Two DJs, Traktor + Virtual DJ, Tempo Inconsistency “WTF Moment”
Okay, so for the last few weeks I’ve been playing a new venue with a mate of mine, and doing a sort of “you play a few tracks, then I’ll play a few tracks, and so on” kinda deal. We’ve both got our own setups, me using Traktor and him using Virtual DJ, and I’ve noticed something REALLY weird going on… basically, if he’s playing a track at 130bpm, and I cue up a track at 130bpm, I can start mine off perfectly in sync, and then it drifts, almost as if his is playing at 129 or 131…
Now this is what I don’t get; correct me if I’m wrong, but 130bpm means quite literally, 130 beats per minute. Now unless Traktor or Virtual DJ has a different definition of a “minute” than the rest of the world, then what the hell is going on?
Obviously the ideal solution would be for him to switch to Traktor, but I have a feeling it’ll take a while for him to come around to the idea lol. In the mean time, am I just mental, or is there really something funny going on here?
How many decimals does the bpm display show on his and your screen? There’s a huge difference between 129,8 and 130,4 bpm, which both could be displayed as 130 bpm.
Regarding your second question:
The really funny thing that is going on here is that you seem to actually rely on the displayed bpm number instead of just beatmatching by ear…
Nono, both are dead on 130.00; that’s why I was so surprised. And yeah, I DO usually end up doing it by ear, it’s just confusing as hell that it’s not behaving the way it should be.
Is the tempo within each system consistent, i.e. does the drifting only occur while transitioning from on of his tracks to yours and vice versa or does one of you experience problems during transitions of two songs from the same computer?
Does this happen all the time or was it just that single wtf moment?
It’s fine when working in isolation on each machine, it seems to just be a variance between Traktor and VDJ, and it happens every time unfortunately, and for varying tempos anywhere from 110 to 150 (the range that was played last night); unfortunately, I can’t say for certain whether it’s a constant difference or a percentage depending on base tempo, as I didn’t make note of the +/-% on the adjusted beatmatching by ear
make sure both soundcards are on asio mode aswell, wmd drivers are laggy as hell.. The calculation for VDJ is very precise, but it only shows 2 decimal places.
