10 1/4" balanced outputs

This is proably a fantasy that will never see the light of day, but...


For those who want to multitrack Tracktor/S4 output into a DAW, having 10 physical 1/4" balanced outputs to route data directly from the 2 Track decks and 8 channels of the 2 remix decks would be heaven for those who want to capture the performances into a DAW, and would allow the recording engineer to potentially layer more instruments on top of the DJ performance, and remix/rebalance the individual layers in a conventional studio mixdown scenario. This would be similar to how the high-end hardware AKAI MPC series allows multitrack recording of drums/loops.

Another option (and probably far cheaper from a product development perspective) would be to allow Traktor to run in VST mode and route output from the decks directly into DAW tracks.

The physical outputs would allow high-end hardware preamps and compressors/EQs to color the sound on input, and allow portability as a DJ can go into any studio without requiring the studio to install Traktor on their DAW systems.... a more professional approach. Virtual outputs in a VST would certainly be more compact and friendly to the MBOX crowd, at the expense of professional portability.

On second thought, having both options at your disposal would be ideal.

 

First I would like to state that I'm using Traktor for DJing live and not for production. However, I don't think adding such features will effect live DJing performances. So I'm not strictly against the ideas but I would like to share my opinions.

This post is looks more like a "Traktor" area post rather than a S4/S2 post.

Having like 10 stereo outputs on a all-in-one DJing hardware would be not only awesome but also incredibly unprofitable. At the Native Instruments hardware quality and performance level, just add some more inputs to such a device and you will have more than a DJ mixer, you will have a close to studio grade mixing board. This will make the device really expensive without giving any noticeable difference to DJs or any reason to studio sound engineers to buy the product. Because of this, I don't think something like that will happen in near feature.

Of course I'm not a Native-Instruments' Engineer or knowing too well about the internal working of the software, but working as a professional computer engineer for years to develop software, I can assure you that making Traktor VST is even worse than adding hardware outputs from the development perspective if Native-Instruments has not been working on such development for a long time. As much as I remember, development team stated that the reason they did not include a VST host on Traktor and did not make Traktor a VST plugin was stability. And I'm really grateful about this decision. Traktor is a rock solid DJing system you can count on it anytime when you compare it with alternatives.


After all these negative opinions of mine, I also would like to share a little tip for anybody interested. Configuring Traktor to hardware mixer would give you every channel output. You can, then redirect all 4 channel to anywhere you like, which could be a 4 stereo channel output. If you run this trough a virtual sound output-input driver like soundflower, you can even record it on the very same computer. If you can find a simple mixer application to send S2/S4's midi commands, then you can remap the controller, and route the output of your mixer application to S2/S4's audio outputs. This way you can record all 4 channels separately and perform on the controller as normally.