Digital DJing Dummy Questions

I saw Traktor is 50 bucks ATM (Black Friday Sale), and I think maybe give it a try? (I used to DJ in the 80’s at students parties, but that was no mixing, beatmatching etc. – simply feeling the vibe and playing the right song at the right time, but it was fun anyway.)

  1. Now I wonder, is it possible with Traktor (or Serato DJ) to sync mp3s and a DAW, say Renoise or Bitwig? If not, how do producers/artists do this, DJing and mixing with their own stuff from inside a DAW at the same time? I mean, not like rendering stuff and simply playing it like any other mp3, that’s trivial.

  2. What would be a good beginner controller for this? I don’t want to shell out 400+ at NI. Would this one be ok-ish:https://www.thomann.de/gb/numark_mixtrack_pro_iii.htm ? About 200 is what I want to spend tops. It would be for fooling around at home mostly, maybe playing small private parties, etc.

  3. Any alternatives to this, like using a launchpadMini + a nanoKontrol (I have both) to control the software?

or

  1. Should I ditch this idea, and better get FM8 instead? :wink:
  1. From what I can tell, by far the most popular way to do this is Ableton Live – typically I see producers with warped/autowarped tracks, which makes triggering pre-beat-matched playback trivial. The rest is jesus pose. I’m sure you could send midi transport data to start/stop a track in Serato from Renoise, but it would have to be prepared and your timing impeccable.

  2. For beatmatching and mixing digital music? The mixtrack is a fine place to start! For alternatives, I recommended the Vestax VCI-300 to a friend a few years back and he seems to still love it. However, I do believe this controller is no longer in production.

  3. So, in terms of beatmatching without pitch control or jog wheel … yes it’s totally doable. I’ve put together a mixing mapping for my Ohm64+Serato. It works well enough, you just gotta get used to those sliders for pitch control and buttons for cueing. It’s not efficient, but it totally works.

The FM8 sale is hard to beat! Just to make it more complicated though, I was recently trying to figure out Synplant… so far it’s pretty interesting, you might check it out!

Thx mars! :slight_smile:

I think I’ll go cheap with the DJ idea, just grabbing Traktor for now, and check my milage with the micro MIDI controllers I already have. I have to admit I kinda fell in love with the Mixtrack, but OTOH I love my tiny controllers just because they fit into my back pack and I can take them with me wherever I go. If it doesn’t work for me at all, I can look for a DJ controller later.

And from the money I save, I can easily afford FM8!

Yeah, synplant looks quite interesting. Oh my… no no no no no, I also need to buy food once in a while… at least for my dog… :smashed:

Well this is interesting…I Dj’d recently for the first time without decks

I really enjoyed it, way more than I thought - I used a pretty usual dj mixing program ( i think it was free) then routed it to a proper old school dj mixer which cost me £20.

It was a good fusion of old and new. I would say sod the dj controller unless your going to use it on a regular basis

Oh yeah! I bought Traktor (after demoing it for maybe one hour), andmapping to any tiny MIDI controller with some knobs and faders is easy-peasy, at least for people who seen this stuff before. And then there’s still the laptop keyboard and a mouse…

I think it would kinda work without any controller, but I don’t have an external mixer. I have to use the internal Traktor mixer, and for this it’s really nice to have at least some faders and knobs.

But it’s really fun practising atm, no dj controller needed right away. Maybe later… :walkman: