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Beat markers not saved...a final plea

Discussion in 'General DJ Forum' started by sparky sanchez, Dec 19, 2004.

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  1. sparky sanchez

    sparky sanchez Forum Member

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    OK, I've read all I can around this and STILL find some tracks REFUSE to save beat markers, what's almost worse is some tracks have 2 or 3 I did a week ago but won't 'take' any more. I've tried every permutation I can think of, saving tags after each marker, saving with a different track in the deck...what else is there? Does anyone have any at least semi-reliable methods to get them to stick? I wasted literally many afternoons' work on this and ain't happy :confused: Got some big gigs coming up and all this is giving me a big hard-off about Traktor in general-I've been mixing vinyl for years and can beat match in my sleep but the wasted effort is a real downer. Like someone said, why not just take a stroll over to Ableton HQ and see how it SHOULD be done?
     
  2. smutek

    smutek NI Product Owner

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    Sorry I can't help you with your problem, I don't use beat markers. Maybe I will one day but for now I seem to get on fine without them.

    Regarding Ableton, for me it's just not practical as a dj app. or atleast not as practical as traktor. The main reason is it's lack of mp3 support. My music library, and most other people here are the same I am sure, would take up way too much space if it were converted to aiff or wav.

    Also...... well thats really it. I use traktor for djing and ableton for live/improvisational/sound creation and destruction and just all around madness.

    I don't know - traktor is an awesome dj tool, live is........

    my favorite app. in the world i think.......

    sorry.:afro:
     
  3. PhilL

    PhilL Moderator Moderator

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    7,084
    Sparky if you are running on a PC try right clicking on the greyspace on deck A or B and choose unload deck from the popup menu. There is, what I would call a bug in that cues are not written to the ID3 tags in a file if the file is opened read exclusive by traktor. This means the track is locked for other application or thread to write to it and no warning is given the data was not written. The problem is hat traktor does not have this problem always just sometimes.

    Phil
     
  4. sparky sanchez

    sparky sanchez Forum Member

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    Thanks guys, smutek, I adore Live too, done some 'dj' ing with it but the sound of some tracks, even at a tempo near their original just don't cut le mustard, my suggestion was about their standard of bug fixing/upgrade/beta testing. PhiLL, thanks for the advice, my error, I should have mentioned I'm on a Mac..for now. Hohum, back to the trying to get them to 'stick'
     
  5. sparky sanchez

    sparky sanchez Forum Member

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    298
    Spent another afternoon marking tracks, generally getting along OK but still got 4 tracks out of 160 so far that REFUSE to either save markers at all or even more infuriatingly have markers that are already there, altered. Tried opening them up in MP3 Rage's editor and changing/deleting the tag type/frames (?) but either it's the wrong tool for the job or I'm the wrong tool for the job or...it just didn't work. Any news on this side of things being fixed in the update? It REALLY hurts to spend quite some time and effort on something just for the software not to perform its job. Same old cry goes out..."Don't add more features until you've got these ones working please!!"
     
  6. kimhill

    kimhill NI Product Owner

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    448
    Have you tried changing the ID3 tag version (eg in iTunes' "Advanced" menu)? From what I've seen here, v2.3 is th best for Traktor. Just a thought.
     
  7. c r j

    c r j NI Product Owner

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    prefereneces

    under preferences are you using just the id tags? or also stripes?
     
  8. kmccoll_Tf

    kmccoll_Tf New Member

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    I'd like to back-up a couple of opinions in this thread. Without a doubt, Traktor is the better application for DJing (vs Live).

    But I love Live for producing and I think Ableton are one of the hottest software companies out there - their products are easy to use, exceptionally stable and perform well.

    Unfortunately I can't say the same for their compatriots at NI.

    Traktor (and the rest of the NI suite) have incredible sound engineering built into them, but the surrounding bits (e.g. the browser and import functions in Traktor) are just not high enough quality. I know some people are lucky and don't experience any problems, but I do and there are elemental coding problems - the application should never crash without some sort of indication of what is wrong. And it crashes in places where it could clearly recover cleanly (i.e. dealing with corrupt mp3 files... if one file out of 2000 is corrupt, at least tell me about it)

    I honestly wish NI had some more competition in the DJ field...
     
  9. c r j

    c r j NI Product Owner

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    my guess

    my guess is that the next update will clear up alot of things that are not exactly emphasized. seriously though, think about it. its going to be merged with finalscratch, and that implies alot of little things being worked out in my book. i think all is good. . .
     
  10. kmccoll_Tf

    kmccoll_Tf New Member

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    9
    I hope so. In my opinion, there's nothing major required for the next version other than tidying up all of the loose ends. But that can be a marketing challenge (more customer-retention than attracting new customers with ever more fancy bells & whistles).
     
  11. pulsewidth_Tf

    pulsewidth_Tf Forum Member

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    240
    One more comment on the problems with saving beat markers, or even just a change in tempo.

    For starters, I endorse Phil's advice about making sure the track you are working with is not currently loaded in the deck. That will resolve the issue most of the time.

    But another gotcha is that you should be working from the "current playlist", and not from a Case context.

    When tracks are added to a Case, their current tempo is written to the cases file. If you later add beat grids or make manual changes to the tracks' detected tempos, these will not be automatically reflected in your Case listings. When you load tracks from these cases, you will not get the beatgrids that you have made if they were created after you added the track to the Case.

    If you indeed organize your tracks with Cases, and use the Case context to browse which tracks to beatgrid, or adjust tempo or whatever, then the way to make this work is as follows.

    First, add the tracks from a case to the current playlist. Change the context back to the current playlist.

    Now load your tracks, tweak the tempos or add beatgrids to your heart's desire.

    When you're finished, unload all tracks from the decks but do NOT clear the playlist. Select all of the tracks in your current playlist, right click (Mac users adjust accordingly) and choose Write ID3 Tag.

    Now switch back to your case(s), select the tracks you've altered, right click (...) and choose Read ID3 Tag.

    It's an ugly hack, but now the tempo and beatgrid data will be available to you from your cases.

    (if anyone knows a less tedious way to do this please let me know...)
     
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