Help, the mothership is sinking (S8)

Okay So I did check some of these things and it appears that the laptop is one of the issues as it is a laptop not entirely dedicated to traktor and has plenty of music,movies, etc on it.

Do all traktor users (those who want reliability) purchase a dedicated laptop? Does mac tend to be the more reliable laptop for traktor?

Thank you

 

I don't know if mac is better, the pro's use mac..every party i go where there is a setup involving traktor i see mac so draw your conclusion, i have a windows based laptop i5 win 8.1 that runs just okay so its possible..

My laptop is not dedicated as we do use it for normal things on a day to day basis, but when using it for traktor thats the only thing running..having movies or music on your laptop should not cause latency problems.

check : http://www.native-instruments.com/e.../windows-78-tuning-tips-for-audio-processing/

 

Oh man Aren't you something?

"If you were to go back and read my posts more carefully you will see that" it's exactly these statements that are way beside the point. If I, and many people here, have a problem running Traktor on Windows 10 (yes clean install, new hardware, and no setup dummy as you blatantly suggest), then it is of no use stating that your setup works perfectly on Windows 10. Great news, so it can actually work, you're lucky. But it still doesn't work for the most of us, and I'm pretty sure it doesn't for me on two different machines.

I started this thread to hopefully get some help with what to do. Because, surprise...it doesn't work for me. On Windows 10 it doesn't work at all. On Windows 7 it works but only for 2.5 hours max. I'm stuck, I tried every single config option and tip that I can find on the net (as I stated in my starting post already, Mr. "if you were to go back and read my posts more carefully"). I even bought new hardware, but that didn't solve the problem either.

Anyways. Since you know this so well, and the setup under Windows 10 is a breeze on any hardware as you suggest, it can't be all that much work to describe exactly what superior setup knowledge you have about setting it up perfectly in one go.

Here, let me help you:
Step 1: Clean install of Windows 10
Step 2: Update windows (drivers, drivers, drivers. Especially the usb ones!)
Step 3: Install Traktor Pro
Step 4: Install S8 driver
Step 5: Fiddle latency and buffer sizes to way too large values for cheap 1/4th timing offset. I love that.
Step 6: Set background process priority off
Step 7: Disconnect all USB devices (except the S8 of course, you setup dummy!)
Step 8: Check with USB latency checker to find it's all good, but the S8 still crashes?
Step 9: Your excellence goes here....

 

I have just recieved an email from Native containg a 'Traktor tool' as they put it, its basically a tool to record the software and note any faults that get logged, im to send this back to them.
So I've made a point of upgrading again to windows 10 as this is where I want traktor to run, hopefully this is a step forward.

 

Hi FloydB
I think my S8 is now working nice with Windows 10. As you said above I set the process buffer to the max 1024 and I am sure that is the main thing that fixed it. I also had wifi off, McAfee internet security off and in my laptops settings went to privacy and turned everything off. Just had 1.5hrs of trouble free mixing
The load bar stayed down near the lower level with no jumps up into the red.
Its a shame Native Instruments didn't get back to me as I told them about the problem. Maybe they just expect everyone to know these basic steps??
Thanks for your help

 

And thanks to everyone else too

 

May I ask what your total latency now is?

 

Do you mind telling what bad spelling you reported dallasweeks?

 

@MarKaS, glad to hear that you have been able to make some progress with your S8 set up on Windows 10. It is all about patiently taking the time to find the right combination for your own individual configuration.

With a little experimenting to find the settings that work best, once you have followed all the necessary tuning tips, you may find that you can lower the process buffer further and still have a good safety margin. You may find there are some changes that can still be made, based on what you have done so far to optimise your set up solely for audio.

It may also help you to test your system by not only trialing mix sessions for as long as is possible, but also letting it run in cruise mode to see if it crashes after extended periods.

I never consider a Traktor version stable on my set up unless I can leave it running indefinitely on cruise mode for days on end. You can also throw in some effects on both decks to load up the cpu whilst in cruise. If the set up passes that test you may be able to lower the audio buffers until a point where Traktor crashes when in cruise mode, which will indicate exactly where you need to be for a good safety margin!

Microsoft made some major changes to the architecture of Windows 10 and in particular interest to DJ's and musician's are the changes to how it now handles both audio and midi input. These two improvements alone can, In my opinion, help to get Traktor users running their systems a lot more smoothly than previous Windows versions.

 

Sorry, I was posting at the time and saw at button regarding spelling mistakes and pressed it cos my spelling is always shocking didn''t realise it was on your post ... my bad!

 

Haha, a Native Instruments spelling checker, including all that weird techy terminology Wouldn't that be something

Always trying to improve here, as I'm not a native English speaker... but you hardly come across people that actually help you out I think chrome has a built-in spelling checker. It should work on the forum here.

 

Hi D Smulders
Just switched on the S8 to check total latency and it is 27.7ms (whatever that means?????) What is your total latency and what should it be?

 

Cheers FloydB
Good Idea. I am doing boring paperwork stuff tonight so I will leave the S8 running for as long as possible to see how it goes

 

Just thought I would let you all know everything was running fine for 3.5 hrs until I put on a stems track. The first stems track was no problem but the next one said it wasn't analysed so I analysed it while another track was playing. When I tried to load it into a deck the whole s8 froze and scratch pro turned itself off too. When I turned it all back on the same stems track wouldn't load so maybe its a faulty track.
So all went well until I messed with stems tracks

 

Heard it mentioned that you can't analyze a Stem on the fly.

 

I'm tracking this thread closely.

When I updated from Win 7 to Win 10 in October, the S8 became unusable with the glitches described here (and in multiple other threads).

I've optimised but need to do more to get it working without audio glitches.

Monitoring all responses

 

So as you'll see from my signature my regular laptop is a MacBook Air running several year old OS and arguably one of the most stable versions of Traktor. I've used newer versions of OS X and Traktor and the grass certainly isn't greener there.

The other night one of my mates asked me to play a few hours at one of his residencies, all good with that, I had about 3 hours to get there. Issue was that he uses an S8, and it was plugged directly into the PA. I thought I would just take my TA6 and X1's, using the S8 as a mixer, until sent me a picture of the setup ... No room!

So I happen to have Traktor 2.10.0 installed on my work Surface Pro 4 (i5, 4GB RAM, 128GB SSD), and so I transferred my music from the Air to the Surface Pro, about 60GB which took 20 min. Drivers for the S8 were installed as part of Traktor.

I ended up still taking the Air and other gear, and the SP4. We played a track from his phone for the change over, unplugged from his Mac and straight into the S8, Traktor popped up with the "do you want to use the S8" message, click yes and basically started playing!

It defaulted to 256 samples, and I left it there. Most of my tracks were locked and so load markers and cue points came straight up (really handy), but when loading each track it did analyse the wave form.

To my surprise it very much worked flawlessly. There were no massive spikes on the load meter, I did however have aeroplane mode on (kills WiFi and Bluetooth), and exited out of TeamViewer and OneDrive.

There were no actual OS optimisations that I have performed. When opening Task Manager while playing Traktor hovered around 12 to 15% CPU usage.

Tonight I played at one of my regular venues for Australia Day Eve, and thought I'd give the SP4 another run. I took a pair of D2's with me to add to the DJM-850 and pair of CDJ-2000NXS installed in the venue so that I could run 4 decks. Get there and plug it all in (SP4 to first D2, D2 splits to DJM and second D2, second D2 splits to both CDJ's).
Using the 32bit version of Traktor (thanks Pioneer, patiently waiting for 64bit drivers) resulted in the DJM-850 ASIO mode not playing nice (will work it out later) and so I ended up using my TA6 running off the first D2.

Set TA6 to 256 samples and started playing. Once again flawless with the SP4, and it ran even better at around 8 to 12% CPU usage. And I forgot to enable flight mode (wifi was connected to my 4G hotspot, Bluetooth on but not connected to anything), and forgot to exit TeamViewer and OneDrive!

So besides the insanely small interface (seriously NI, that needs to be sorted) I can highly recommend the Surface Pro 4 to be a viable Windows performance laptop straight out of the box. I have done nothing special with Windows updates or drivers, it's been updating itself just fine in the background.

Any questions please let me know.

 

Wow thanks for the info. I have been thinking about buying a Surface Pro 4. Please keep us updates if you continue to use it. Glad its working for you.