i have hooked up for the first time my traktor scratch duo system to two technics mk2 decks and audio4dj interface, calibrated the vinyls, which went through just fine. playback sounds fine aswell, but the second most important thing, the sync, does not seem to function properly, or at least as it does when playing back internally, without decks.
tempo on track goes up and down rapidly in small increments (if tempo is 128, BPM meter will rapidly shift between, e.g. 127.960 - 128.040), just as if i was quickly moving pitch on my decks up and down.
second thing, when pressing a sync button for the other deck, tracks go in sync, but immediatly start drifting away. when i press sync again, it goes back to sync, but starts falling apart again and this time it will maybe start drifting in the opposite direction.
is this supposed to be this way? ich don’t think so, right?
my keylock is on and i have made sure my tracks are beatgridded correctly (using a lot of my own productions).
the thing is, when i start playing one deck internally from traktor and other one on a physical deck, both sync perfectly together and sync button stays on…
That is the way the system works. When you enable tracking, and you are playing with timecode, the sync button acts in the way you describe. It will only fix the phase and pitch for a sec, and then it will take the info from your turntable again. The software assume that if you are using timecode you are in control of the tempo and phase, in other way it assumes that you are manually beatmatching or scratching so it does not synch in the way you want.
If you want to actually sync as when not using timecode, you need to assign another button to diesengage the timecode control and then sync. Then depending if relative mode is on you can engage timecode control with the deck syched with another button again.
It is the way the software works according to my knowledge.
But if you think about it… if you are using vinyl there is no way that the software will move the pitch fader of your TT. So if it does modify the pitch on the software and then you want to modify the pitch on the TT… things would get quite confusing…
It make sense that when using tiemcode the software just can sync the music but then the drift from the turntable or cd deck will start making the tunes out of beat (you told the software to do this when selecting timecode control, which in other words is an order to get tempo and relative position of the track from the timecode). You need to manually correct the pitch fader on the TT to make it match with the correction on the software deck.
The work around to this is the way I described before, but then you are only using your turntable as controllers for play and cue (dropping the needle). So in that case you will do better with a midi controller
NI is correct with their approach, it is a digital vinyl system…
it doesn’t make sense to me, because pitches on technics do not drift that much when being used with real vinyls.
and why is it that sometimes it starts to drift in opposite direction, as if i changed the pitch on deck, when i haven’t even touched it?
When I use mine with traktor scratch the tempo is always changing in small amounts, but i don´t pay much atention as it is a calculation wich is not exact, and it always moves back and fourth with the motor variations in small increments as you describe. But if you pay attention to the sound (in my experience) is not varying at least in a way you can listen. If you try to beatmatch the feelling is quite the same. I don´t get the feeling as if I was moving the pitch fader up and down although the visual representation is telling you that (which is a real thing that is happening, not even a new 1200 will run always exactly at the same speed, you just need a hair in the system to cause some friction and a small drift). So if you get the feeling that the music is actually getting faster and slower and you can listen to it, and this does not happen with real vinyls… there is actually a problem…
Does this happens only when the ptich fader is near the center position?
both of them have the same issue. i have searched a bit on NI forums and found out that keylock on hiq might be causeing this. will test out today. keylock in eco mode is unusable imho, sounds really dodgy.
There is no reason why properly calibrated decks should not sync perfectly and loop perfectly. Your beat grid need to be 1000% right if you want to use sync in a permanent state.
As has been mentioned there will always be a slight drift because of the turntables . Thst just requires a little pitch bend but pressing Sync (with state hold as Bento says) should keep the mix tight.
How old are the 1210s? How clean are the contacts?
Can you take a screen shot of the calibration circles.
everything is clean and the decks are not that old (beginning of 2000s). they do function correctly when mixing normal vinyls.
beatgrids are also set up correctly. i am often using wavs bounced directly from artists’ sequencers.
does this mean i have to ride physical pitch myself when in scratch mode? i cannot leave both pitches at 0% and push sync button and still have vinyl control?
Nope thats not possible - welcome to the world of timecode. No product and i reapeat NO product is able to do this. When your working with this sort of setup(NS7 and SCS1d included ) the bottle-neck is the motor technology.
Sux dont it, definantly gives touch sensitive non-motorised jog wheels their own appeal.
If they were to make the hardware do what you wanted then the software would constantly have to basicly guess what your trying to do with the vinyl. Essentially it would ruin the feel of the vinyl as minor variations, even as simple as running your finger over the platter - not only would this idea be incredibly dififcult to implement, it wouldnt work very well.
That is what I was trying to explain (hmm my bad english… hope you all spoke spanish lol)
That is how the system works, the software cannot guess or move the pitchfader on your TT. So it can not overide it all the time, it is a contradiction to the system…
Yep, seconding that. This is how DVS works. Your decks will vary in tempo, the amount you’ve quoted does not sound unreasonable. With Traktor, the deck jitter is very obvious because you can see the tempo fluctuating on your screen.
just to clear this up, the problem is not deck jitter or drifting or keylock, its the way the user is trying to use the system.
The pitch shift of the music that’s being played back can either be controlled by the computer internally which would use the internal, virtual on screen pitch shift to beat match, or by the speed of the time code vinyl/cd’s that the computer is receiving. NOT both at the same time as they are two conflicting sources of data, and thats exactly what the user is trying to do, beat match with the sync button and internal, virtual pitch but also scratch on the vinyl at the same time.
If you want to use time code (for cds or vinyl) then you also have to pitch shift with these manually to beat match your music. Using the internal sync would put it out of time with the timecode and then the system wouldn’t work.
In order to do this the computer would have to ignore the time code sometimes (i.e. when mixing and beatmatching) but then kick into following it when you started scratching. but it would have no real way of knowing the difference and making the change. You could perhaps do it by speed of the time code and some sort of sensitivity control, but then it would become unreliable with slow scratches because the time code would be too close to the normal movement and again it wouldn’t know whether it was supposed to be following or ignoring this part.
