The release of serato 1.6
From what i am seeing a lot of improvements in the new release of serato. It was beta tested by serato users publically for about 2 months and it is finally finished. Was wondering if anyone has had a chance to use this as of yet?
Is this enough to make anyone make the jump from traktor? Just curious to what people think.
Nameable Cuepoints FTW!!!
Listen up, NI!!!
yea man i honestly have wanted to stick with traktor but serato is really making some big strides, i am just wating to see if 1.6 is stable then i think i may make the jump to serato.
I’m really digging it, but I also really never cared for traktor. Every time I try to get into it for DVS it’d just be headache after headache.
On my to pick up my x1 from a friends and I’m going to fuck around more seriously tonight and see if I can spot any bugs
If you dont mind posting here i would appreciate it, i am already seeing people complaining about things with 1.6 on serato forums. Let me know what you find out.
It was running pretty smooth for me last night, my only complaint is you can’t midi map browse. Pretty lame omission but not a deal breaker
Oh I just remembered a glitch though - plugging in more then one serato device will crash the program.
Expected it but yeah shit crashed plugging in both my ddjsx and sl4
I’m still not convinced by serato, I don’t like the single decimal place on the BPM, makes it impossible to know actually how close you are, they have 2 decimal places on dj intro, which ironically makes for a much better time beatmatching without sync.
I’m also not convinced by the way the functions map out to midi controllers, trying to map the ‘track gain adjust’ to an encoder results in the gain moving in large steps, map it to a pot and you get fine control but using a pot means that anytime you want to tweak the track gain adjust means that you will 9 times out of 10 see a large jump as the control matches the next pot value it sees, this is poor either way you look at it for a program that saves track gain information for each track, it should be setup to accept encoder input for fine control.
My experience. OSX Mountain Lion seems to be working well with Rane 62 and SL2. Windows 8.1 only works with SL2 not Rane 62.
Is this sub forum dead? Doesn’t seem to be much action on it, which begs the question, is serato any good? Even with the updates I’m not convinced, there seem to be so many little oddities about serato that I can’t quite work out what it’s trying to do/be.
Like rotary encoders, in serato they appear to suck, hard, you get big clunky step changes, I appreciate that it doesn’t look visually intuitive to move an encoder one rotation and only see it move a bit but it’s also not sonically intuitive to have huge step changes that are audible on things like effects and I care about the sound way more than the look of serato. Map one of the effects knobs to a pot and you get a nice smooth action on it.
Waveforms, beat gridding, cue markers, loops, sampler all kind of work, a bit but not really how you would want.
Waveforms are ridiculously small and you can’t zoom in enough to actually see where you’re placing the cue point, beat grid, loop point, so it has a ripple effect. They essentially expect us to guess roughly where we want to place those things, leading to issues with sync, clicks and pops because you can’t see a zero crossing point etc.
The samplers, look like they’re an attempt to add extra decks in but not quite, no chance of platter control on the sampler but you get everything else from a deck control wise, you just get stupidly small waveforms and everything squeezed into an incredibly tight space on-screen. Fundamentally, anything that can play an mp3/wav/flac in any of the dj software apps. is a sample player, so it seems stupid to even bother differentiating between them. Just merge the functions and stop pretending they’re 2 different things.
Current BPM display is pitiful for the decks, they only display to a single decimal place, what’s worse is that the resolution on the pitch faders on a lot of controllers is poor, 128 steps over 16% of pitch = 0.125% per step, coupled together, it makes it impossible to see whether the BPMs are matching and if you could see it to 2 decimal places it is stilll impossible to tempo match because the resolution is so poor. you can have what look like matching BPMs and still be 0.1 of a bpm out, at 180bpm it will drift quickly. The same goes for trying to tempo match, if you could physically see the bpm, 180.37 for instance, because the resolution on the pitch fader is so low, you might have to settle for being at 180.25 on the 2nd tune, again it will drift, no matter how good you are beat and tempo matching on a pair of technics, you won’t be able to achieve the same accuracy.
The kicker with the BPM only displaying to a single decimal place is that the sample players, despite having the most things stuffed into an interface that I’ve seen in a while, they still managed to find space for… 2 decimal places on the bpm display.
Now you could blame the pitch fader resolution on the controller makers but I didn’t buy the software from the controller makers, traktor doesn’t care which controller you’re using, you can map anything to give you fine pitch control, which brings me neatly onto serato’s last problem, midi mapping, it’s rudimentary at best, with zero options to re-map official serato controllers and very basic options to add in 3rd party controllers to try and fix missing/broken stuff.
A lot of functions that you might like to remap, pitch faders, volume sliders, crossfaders, platters simply don’t exist, serato give some poor excuse that the way platters work on controllers is completely different to each other, which is such a BS reason, I don’t know why they even wrote that in the manual.
The platters might function in slightly different ways, the fact that serato KNOWS how they all work pretty much bites them in the ass, hard. When you plug in a serato based controller, serato IS internally mapping your platters 
They do this on every single controller that they support.
I could also just use sync, for the tempo matching, although for those of us that want to ‘do it oldschool’ that’s not a reasonable option, for anyone trying to train their ears and learn how to tempo match it’s also not a reasonable option, it doesn’t work properly, it needs fixing. We need the all of the software functions to be midi mappable and we need the official controllers to have some remapping functions too.
Well I like Serato haha
I like serato too, it’s almost perfect but it needs these small things to tighten it up properly. I bought and paid for exactly the same copy of serato dj as someone with a $1000 controller, so as such I should be able to expect the same software features that are offered to better devices (with regard to pitch resolution, clearly it’s a hardware limitation on my controller but it is entirely configurable via software and your PC keyboard IF serato want to).
As for how they handle midi, these should just be standard things, I also have traktor, they’re comparable pieces of software, traktor is infinitely more controllable. Now I’m not saying traktor is any better as software than serato, however, traktor has got the midi control dead right. I’m not trying to change anyone’s mind about which software that they use, I’m just pointing out the flaws in serato in the hope that they’ll get fixed 
Clearly saying something here won’t get anything fixed, which is why I’ve also posted these issues to the serato forums.
Things like the lack of information from serato about exactly what midi controls and data values the gui can accept for midi-mapping just shouldn’t happen, what’s the point of allowing midi mapping if we’re going to have to guess at what it accepts? Also, with the encoders, I thought the encoders on my 3rd party controller were broken or I’d got something wrong but no, it’s software crippled to behave poorly. The point of an endless rotary encoder is that you can turn it forever and each click will give you 1 step at a time, not 8 or 10.
I think it terms of flexibility with MIDI mapping with Traktor will always be more than Serato. And that takes it all the way back to the root on how you purchase the two systems. Traktor you have to buy the Software (Traktor LE, Duo, Pro). Of course if you bought a Native Instruments hardware controller it mostly comes with some form of Traktor for free. Serato on the other hand is a more closed configured environment. Serato with DJ & scratch live are both free in the software department, But only with their supported hardware (SL2/4, rane mixers, dedicated controllers).
With todays technology, these two giants in the industry both offer great solutions to different DJ’s. I started out on Serato, then went with Traktor for 2 years solid. And recently moved back to Serato. I found that going back into timecode and focusing on the mix of 2 decks, turntablism and no sync functions is where Serato is more stable.
my controller manufacturer (numark) pushed me towards serato as it’s certified for it, even though it’s totally inadequate as far as pitch resolution is concerned, which has really driven me towards traktor, it’s not like I can even buy a 3rd party controller to overcome the issue or build my own, if I was starting out and didn’t have a clue about the mechanics of how mixing actually works, I’d probably be sitting here thinking I wasn’t very good when it’s actually a software/hardware limitation that I haven’t been made aware of.
I agree that timecode vinyl or decent cdjs + serato is probably very good, there’s no reason for it to be bad at all, then again, there shouldn’t be anything wrong with doing it via a controller either, you use all of the same techniques to mix whether it’s on a controller, cdjs or vinyl, they’re just all slightly different.
Both pieces of software are great, I’m just dead lucky that traktor is flexible about who it lets use it’s software imho. With serato I get 2 decks + samplers, traktor, I can have 4 decks whether my controller can do 4 decks or not, with the added bonus that traktor will let me remap my controller, which means my mixtrack pro II is essentially now a mixtrack quad, what’s more I can add more controllers and pretty much map everything that’s missing, including those pesky pitch faders that serato won’t let me anywhere near.
Lastly, I forgot about serato and remapping the platters, they just won’t allow you to do that either, they’ve come up with some lame excuse about all of the platters are different on the controllers, blah, blah, blah, so we can’t let you do that, then you see traktor and it’ll let you map anything to the pitch, including all of the platters on the different controller devices.
It’s these kinds of things that annoy me with serato, it’s a lame excuse about the platters, they’re just rotary encoders with different data output that is obviously known to them because they’re mapping all the certified gear to them, it’s clearly crippling the software because of the hardware with the pitches, they have a robust midi-mapping system so there’s no reason not to allow us to map the pitches.
Have you seen their stance on the Mixdeck Quad? They say they can’t make it four deck controllable because it’s “not meant to be used that way”. If you connect it to any other software it totally works with four channels. This company needs to get their head out of their ass. The problem is that every decent controller comes with serato these days instead of proper software. There, I said it. Now flame me all you want.
mine didn’t come with serato, numark directed me to download serato dj intro!! They’re kind of right but not really, the mixtrack pro II is capable of controlling 4 decks but it’s not intuitive, you have to remap stuff and it can be a bit clunky but it IS possible and it IS usable.
I’m not trying to rail on serato, I want them to sort out all these little problems but it’s whether they want to sort them out is the key, I’m not sure if they do.
can’t say I agree, i have vci380, twitch and ddjsx and IMO they all rock with SDJ 1.6 and a MBP. I’d go so far to say that the DDJSX is the best controller I have ever owned.
can happily beatmatch on the ddjsx, have done with the vci (although the faders are shorter and its harder) and I don’t bother with the Twitch
i’ve never found myself needing to zoom in to catch zero crossings (in maschine for sample chopping yes…) but for setting cues not so far
IMO SDJs strengths are:
agree that there are things that Serato doesn’t do so well right now:
I have traktor as well but always end up drawn to SDJ, in my mind it just works. Have had a midi fighter and F1 and tried syncing stuff with midi clock and other assorted next levelness but for me I have all I need with SDJ. 2 FX banks plus channels filters is sufficient.
This is a very traktor-centric forum and you might be better of checking out the Serato forums for more info on the pitch display:
Interesting things from a controller’s perspective. I’ve never used a Serato Controller before (full mixing). Only controller I would have interface in serato is my rane sixtytwo and the Serato ipad app. So clearly with my use in a DVS situation, I would say Serato SSL and SDJ are solid in timecode tracking with sync and pitch encoders not meaning much in my set-up.
nope, I’ve had my fill of the serato forums but thanks for the heads up though
I’m not saying that serato doesn’t work but it doesn’t work the same for all controllers with all music, it’s just the way it is, the resolution on my numark just isn’t good enough. That’s not serato’s fault as such but it could be rectified with midi mapping. I wouldn’t mind trying serato with technics and timecode vinyl, I’m sure it’s great.
The one thing stopping me from purchasing a ddj sx or even possibly the ddj sr, well I am not 100% sold on serato obviously. But also i see a lot of people complain about the ssx mic quality and sound. Also the ability to live mix video, a lot of clubs in my area want this option these days. I love traktor, but i am not happy at all with the s4 mk2, or s2 mk2 versions. Native instruments seems to be completelly silent in even acknowledging that they have major issues. But then when you go to seratos forums it seems serato will nickel and dime you to death. Pay for effects, pay for an adequate keylock..etc..etc..