 4trak is basically a repurposed, reskinned ns6, so it’s not really 1:1 mapped to traktor :slight_smile:

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oh yeah, and the timestretching algorythm is also a lot better in traktor, and i do use extreme pitchbending to get creative in transitions :smiley:

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Is there a specific test you use to measure jog wheel tightness? I have my CDJs connected through HID and they seem pretty tight, but I only have standard MIDI atm to compare with.

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Yes i have :slight_smile:
and they are cool for using as jogwheels, that is to speed up/slow down the track momentarily, but when scratching there’s always that split second they take to react to a spin, and i really really hate that.

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no, just personal feeling :slight_smile:
the hid mode on cdj’s is as tight as the s4/s2 etc, that would be the perfect setup, but it ain’t cheap…

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Did you keep an eye on the latency settings when testing out different jogs?

Edit: Turntables are always an option if you’re keen on jogs, and are much cheaper than CDJs.

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Sure :slight_smile: i always set the minimal latency possible without dropouts, and it was never more than 6ms. The latency i was noticing was more in the 20ms range.. (saying this by ear, i know how 20ms sounds like since it’s the latency i have when i play a virtual instrument in my daw)

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People seem to think its all about the gear and not the final product. Make it sound good. That’s all that matters. I don’t care what you play on, make it sound good.

I was once given some advice about production: stop buying gear and learn how to actually use what you have.