How to prepare music for use in Traktor

I too would like to congratulate pixeltrance for this post ! amazing information _pdf it and sell it ! however I am such a muppet that I would always adjust the pitch of the songs manually on the fly.. setting beatgrids is not just working with my stupidity. I have followed your advice and managed to get two house tracks running smoothly without even touching sync once... then one of the tracks entered a break and as it came back in a trainwreck happened.. i thought the tracks were so much in sync , how did that happen ? and what would I do when this happens ?? I had set the beatgrids as better as I could !

 

Did you press "lock" when you set the beat grids? I've had Traktor change them on me when decides that it needs to rematch the tempo of the song in the other deck, and it almost entirely happens during long percussionless breaks. Pressing lock makes a big difference.

 

you are most right boysteve works like a breeze now !! but it takes alot of effort to do this for all my songs !

 

Thanks for your kind words neodjandre and good luck with your beatgrids.
Yes, it takes a while to set beatgrids for all your tracks but with practise it goes very quick and it is well worth the effort

 

nah.. I have noticed that beatgrids don't work with a certain number of tracks (possibly because they are vinyl rips). However, the majority of my collection is tracks I got from cd singles and those are fine.. we need those elastic or multiple beat grids I would say.. I might as well be moving to Ableton Live 5 !

 

Hi forum-

I'm kind of a late comer to the software and awaiting my boxed copy in the mail. With using the demo, I seem to have a hard time setting cue points on the fly and having them saved. Maybe this just isn't possible? I thought it was a demo bug but I'll know if I'm really clueless once I get the full blown version installed.

I never thought about setting up beat markers/cue points then saving them for future use. I was wondering how you all managed to quickly get your mixes started like you would if you were using vinyl.

I have alot to learn about this but patience and practice I know is key.

I just want to say thanks to PixelTrance for sharing such a wealth of knowledge in writing this tutorial!!!

Take care,

LL

 

Whats up also a newcomer and wanted to put my .02 in and tell you what i've figured out. You know what I cant think how you can save the cue marks I know you can save loops and cue them i believe you can save up to 10 different loop cue points maybe Im on the right track any help would be nice for both us...

Good Day
Dustin

 

Okay I've figured this out just hit the lock buttons in the loop box and for the cue marks hit the lock button in that area. I hope that helps anybody...

 

ok i wanna thank god , pixeltrance , and NI bout this...
finally , i made a beatgrid 99.99% perfect...
peace

 

Hello there! First post on the forum, and first use of TDJS 2.6, total noobie! and i'm glad i stummbeled across this! A big thanks to Pixel and the rest of you guys, and gal(s)? Still struggle a bit on a few beat grids!

Just a quick question, Would it be correct to assume that if I ripped a CD to MP3, not a mix one, and tried to apply a beat grid to it, but the CD was created from using vinyl would you still have the problem of drifting due to been played on vinyl, and depending on what decks they were played on?

Many thanks again!

Cheers

Ash P

 

Re: .aiff v. mp3 ?? ( ARRRGGGHHH!!!...Sorry! )

Please don't feel bad. There are more of us out there who very much feel that this is THE most important point. Many (but not all) seem to forget how very crucial it is for the music quality to be absolutely of the highest order. It is understandable; sometimes they had no example, no point of reference. Some of us are playing professionally for thousands of people and getting paid for it, week in and week out, while others are just enjoying playing in their living rooms or for their friends at parties. (nothing wrong with either, but it is uncommon to see people driving F-1 cars to the supermarket, if you get my analogy; and it is just as uncommon to see people driving Honda Civics on a race track)

Playing on very big sound systems is like if you are making digital imaging for large-scale advertising billboards. Using a jpeg image you got on the web would look horrendous when blown up. That is why you use a 320 Meg photoshop image, so that when it is magnified it still looks good and sharp. In the same way using an 8 Meg MP3 song file you got off the web cannot compete with a 245 Meg properly encoded 24-bit / 96 kHz sound file on a 65,000 Watt sound system.

CD quality is already horrendous on big sound systems. And the argument that sound systems are so bad to begin with just doesn't gel. The worse the system is, the more you should work at making your audio source sparkle.

All the advanced features you get from ID3 tagging could easily be available with high-resolution audio files if Native Instruments would agree to support the standard 'Broadcast Wave' format, which supports fully compliant meta-tagging among other things. Whether they like it or not, they will have to in the future. So if your collection is already encoded that way, then it will just be a trivial matter of batch-converting your files to a different format.

Please do not stop being super-anal about quality!! Our musical culture should evolve to higher standards, not those of audio mediocrity set by the convenience of the personal audio player revolution. These things are great for personal and home use, but have no place in a large-scale or professional environment. The problem is that if a whole generation of people are not exposed to those better sounds, they will not even know that it can sound so much better. (and that their enjoyment of the music is also magnified)

As a professional, why would I want to skimp and not have the best tools to do what I do, and sound the very best I can compared to those who were fooled by the emergence of inferior home-oriented technologies (and also liked it because rampant piracy made them able to find material for free on the P2P services, which was a more important consideration to them than providing their listeners with the best listening experience)? Because I can DJ from a 20 Gig hard drive instead of having to carry 1/2 Terabyte of storage with me? Because I can save $300 on hardware?

I have just spent (part of) over 2 years of my life encoding stuff, how much did that cost me? why would I not want the highest quality? (I can always make MP3's of my files if I ever felt like it) How long am I DJ'ing for? Until I get a real job, or for a lifetime....? Should I plan my digital music collection for 2 years, or 20?

Am I a leader, or a follower (sheep) ?

Questions, questions.....

D.

 

what about ripping vinyl? i can't believe you guys call yourselves dj's and all you use are cd's!? is anyone out there ripping their vinyl into a mac any other way then thru their hardware mixer? and i mean good quality, not i-mic and final vinyl and that type of poor quality stuff?
i really would love to streamline my pile of hardware!

 

i can't believe you guys call yourselves dj's and all you use are cd's!?
YEAH MAN!

 

I call myself a DJ and I don't use CDs or vinyl. I also don't use a gramophone or bang rocks together.

 

lol, this is the 2nd time 2day, i'm LMAO on your remarks...

 

Hey....!!!!! I resemble that!!!

Diamonds on Vinyl, ya know know someone should try that, it might just work..... err... nevermind... been done.. people moved on.

 

You dreamers--no practical sense whatsoever.

 

This statement is not correct, in that when you blow up a picture you are reducing the amount of information over the area. When you play a tune louder (i.e 64KW), you are not reducing the information contained in the audio, just making it louder. i.e easier to hear. You can exceed the point of easy to hear by playing too loud.

CD is excellant quality and will not be a difference over an audiophile home sound system and a quality large PA. The PA will sound worse as the details will be removed due to overloading of audio into the ear canal. The large speakers loosen the bass repsonse, and the large area make it difficult to send high end to all areas, effectiively meaning the sound is less 'bright'.

320KBps is less information than on CD, but so small, that only a audiophile home sound system will be able to determine a difference. Not a 64KW sound system, due to the reasons stated above.

The Broadcast Wave Format is just a container format for transfering audio with all associated metadata. You can put a MPEG (MP3) or WAV encoded data in this container class.

You are correct in that quality recording and quality playback are important, but the method in which the data is encoded in separate.

When you are creating audio (music), not just playback, using higher sample rates and non-lossless compression helps due to the very reason that these 'core' sounds will be manipulated/transformmed so being precise as possible as to not add unwanted artifacts can be important.... but remember when manipulating a sound, you are adding distortion, so it seems kind of moot point.

I don't think that anybody using 320Kbps MP3 will have any problems with the quality of there music in 20 years time, unlike tape or vinyl which will be trash after that amount of use.

 

There have been many and long discussions about the quality of mp3's. Some people claim that they suck while others say that they can't hear the difference.
I fall in the latter category but then all my mp's are 320 kbs LAME encoded plus the fact that I have been doing the DJ thing for quite a few years now so I bet that my ears are shot to some degree.
Sure, there is no question at all that mp3's suck if you just look at the tech specs but is that the whole truth?

This summer I played at a festival in Hungary. The system was a 140 KW line array from Meyer Sound. (Yes...140 KW...BWAHAHAHAHA!!! ;-)
For those of you who don't know Meyer Sound, it's considered to be one of the absolutely top systems in the world. This of course means super expensive and rather exclusive. Check out www.meyersound.com for more info.
This system was truly amazing! So much power and dynamics. Clear as a mountain stream
Every artist I talked to at the festival said the same thing, that is was the best system they have ever heard.

Anyway, I was interested in how it would sound when I played on this system since some people claim that the mp3 sound quality sucks and I figured that if any system would reveal it then this Meyer system would.
Since it wasn't really possible to hear the sound myself since I was on stage I asked some friends to have a close listen to the quality of the sound and then let me know what they thought.
These people are all artists and they were all there to play live at this festival. So these people know how to listen and are very picky about sound quality.
Everyone I talked to after my set said that they couldn't hear any difference at all between the mp3's and the uncompressed wav's I played.

In conclusion. After this experiment I'm completely comfortable with playing mp3's and I'm not worried at all about the sound quality.
If professional musicians, who knows what to listen to, can't tell the difference between an uncompressed audio file and a properly encoded mp3 on a very, very high quality system, well then I'm willing to bet that no one else will either.
As always, YMMV and so on...

 

Amen to that...