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Virtual DJing

There’s probably no substitute for tactile sensation your trusty decks and a box full of your newest vinyl, but hey, this is 2001 and things have changed! A lot of us don’t own any vinyl and even more of us listen to MP3s as a matter of course now. Napster may change or even disappear, but music in a virtual digital format is here to stay. There is a multitude of ways to play mp3s including many free software players such as Winamp and there have been a few software MP3 DJing packages such as Virtual Turntables VTT which was the original MP3 DJ package and is currently available for a very reasonable US$42. Traktor is different in that it is from Native Instruments who are a company with excellent software products with professional price tags. This is a truly professional approach to Virtual DJing that has many similarities with CD DJ decks.

Requirements

You need a PII-366 with Windows 98/Me/2000 and 64Mb RAM, Cyrix 6x86 processors are not recommended.

Because you effectively need a stereo output for the main mix and an additional one for headphones you really need a multi channel, 3D or second soundcard. If you want to use all the pre-listening features and you only have one soundcard output, you'll have to settle with dual mono, so the headphones will be on the left output and the speakers on the right. This sounds a bit grim, but if you think about it, it’s a hardware problem with no software solution – if you are serious about music, it’s time to put your hand in your pocket!

Installation

Installation is simple and help is available, if needed, from the excellent 68 page printed manual. Copyright protection is via a strange system of a couple of holes drilled in the CD which make it uncopyable and you have to insert the CD the first time you run Traktor.

In Use

You could read the manual and follow the tutorial to get you started, but I couldn’t wait. I quickly scoured my hard drive for some mp3 and wav files and dragged them onto the virtual decks. The decks don’t look like decks, just waveforms, which are far more useful when you come to scratching and cueing. Clicking play on deck 1 starts the track playing and within a second, the BPM was displayed. It was obvious how to skip up to a rhythmic part of the second track and find the BPM.

At the top you have the main unit to control the volume of your monitor and the master volume. The master volume is what your audience hears, and the monitor volume being what you hear on your headphones. You can choose the master BPM here.

As well as the usual fader there is an Auto-fade function with adjustable time, punch-in, boost and mute buttons.

Beat Matching

Traktor can automatically beat match the decks, simply click on the "=" button and it'll make the tempo the same as the other deck. Sometimes though you will need to manually override the system. Like BPM counters you also have "red lights" which indicate a beat. House and Trance are simple to mix, but anything with a less obvious beat takes a bit longer to mix with Traktor, which is to be expected. Provided you cue up the track reasonably accurately, Traktor can sync the tracks for you so it sounds perfectly mixed, but rather than use auto sync all the time you can sync the decks manually, which is probably the way to go if you are not panicking.

Like a real turntable, Traktor changes the speed of the music by changing the pitch. This is good, but it would have been nice to have a timestretch function, so that you could change the speed of the music without changing the pitch, like on some expensive CD decks. This is probably asking too much for the price. Interactive waveform display, sample-accurate cue points, pitch change (+/- 35%), scratching, seek mode and reverse play The cue function is very impressive letting you cue to within a millisecond. You are helped by red markers, which indicate a beat and the graphical display, which gives you a lot of feedback. The pitch controls have a range of +/- 35%, which goes from Darth Vader to The Munchkins, so be careful!

Other Functions

The scratch function works well to. You can do rewinds and any scratch you want and just like with a real turntable, you'll need practice to get the scratches to sound good, the manual invites you to get rude with your scratching…hmm…OK.

There is 3-Band EQ section for each deck with phenomenal kill switches for dramatic effects. Creative mixing is available with the help of 8-pole bandpass/notch filters with variable width, resonance and cutoff frequency. These filters have been developed from Native Instrument’s Reaktor virtual analog synth product and consequently sound well gnarly.

Looping 1, 2 or 4 bars of music is simple; just indicate where you'd like to start the loop and where to end it. I found this to be one of the most fun aspects of Traktor.

Recording

The beauty of anything you do with computers is that invariably it can be automated and reproduced. You can save the mix as a wav file like many other virtual DJ programmes. However, unlike other ones, you can save the movements of the switches throughout your mixes as a mix file, which stores no sound information. mix files are typically only several hundred kilobytes, thus meaning you save every mix you do.

MIDI Control

So far everything sounds rosy but the virtual nature of this product means that you have controlled everything with the dreaded mouse – the weakest part of the Human/PC interface. This is more serious when you want to be adjusting two or more parameters at the same time. The good news is that many of the functions can be controlled from external MIDI devices such as a joystick, a pitchbend wheel on a synth or Native Instruments own ‘4CONTROL’ a hardware controller originally designed for Reaktor.

Conclusion

I like it, it’s more expensive than its competitors, but it works well. It didn’t crash and it was intuitive to use. But who is going to use it - The bedroom DJ, the MP3 geek or the club DJ? In theory you should be able to do an entire season in Ibiza with nothing more than a laptop and an Internet connection, but you may be gambling with the stability of your machine in a hot sweaty club. OK, I’m off to find my sunglasses and pick up some Pesetas!

Upside:

Downside:

Price: € 152,88 (about £91)

NATIVE INSTRUMENTS
Software Synthesis GmbH
Schlesische Straße 28
D-10997 Berlin, Germany

tel: +49 30 61 10 35 0