CRUISE Suggestions

I'm new to Traktor Scratch, but I think I've explored every facet of the CRUISE feature as currently designed. I have some suggestions.

First off, CRUISE is a very valuable feature. It appears to work best when just letting it play an entire audio file and moving onto the next, playing the whole song start to end. I wanted to tighten the gap some between songs so I tried the FADE IN/FADE OUT but I hate FADE IN's into a song. I strive to segue music like heard on radio stations--where as a song just begins to fade, the next song starts, with the first one then fading quickly and completely underneath. I tried just the FADE OUT cue points and they do part of the job. They start the next song alright, but they also abruptly stop the first song and load the next song into that deck from the playlist. There is also a slight audio interrupt as well that makes the whole transistion sound even more choppy.

My suggestion would be to enable the use of the FADE OUT cue point only if desired and design it to start the next cut as it currently does, but still allow the rest of the first audio file to play to the end before loading the next song from the playlist. Perhaps a different type of cue point could be designed, one that would just start the next deck when enabled since a fading feature wouldn't be absolutely necessary. Maybe the answer would be to enable separate control of FADE IN and FADE OUT. I suppose there's also a difference between behavior using the internal vs. the external mixer functions. A real feature-packed CRUISE might allow placement of a FADE OUT command (whereas the user can set the FADE OUT rate in Preferences) and place a TRIGGER cue point just after the FADE OUT marker to start the next song.

Also, one might want to use CRUISE often on and off throughout a performance. If cue points specific to CRUISE could be toggled off when CRUISE is disabled, that would be nice. That, or a button on the front interface to more easily access the cue points when using CRUISE might be good too. With this feature, you wouldn't have any unwanted starts when running the decks manually.

In addition, for those of us who want to use all four decks, enabling CRUISE to toggle through all decks instead of just A and B would also be a plus.

Thank you for your consideration. I look forward to your response.

 

After a week of playing around some more, I think the cure to my issue with CRUISE is to modify Traktor to allow the audio file playing when CRUISE is on to play all the way to the end before loading the next file into the deck. It already does that if you don't activate FADE IN/FADE OUT markers in Preferences. Once you activate the markers while using CRUISE, Traktor wants to load the next song as soon as the one playing hits the FADE OUT marker. This results in the song playing to be chopped off. Again, I know I'm not using the FADE OUT marker in conjunction with a FADE IN marker as designed, but the fading in of songs sounds awful unless you're trying to do a more elaborate beat on beat club mix type of segue.

Also, a more advanced solution would be nice too. Perhaps the FADE OUT marker can be designed to be used independently of the FADE IN marker and actually perform a controllable fade out where placed and still trigger the next deck at the same time. The file playing likely still needs to play to the end before the next cut loads--or at least until the predetermined fade is complete.

Hopefully, I'm not the only user that would like to see this feature modified and the software engineers can include an enhancement in a future release.

 

The solution to your request, and some others, is to have a fully configurable crossfading shape. This way you could tell the crossfader to fade one track and then start the second track full. It can be done with Swift Elite and Winamp with a plugin, but Traktor is limited to symmetric fades.