My main problem with Traktor DJ : constantly losing control of the tempo

Hi,

I recently tried a gig with Traktor DJ and an iPad Air. My normal setup is a Mac with Traktor Pro but for mobility reasons I'm trying to figure out what the best mini-setup would be.


Here is the main issue I encountered : We all know that Traktor DJ works with a Master Tempo and that you may mix songs with a very different BPM together by disabling SYNC then setting the coming track as master.

However there are many issues to this mode that sometimes have put me in difficult situations during the gig :

1. There is no indication of the original BPM of the song, nowhere !!!
2. If you loaded a track with SYNC enabled, there's no way to reset it back to its original tempo
3. The only way to change the tempo of each deck is through a Kontrol S2 or S4 Mkii, will not work with Z1 or Traktor Audio 2 for example.
4. There is no indicator helping you to realise that your song is not even close to the original tempo which easily has you ending up with a mess-up in tempo when starting a song if you forgot to pre-cue (happens to not pre-listen when you mix a song by starting it from a cue without beat-matching).
5. The Grid Editot/BPM tap feature does not seem to work very well, when I enter grid edit mode and tap the beat to adjust the grid, I usually have a lag of one beat that I need to adjust manually. This part of the software, which is btw strategic looks very inaccurate and buggy. What's the point of forcing us to forget traditional mixing and use SYNC/Master Tempo mode if the grid editing is buggy ?

All that makes me think that the only thing for which Traktor DJ is actually useful is for mixing House and Dance tracks or setups with no big tempo amplitude.

I understand Traktor DJ doesn't have the "Pro" label but at least make it useful for basic stuff, Algoriddim Dj does it right, unfortunately I need to use another controller with it because NI's controllers don't do MIDI on iOS.

What do you think, did anyone experience the same issues with Traktor DJ and Kontrol S2/S4 MkII ?

 

Some great points raised here, but to be honest they've already been said many times before. It's a case of 'let's wait and see now '.