Traktor 2.10 stress test

DJ Life & Community General Discussion
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Traktor 2.10 stress test

Hello everyone, let me start by saying that this post is not for everyone. After researching online, and finding a bunch of nonsense, I decided to to test and stress test some more traktor 2.10. I tested the software with my mid 2012 macbook pro, running 10.9.5 Mavericks. I noticed that the primary issues are all on Windows based machines running TSP. I am using midi (Denon sc2000) and a Z2 mixer.

I must say this version seems very snappy, imports went smooth and cpu load is way below average. I was running 2.6.8 and cpu load was not bad but not as low as this. I loaded 4 decks, 2 track decks, 2 remix decks. I loaded to tracks with sync on, keylock, and 4 effects. The remix decks were loaded and I had deck C & D playing 8 samples. After loading and unloading tracks and samples traktor ran flawlessly. No glitching, or freezing. I tried my hardest and it ran perfectly. The problems encountered must be a Windows compatibility issue, TSP, updated versions of osx, and of course un-optimized windows and or macs.

If your a seasoned DJ ignore this part, but for you newbies out there.
First thing to to do is disable your screen saver!
Second thing is disable sleep options, you don’t want your computer to go to sleep in the middle of your set.
Make sure to turn off airport and bluetooth.
disable spotlight indexing
Have you ever seen the Spotlight magnifying glass icon with a pulsating dot in the middle? Did you notice your Mac running super sluggish while this was occurring? This is Spotlight creating a virtual index of all the files and folders in your system (i.e., indexing), allowing Spotlight to quickly search your drives. For everyday use, this is fine and not too much of a nuisance, but when using resource intensive audio applications, having Spotlight suddenly start indexing in the middle of your set can be disastrous.

The easiest way to prevent indexing is to adjust your Spotlight Privacy settings. The only hitch, Spotlight will no longer be able to search the drives you make ‘private.’ If you’re a Spoltight addict, don’t worry, you can easily remove your drives from the Privacy list to restore searchability after your gig is over.

Open System Preferences by clicking the System Preferences icon on your dock.
Click on Spotlight.
Click on Privacy.
Click the + sign in the bottom left corner, click on the drive you want to make ‘private,’ and then click Choose. Repeat the above process for each drive you wish to add to the Privacy list.
To remove the drive, click on the drive icon listed and use the – key.

Disable widgets! You might not know this, but those little Widgets, hiding out in Dashboard, eat-up your RAM, even if Dashboard itself is closed. The remedy is easy, open Dashboard and disable all Widgets except for one. OSX requires at least one Widget to be active, not sure why exactly, so leave something like Stickies running.

disable infrared (IR) reception
Disabling IR reception is seldom mentioned in Mac optimization articles, but definitely worth doing. All it takes is some joker in the club to point an Apple remote at your Mac and click a button to bring your set to a grinding halt. If you’re using OSX 10.6.8 or earlier, an Apple remote click activates Front Row—a media center application for viewing videos, photos, music, etc.—and completely overrides all programs you’re using, yikes! Your best defense is to disable IR on your Mac.

disable automatic graphics switching
If you’re using a MacBook Pro (15” or 17”) built in 2010 or newer, your computer may have two graphics cards, one for normal use and one for high performance. By default your Mac is setup to automatically switch between the two. When using graphic intensive programs for DJing or visuals, it’s recommended to use the higher performance card. The problem is, by default, your Mac chooses which one to use and when to switch. If you’re experiencing intermittent stutter, lag or performance issues, this could be partially to blame. Switch your Mac to the higher performance card and take the guess work out of it.

disable time machine
I’m all for backing-up and doing it often. If you’ve never made a system backup or if it’s been more than a few months since your last backup, go do it now, I’ll wait.

Good job, now don’t you feel better? Like I said, I’m all for backing-up, but I’m not down with Time Machine wanting to backup my system while I’m DJing; not cool Time Machine! Time Machine is set to backup your files every hour, which in my opinion is a bit excessive, but I understand the importance of it. To keep Time Machine off my back, especially while DJing, I simply disable Time Machine by turning it off and when I’m ready to backup, I turn it back on. Easy breezy.

keep your computer cool with SMC fan control
Heat is one of the main contributors to premature hard drive death and overall system lethargy. Hard drives, computers and electronics, in general, do not like excessive heat. As heat increases, thermal impedance increases, greatly impacting processor and internal component performance. An easy way to ensure your computer doesn’t go into ‘meltdown mode’ is to keep it cool by using a laptop stand—to increase air ventilation—and installing an easy to use application called SMC Fan Control.

With SMC Fan Control, you can adjust the RPM speed of your cooling fan(s) within your Mac. Your Mac will automatically start the fan when your computer gets too hot, but once your Mac gets toasty in a hot club, it’s really hard to cool it down quickly. Using SMC Fan Control, I set the fan to a higher RPM (5000-6000 RPM) before I start performing. This helps keep my Mac cooler for longer—by increasing air flow earlier—instead of waiting until it’s scorching hot.

For you windows users here is a cool article explaing what you need to do Optimize Your Windows PC for DJing & Music Production w/ DJ Endoby | Dubspot. I followed this back when I used a DEll to perform. After doing this I never had any issues.

I hope this post helps someone, because searching online is pretty much useless. Everything is a Serato against Traktor, and PC against windows. The way I see it, They all are inperfect, and need some tweaking. Thanx :smiley:

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Nice post.

For windows users I suggest dual boot on a separate partition with all the unneccesary services disabled (either by installing a Lite version of OS or disableing via .bat files). That way, you get a laptop that can be used everyday and still be a 100% ready performance machine for DJ-ing.

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That’s a great suggestion, there are plenty of articles on pc optimization for dj’s. Upgrading hard drives to the newer ssd drives is a another thing you can do. That alone, if everything else is up to spec and running good will give you amazing results. 5400 RPM drives just don’t keep up in my opinion. They work, but so do old laptops, Dj software needs its resources quick and quick is what ssd drives do best.

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This is completely unnecessary on a modern windows machine. There is simply no performance benefit to doing this any more. Every time this comes up, someone claims that its always better, but no one has any benchmarks or evidence. My own testing proved that there was no difference at all on my own rig and I stopped dual booting about 7 years ago.

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Your opinion is your opinion. I haven’t had a single crash/hiccup in 5 years using dual boot. CPU meter doesn’t go above 15% in Traktor (50-60% using Traktor on primary partition). Yes - I use and old laptop, old OS, old Traktor version.
It’s not about performance but stability. With dual boot you eliminate the need/risk of updating OS. Also, I have Traktor installed on my primary everyday partition - that way I have a “lower spec” backup for non-hardware related problems. And it cost me NOTHING.

If you claim that same OS, on a SAME machine, can work eaqually stable and fast with and without antivirus, firewall, unnecessary services, drivers and other programs in the background…I think that’s BS. I can accept that on modern windows machines the difference is smaller but it can never be the same.

I’m glad that, for you, the difference is so small that you don’t feel the need to do it.

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I’d LOVE to see evidence either way.

My latest machine is Win10, i7, 16gb ram, 250gb SSD. Pretty damn powerful. And I have not even tried to optimise (although I always have on ALL of my previous machines).

Can any one demonstrate for sure, that optimisation on a machine like mine is necessary? I like th eidea of having one machine for internet/office/music - but something just doesn’t feel right doing audio on an un-optimised machine… :confused:

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Dual boot + optimisation =/= optimisation.

And I would say that it is not absoulutely necessary. But I like and recommend doing everything I can to ensure a stabile performance when using DJ software.

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Like I said - I always have. And I always have Dual Booted to an optimised partition for Traktor. But now I haven’t. And I’m not seeing any drop in performance by not.

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My main rig is a core duo 2, and runs Traktor like butter. No dual booting, no optimisation apart from tuning up the running processes. Goes on the internet all the time. Utterly stable. Runs antivirus. I dont understand why youd mention firewall in the context of audio performance, its irrelevant.

There is literally no more performance to be gained from this machine by dual booting and removing services.

Ive been a pro pc tech for a long time, and i come to these conclusions through testing and benchmarking. There is nothing wrong with running your machine that way, but times have changed and things like dual booting are really a thing of the past.

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I agree that dual boot is nowhere near necessary. The same optimization works both for traktor and everyday use.
Click Windows Key+R, type in msconfig
Disable all un-needed services
Now click on startup options (win8 and newer will redirect you to another dialogue). Disable all un-needed startup items.
On the regular, clear cached images and date in your preferred web browser. In my case, chrome does so every 24 hours.
Before opening traktor, disable wifi and bluetooth. Run Traktor as Administrator.

I run Traktor on a cheap HP Stream 13" (Win8.1 pro) with dual core intel celeron running at 2.4ghz and only 2gb of RAM.

I would die without my touch screen.

I can run 4 decks, 4 fx units (with all fx running), audio kontrol 1 (total 11ms buffer), sync, and keylock and peak about 35-40% cpu usage.

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Or I can just do that by selecting my DJ OS on startup with dual boot with no work involved :roll_eyes:

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You are not reading my posts so I see no reason to continue this. I have stated some very good reasons for dual boot option other than simply performace so do as you like.

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I have read your posts, i just disagree. I dont think youve made the case for any convincing reason to go dual boot.

No idea why you are getting offended over a difference of opinion.

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I talk about stability, you talk about performance…and then you say stupid thing like this. You lack basic discussion skills mate (and I’m being police here.) :roll_eyes:

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Another very long term PC professional here (30 years), I agree with Ded… dual booting just for a handful of settings is not really necessary. You are perfectly free to believe what you want, though.

Also, no, you weren’t being at all polite. Your logical fallacy of the day is “Ad Hominem.”

Fair disclosure, while I use Traktor, my primary DJ software is Synner 3.

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Deathy - you can’t just drop the name of your DJ software and not give us any info on it! :wink:

How is it coming along?

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deathy, thanks for input but…I haven’t said it was necessary and seems I’m having trouble putting that message across (based on responses here). And yeah, I wasn’t polite overall in my message, just on that last part of sentence describing him. You could say i’m having trouble responding politely to people who pick and choose arguments, that just grinds my gears.

How do you mean “handful of settings”? Decribing the difference between a win OS in normal use (with a bunch of programs installed and services in use) and optimized clean installed lite version of OS as “handful of settings” is kinda… :thumbsdown:
Also, as I have stated before, dual boot enables to adjust that “handful of settings” just my selecting a option on startup - isn’t that a valid argument?

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Prototype is done, working on the production version now. Played out with it a fair bit while I was still in the Netherlands, have recently moved to the Bay area and haven’t got anything show-like yet.

I’m actually thinking about putting together a nice presentation on what I’ve done with the software… I’ve held nothing sacred in reimagining the workflow, so I know most people would probably not care for it, but… since it’s just for me, don’t really care. heh

Best feature to date - live remastering. Completely modify the sound of the tracks so that they all sound like they were mastered at the same time and to take up the same frequency space.

(Good seein’ ya!)

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The way you present your case, though, is that you seem to not just want people to let you do your thing, but rather to acknowledge that your way is better, and you attacked ImNotDed for disagreeing with you, in spite of the fact that he wasn’t saying YOU should do anything differently.

Whatever works for you, do it… but don’t try to force your opinion down other peoples’ throats.

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Not at all. I’m just trying to present arguments and, accordingly, expect from people that participate in the discussion to aknowledge good arguments when presented or challenge them before proceeding with the discussion - not try to go around them, not answering questions or/and puting words in my mouth as I’m seeing here.
Does the way I present my arguments have any effect on their validity? It should not.

But, I am sorry if I seem a little forceful - will work on that. Thanks for the heads up :wink: ImNoDj - sorry for the tone, it is not personal (at least, wasn’t intended to be). As I said, I stand by my arguments but I also acknowledge that - even if they are ok - your way is equally good when looking at it’s core - does it run Traktor? I’m sure this discussion would go much better in real life, with some beer in one hand. Cheers :wink: