Traktor on the Record #3

Hi all,

Welcome to the third issue of "Traktor on the Record"! This Q&A session gives you the opportunity to get direct answers from product designer Friedemann and product manager Tobias on all things Traktor.

Please read this post first for info on how this works:
http://www.native-instruments.com/forum/showthread.php?t=75597

The most important stuff briefly:

- This thread works like a mailbag, all posts go in an internal queue and won't be visible at first
- This session is a "Free For All", so all forum members can post questions
- Please keep it focussed and suggest only one topic per session

This thread will be closed for submissions sometime on Wednesday, and answers will be posted on Friday.

We are looking forward to your topics!

Regards, Thomas

 

The Explorer and iTunes nodes are so called “read-only lists” so they are not editable in Traktor. For instance, if you want to edit tracks from the Explorer node anyway, you currently need to add the tracks to the your collection first.

We are actually looking into ways of allowing track edits in read-only lists, but it has a lot of technical implications so we cannot promise right now whether when we can enable this option.

 

This will be fixed in the 1.0.3 update.

 

Nonlinear parameter recording has many complex implications for the whole functionality of Traktor. Also we were never completely satisfied with how NMX recording worked in previous Traktor versions. So we will take all the time necessary instead of implementing a half-baked mix recording feature that compromises our quality goals for Traktor Pro. At this point, we really cannot give any specific date for it.

 

We already did a public beta test for the Traktor 3.4 update last year, and we will do further public betas for updates with a similar scope in the future, basically whenever it makes sense from our perspective.

 

Yes, we browse the feature request forum when we have to prioritize new features for a new version, even though we don’t have the time to respond to them. If somebody posts a great idea that nobody else ever brought up before, we will catch it.

In general we receive lots of feedback from Traktor users throught many channels all the time, so we are never really short on ideas for new features and improvements, it’s the priorization that is the key.

 

We actually have this kind of cue point feature on our list for a Traktor Pro update in Summer!

 

This feature will return in the upcoming 1.0.3 update.

 

Drifting is mostly due to inaccurate beat grids, and slight adjustments of the grid will solve the problem.

But if you are talking about tracks that have an inconsistent tempo, you are right in that Traktor Pro is currently not able to "straighten them out". We plan to implement such a functionality with "variable beat grids", probably already in the next major update after 1.0.3.

 

Metadata has become a very complex area because there are many different entities that store track information - the standard ID3 tags themselves and proprietary tags written by iTunes or Traktor, the iTunes Library or the Traktor Collection. So it can be confusing to work out which of these entities “override” the other.

For this reason we have decided to give the highest priority to the standard ID3 tags when available, because they are the most common denominator among all tagging applications. For information going beyond the standard, we rely on extended tags written by Traktor Pro into the files.

We decided for the latest ID3 version 2.4 for Traktor Pro so this should ideally be used.

Regarding MP4 files, the bit rate is not stored in a tag, it is retrieved by the decoder. The MP4 decoder in Traktor Pro has a bug where the bit rate is not calculated correctly. Because this decoder is licensed from a third party, we can't make any promises about when this bug will be fixed.

 

The advantage of the "play on release" method is that you don’t have to look at the button the moment you trigger the playback, so you can keep your eyes on the crowd or on the screen instead. But you can revert this behaviour by making these two function assignments to the button of your VCI:

Add > Cue/Loops > Jump to Act Cue
Add > Transport > Play/Pause > Interaction Mode: Direct = on

 

When the BPM analysis gives false results, it’s very often because of the BPM Range setting in the preferences. When going from Traktor 3 to Traktor Pro, we changed the default range from 70-190 to 60-180. It seems that for some genres, the preset range in Traktor 3 gave better results. In general it is helpful to personally narrow down the range depending on the music genres that you play with Traktor.

Additional tweaks to the BPM detection will come with the 1.0.3 update and with further upcoming releases.

 

Traktor Pro fundamentally relies on the tags written into the files. Switching off tag writing would make it impossible to do any kind of tag editing in Traktor, because the information in the collection is updated from the tags on every startup.

Traktor only writes tags when they have been changed, it merely *reads* them on each startup to update the collection. Since this process can take really long for very large collections, we will make this scan optional in the 1.0.3 version, so you will be able to skip this procedure if you are sure that the
tags are unchanged.

 

This concludes the third Traktor On The Record! Thanks for all your submissions.

You actually submitted more questions than we could answer, so some of them will carry over to the next session.

Next week we will have the first German-language Q&A, so the next regular session in this forum will be in two weeks time.