following on from the harmonic mixing thread, this is something I do by Ear BUT do it using the Keylock / Transpose in either Ableton or Traktor rather than tag all my tracks with keys, which unrestricts me alot more with what I can play together.
The question I have is which DJ soft gives the best function ?
Ableton Does a great job, But Traktor makes anything more than a .5 shift sound like a 192kbps MP3 affecting the top end badly… Deckadance not much better, VDJ even worse (when I last tried).
I strongly advise to NOT use keylock in Traktor at all. Not only is the quality not what you would expect, but it affects system stability as well. The stability issues translated themselves into artifacts (much like cracks and pops you get with latency problems and sometimes when I jumped to another cuepoint while playing, the mix just trainwrecked (yes, all my settings are right)).
Just set keylock settings in Traktor to eco and make sure the key lights in each deck are off.
[quote]I strongly advise to NOT use keylock in Traktor at all. Not only is the quality not what you would expect, but it affects system stability as well. The stability issues translated themselves into artifacts (much like cracks and pops you get with latency problems and sometimes when I jumped to another cuepoint while playing, the mix just trainwrecked (yes, all my settings are right)).
Just set keylock settings in Traktor to eco and make sure the key lights in each deck are off.[/quote]
Kinda defeats the purpose wouldn’t you say ?
I’ve been using it for over 2 years .. there’s nothing wrong with my:
A) System stability,
B) Latency or
C) Audio quality overall.
Never had a Cue go crazy or skips like yourself, and I’m using 4 decks + chained effects alot of the time? If I did i’d go crazy!
My Issue Just audible artifacts on the top end when transposing more than .5 ±
I simply wish to be able to use “A” keylock with some form of DJ soft (if possible) with the least possible artifacts. I’m well aware zero artifacts are a technical impossibility, but minimization is “key*”
Keylock doesn’t do any wrong so much as changes the sound quality to the point of being audible (depending on the amount of transposing).
The question is: What DJ Software provides the best quality keylock/transpose? or perhaps theres a decent VST that will work in Torq ? (which i’m gonna give a whirl)
I’ve personally never heard anything wrong with the Traktor keylock. There was a comparison on this website about a year ago about it… but I appreciate it is a subjective thing. Some people’s ears are more atuned than others.
Obviously, the closer you have the tempo to the original the better, keylock by it’s very definition means adjusting the sound, either by dropping grains of it out, or by adding extra grains based on the adjacent grains of sound.
Hrmmm, Tried the Torq beta out and it “seems” to sound a lil more Punchy than Traktor, Still Audiable mind you .. I guess i’ll try out some VST’s and see what happens.
Maybe its just my Cans, Sony V6’s which are notoriously “toppy”, which is where the artifacts are most noticable to me anyhow.
Yeah obviously the closer the Keymatch the better, it could have been on here I read a comparison before, I believe it was Ableton best. 2nd Traktor at the time.
hate the keylock in traktor. its the one thing that ive just gotten used to. i found in a cd vs wav, vs cdj1000 vs traktor at the club right at opening, that the keylock on a cdj1000 sounds awesome , and traktor not so much. also we found that the low end is problematic with the keylock and eco mode sounded better to us than hi-q mode. even so much as to write a thread saying ‘are the keylock modes swapped? why do we think eco is better than hi-q’. i only got a few replys sayin ‘nope , not here , u must be nuts’.
but as to the question, when i ask my other dj friend, who’s used them all , he said traktor sounds best. the connectiv torq thing he said didn’t sound good, and the SL1 not much better. i know its not hardware we’re comparing but it just represents when the tests were done. id love a new keylock test with modern versions of the software and hardware. SSL 2, TraktorPro 2, Torq 2 , but we should wait till all products are fully available and out of beta.
I wonder could that be to do with amount that traktor needs to “slice” the track for transposing.
Ableton Using Complex pro while less obvious on synths and vocals, seems to lose that “punch” on beats making things on the bottom end all muddy… Traktor on high CPU mode might do something similar ??
I wouldn’t go near 100% in any case, ±6% normally, and around ±4 semitones at most.
Might try eco mode for a while and see how it sounds in comparison…
Seriously considering Torq as an option though as I can prolly pick up a second hand connective unit, Control Vinyls + upgrade 2.0 for around $170
I actually think Ableton with Complex Pro warping sounds better than Traktor. To me, Traktor (in Hi-Q) mode sounds bad even when the pitch is just altered by 2%.
Just tried Traktor in ECO mode and it really sounds like utter sh1te. (sorry djerikt )
Ableton in complex does sound better than Traktor, no contest, but there’s a muddyness in the low end that isn’t as apparent in plain jane complex .. it depends on the tracks though
the keylock feature in traktor has some uses, it’s cool for creating build-up effects and other nifty tricks… some tracks it can hold it’s original key alright, other tracks it sounds really bad..
when it comes to changing a track’s key, i use ableton to edit the tune… traktor’s keylock isn’t really usable for that function imo, way too much distortion.
My last gig before leaving the States i used keylock to bring in a track with 5 BPM difference @ 118ish. Sounded like crap and damn near caused such a latency problem I was concerned with mixing the following track in phase–was something like 2 beats off from screen to main. While I pushed the pitch fader to center the latency remained and I fear turning off keylock until the track played out. Don’t think i’ll ever do that again.
Dudes, you do realize that Ableton Live (Complex and complex pro) and Traktor use the same time-stretching algorithm and should mathematically sound identical, right? If you don’t like the way Traktor sounds, it’s probably because you’re using its limiter, which sounds like canine excrement.
And because some geeks are going to complain, complex and complex pro are the same algorithm…complex pro just gives you 2 parameters to tweak based on the audio. But, from all the people I’ve seen arguing for it, I haven’t seen one who could even quote from the manual about what those parameters do or how they should be set based on the audio.
Seriously, you guys are all making sht up–intentionally or not–or doing something else wrong–like using Traktor’s sht limiter. Key locks have sounded awesome for a while.
It doesnt.
Tested this out on a extremely picky track and a deep bassline
(Cygnes Feat.clAud9) by Mr. Sam
Both ran at 132bpm from 130(Original) 1.6% shift
Traktor raped the fuck out of that song making it sound like shit going through a tunnel of wtf.
Ableton on the other hand didnt destroy it.
If wanted I will post up examples in a little while.
So now the theory about them using the same algorithm has been shot down.
)
