Rather than emulate the wheels of steel paradigm, like for instance algoriddim’s djay, the interface designers for Traktor DJ have approached the task as an opportunity to really explore touch screen. or even record a mix – it has a built-in recorder. As Ritchie Hawtin was rumoured to have done recently while the shroud of secrecy was still draped over the app, Traktor DJ is more than capable of being used as a live mixing tool, and indeed the only tool you need to rock a party. So far I’ve been talking about Traktor DJ more or less as though it is designed as a preparation system, but that’s really just one side of it. Keys that flat-out don’t work together, tracks whose rhythms just don’t mesh properly, and other subtle things that your experience as a DJ helps you to decide against are sometimes suggested, making the recommendation system perhaps more of a suggestion system, one that can augment your own digging and selection ideas but isn’t about to replace them. The more you use it the better it gets, but worry not about a Twilight Zone (or Black Mirror, for savvy UK readers hankering for a more up to date reference) esque situation where your own gear decides you’re redundant, as it is fallible. The recommendation engine can actually get a little creepy in its usefulness, and studies both what the track metadata says about your library and your own usage habits to highlight the most potentially sweet and natural mixes with a hint of your own selection prowess thrown into the mix. I think the Microsoft Office paperclip guy is officially as cliched a reference point as space hoppers or Global Hypercolour tshirts, but imagine if, instead of making you want to straighten him out and ram his tail into one of his own smug little eyes, paperclip guy occasionally popped up to give you a scarily insightful and accurate suggestion for your next sentence. NI’s answer to the problem of ever-expanding music libraries (and I still side with Mark when it comes to the amount of music we actually need for a gig, but the reality of the scarily increasing pace with which both we and the audience ‘consume’ music can’t be ignored) is something new to Traktor DJ and very soon Traktor Pro: the recommendation engine. No more DJs with ‘unique’ headgear… please) and use your time productively. In use it’s absolutely fantastic for all those times that you’re away from the decks, but want to put your DJ hat on (not literally.
Want to sketch out an idea for some transitions? Traktor DJ will allow you to do it, complete with effects, EQ, and filtering directly lifted from Traktor Pro for maximum like-for-like sound compatibility. Rather than simply aping Pioneer’s app for the world of Traktor, Traktor DJ is a fully fledged DJ app that not only allows you to quickly and intuitively set your BPM, grids, cue points, loops, and other metadata and sync them with your library both locally and via a cloud service (Dropbox now, and hopefully others soon), but also audition them on the move with complete two channel mixing capabilities. How much further is a question best answered by using Traktor DJ. Pioneer’s Rekordbox app is fantastic for preparation on the move, but it doesn’t allow anything but preparation: this suits Pioneer’s laptop-free ideology, but for a company that centres itself around software, like Native Instruments, it makes sense to take things further.
It seems to me that in these transitional times – tablets are getting pretty damned powerful now, but they don’t quite have the horsepower to drive the feature set and engine quality that Windows and OSX based DJ software has risen to – the ideal tablet DJ software is complementary, not laptop replacement. Mixvibes, DJ Player, and the small pool of other apps that have pro DJing in mind are great, but they do somewhat force you to pretty much switch to them from your laptop software lest all the management and workflow changes you have to endure become a little redundant. IOS based DJ apps have yet to really gain traction (sometimes the puns are too easy - write this one yourself if you’re so inclined) outside of apps that err on the ‘casual’ side of the fence, and I’d posit that a major reason is that there’s just not enough compatibility between what we use on laptops and what’s available in the touchscreen realm.
Traktor DJ is incredibly intuitive and really doesn’t need any more of that.
This will be followed up soon with a deeper dig into the features, but offering more opinion than simply running through what it does. So we’re not going to bother doing that, and instead offer you firstly some commentary and insight from Chris Cartledge.
It’s absolutely everywhere - in all the gadget blogs and even national newspapers, with a heap of very similar videos walking you through the same things ad infinitum.