Nikhil Dev

Today morning I was convincing myself that I will have to wait just another couple of days to receive my new laptop. But then at around 10AM I received a phone call. The caller said that he was from BlueDart. I knew what it was. I was really excited. I signed the papers and took the box. But the security at the gate would not allow me to take the box inside saying that it was a personal laptop which was not allowed inside. I told myself that I can talk him out of this situation. So I opened the box at the security, checked all the contents and left it with them. I finished my work real soon and left for home by sharp 5:30pm. My first impression? This baby is friggin huge. I weighed almost twice my old Compaq laptop.

I started it up and the screen was enormous, I think I dont have to connect my laptop to the LCD now to watch a movie. Anyway, I set off to do what I usually do on any new computer. Reinstall Windows. This thing came with Windows Vista Premium shipped with it. So I could get all the Aero effects with the 256MB ATI card that was powering them.

Anyway, there is one thing that I havent been able to find on. I saw that a lot of users complained about the reinstallation of Dell Media Direct. They said that you have first install the Media Direct CD which will then take you through the Windows Vista installation. I tried following the instructions but this one came with Media Direct 4 and the CD was not bootable at all. The Vista CD booted pretty well though. So where was I going wrong? I tried contacting the support on chat but they were closed for the day. So I did a little reasearch and found out that in Media Direct 4, there was no longer a seperate partition for Media Direct software. In fact you have to boot the whole of Vista and the only function that the Media Direct button would do was to boot Vista and start the Media Direct software automatically.

So the process is that you have to go with the regular Windows Vista installation process and install the Media Direct software from withing Vista.

But I was really impressed with the performance of the laptop. This baby has some serious firepower in it. I think I can start with my Audio recording and production as well as I get to use this darling to play at a party this Saturday.

If anyone is thinking of getting the Dell Studio 17 (1737) in India or Hyderabad, I would ask you to just go for it. This thing costed me about INR 58,500/- after a few discounts and taxes. The upgrades that I did was to opt for a backlit keyboard and the Creative Audio drivers which I think are worth the money.

Now the interesting part that I noticed just a while ago. I started writing this post after starting the Windows installation on this machine. It’s done now. This baby flies. I think this is what I call “Money well spent”

Do leave comments if you think you need more information on this laptop, its features or its performance.

At last the long ordeal has ended. I am the owner of an apartment. Need to get some things done before moving into it. Wasn’t able to post because of this.

But the updates are that I have started praticing quite some mixing when it comes to hip hop. Got a lil better at it. Learning to sync manually. Still need to put up some money to go to the DJ school. Mostly might make it by end of this month so I can start the classes next month onwards.

My setup for DJing is pretty much the same. The same Compaq laptop, Numark Total Control and Numark DJIO. Got a new pair of Sennheiser HD202. These are quite isolating on sound but are a lil trebly. Thats why I am shifting back to the Sony Studio Headphones. Heard that the Technics RP1200A are pretty good. But they are pricey as well. About 120 dollars. I think I am gonna get a pair in a couple of months.

Will try to postmore frequently now.

Flicked this off a website but they really piss off a DJ(experience, although very little)

1. PLAY SOMETHING GOOD…SOMETHING WE CAN DANCE TO!
The DJ has to play for more than one person…so what you hate may be another’s favorite song and EVERYTHING played here can be danced to one way or another.

2. WOULD YOU PLAY SOMETHING WITH A “BEAT”
BE SERIOUS! We know of NO songs played in a club that don’t have some sort of BEAT!

3. I DON’T KNOW WHO SINGS IT AND I DON’T KNOW THE NAME OF THE SONG, BUT IT GOES LIKE THIS….
PLEASE don’t sing for the DJ. They have to put up with smoke filled rooms and dangerous decibel levels all night long…Do them a favor and DON’T give them a rendition of your favorite song.

4. EVERYBODY WANTS TO HEAR IT!
Oh, sure … you polled everyone in the club and, as their spokesperson, you’re requesting the song.

5. EVERYBODY WILL DANCE IF YOU PLAY IT!
The DJ won’t. I guess that blows a hole in that theory!

6. I CAN GET LAID IF YOU PLAY IT!
Why settle for one night? Buy the album and get laid for a whole month!

7. I WANT TO HEAR IT NEXT!
The ONLY people who can get away with that statement write the DJ’s paycheck!

8. WHAT DO YOU HAVE?
It’s a lot easier for you to go have another beer and figure out what you want to hear than it is for the DJ to recite the name of every record in the booth!

9. HEY, MAN, NOBODY CAN DANCE TO THIS!
It’s NOT advisable to say this when the dance floor is packed (but some people do anyway) ! HOWEVER, even if there is only ONE person on the floor, it STILL contradicts the statement!

10. PLAY IT SOON, BECAUSE WE’RE LEAVING!
If your gonna leave after he plays it, why shouldn’t he wait till the very last song so you stay all night!

Allright then. Came home really late last night(in fact, in the morning) so wasnt able to post the picture. But here it is

I was provided a Pioneer DJM-800 mixer by the resort guys. Apart from this I used my Compaq laptop which was running Traktor DJ Studio 3.2.2. I then use the Numark Total Control USB midi interface to control Traktor DJ Studio.

When it comes to output routing, I used the Numark DJ/IO to split the output in terms of monitor and master.

The setup is pretty straight forward and one of the easiest to control. There are not many effects possibilities though. The few effects that i use are Delay, beat masher, flanger(i use this a lot) and the T2 filter. I thought these are good enough for a small show. You can play around with the T2 filter quite a lot as well as the delay. The only limitation I felt was having to use the mouse every time i wanted to change the kinda effect. Otherwise the effect control are very easy to use.

The best part about this setup is the ability to load songs faster. The middle knob of the Total Control allows you to quickly scroll through the tracks in the view. Pressing the know down preplays it on the monitor o/p. Each deck has its own set of load track buttons. which loads the selected track in the particular deck.

I will post a detailed video of the basics with this setup and a few simple mixes. Hangon till then.

As for any aspiring DJ, I would like to say that this is a VERY portable setup. Its a must have actually.Its worth the money at least.

Cheers till then

Ok,

Yesterday went out to an offsite with the team I work with in the office. We did not want to invest on a DJ so I(chance pe dance) agreed to DJ for the evening. This was the time to test my new gizmo. It was pretty easy tp carry it. The laptop went into my laptop backpack and the mixer along with Audio interface fitted neatly into another laptop sling bag. The setup was pretty straight forward and took just about 5 mins. I have a lotta USB peripheral connected to my computer right now leaving me no extra unused USB port. I will find some time today to post a picture that I took yesterday from the console. Will explain how I did the whole shit. Hangon till then.

At last this Monday, Rachel brought in the Numark console that was with her all the while. I though that I can try it over the weekend but unfortunately I am going on a bike ride to Nirmal City on Saturday. So I think I will have to wait and take a day off during the week. I unboxed it and set it up and the work machine, installed the drivers but looks like the Controller was made with Numark Cue in mind. All the controls are arranged mainly for the Cue software. I tried to map the Traktor DJ Studio but with not much lunk. At last I found the controls map on their website for the full version of TRaktor. I think I will take some time on the weekend and try it with the TRaktor software. Cos Traktor is something that I am very used to.

Anyway, let me get some breathing space and I shall put up the first video of my setup.

Get a beer till then

Just today I paid off the credit card bill of about 13 grand something tha tI spent towards the Numark total control and DJIO that I shipped to Rachel. She said she is arriving in Hyd on 26th Feb. I just cant wait anymore. I think I will start taking this practise seriously as well. Its better to doing nothing but drinking.

As a band(DTuned) we have stopped jamming. The others dont find time at all although I have all the time. But I will come up with something and record the guitars, bass solos and drums myself. All that Shoheb will have to do then is sing. This way, I am sure we can come up with an mp3 that is worth distributing to people.

Later we can think about composing some more. But as for now, my music is on a low profile. Buying a house if on a higher priority. The next would be getting a job that pays me at least double of what I am getting now from Google(that is what my market value is). My fingers sucked today when I sat down to play. I feel like selling away all my guitars stuff and sticking to serious DJing,. At least I can make some money on the weekends. All the people who have heard me mixing house and electronic said that it sounded awesome. So I think its time to make some money.

When I get my Numark, I will start a range of videos demonstrating the lessons on Traktor with Numark. I am sure there are quite a few people who would be interested in watching them.

Traktor is the most popular DJ software in the professional market and that’s probably because the developer, Native Instruments, is a well-known brand in high-end audio software and hardware. It also helps that Traktor is available for both Windows and Mac OS X, so they get the full word-of-mouth effect. Traktor is designed with the experienced knob twiddler in mind, with none of the DRAGONTRANCE! skins or flourishes of some of the consumer-oriented DJ packages. Its interface is likely to turn off some newcomers to DJing but I personally like its no-nonsense slickness.

The nicest thing about Traktor’s lack of reliance on skins is that it works well in a variety of layouts and screen sizes. You can have it in a window, stretch vertically and the width of the waveform preview will change size to accommodate the width and the playlist stretches out, and it won’t look sloppy. Combine this with three available type sizes and you can basically work comfortably playing out on a laptop or honing a mixed CD on a giant LCD.

While there are a lot of buttons visible in Traktor, it manages to reduce clutter by not presenting every single option at the immediate level. Instead of showing a wackload of loop length preset buttons, you can right click to pick from a large list of loop presets and the button then switches to that setting.

1/8 loops: good for those epilepsy fundraisers

Since Traktor basically set the interaction standard for other DJ apps, a lot of the toggles and tricks you find in other programs are close to the same here: right-click and drag to position the sliders and then click the left mouse button to instantly snap to that temporary position, good for quick crossfading or more subtle EQ kills. A few Traktor-only interface goodies are a Snap mode for navigating the waveform, good for use with beatgrid testing and a track ending warning that uses a user-set time for blinking a warning that your track is ending. The Dead Air Preventer 9000.

BPM setting and the beat grid

While Traktor’s BPM detection is very good, accurately guessing the tempo of some really fractured drum ‘n’ bass beats I have, relying on a single BPM guide is not always enough to get tracks to line up properly, so Traktor lets the user set their own beat grid manually. Unlike just setting a global BPM manually by tapping it out (also available), a beat grid is like overlaying a must-follow guide for when you hit sync. For most house and techno, manually setting a beat grid is not going to be needed, but it’s essential if you want to mix an acapella or have any music that is too complicated or sparse for the app to figure out. Also, it comes in handy if you have music that switches tempos mid-track for a break and then resumes its first BPM later.

You set the beat grid by cueing up the first beat in the track and then selecting the Grid popup from the Cue Edit menu.

From there, enable the Tick option in the BPM menu and then click Cue on the channel in the mixer to hear a tap of the beat grid (the Tick) as you cue your track. Don’t worry, the tick never plays through the master channel, only the cue. Play back your song and manually change the value in the BPM menu (or slide the number up and down to interactively change it) until your beat grid overlays your track perfectly. This is a significant feature since loop lengths and beatjumps in DJ programs are invariably linked to the BPM and if it’s not dead on, then you’ll have problems when trying any of those.

Cue points and looping

The nice thing about cue points in Traktor—other than you can have ten of them—is that you can edit their names. This may not sound like much, but when you have a large collection of music and your brain is fried like mine, you need all the help you can get to remember where the vocal break is.

Cue points are saved for files as are loops, the most powerful part of Traktor. Aside from just having the option of using a bunch of loops for mixes, they can also be moved around so that they align better to beats while the track plays.

Master and slave tempos

Master! Master!

When you get into four turntables, the main problem—other than losing your mind—becomes what to use as a reference tempo. You can’t just sync to the three other tracks since they all have independent BPM, so Traktor lets you set a deck as a master for syncing. You can also use an internal BPM clock or an external midi clock if you prefer to have something more centralized for reference. If you show the full four-deck layout, you can set the master clock.

Click Master and then any time you hit sync on a deck, the tracks will sync to the tempo specified in the Clock panel. You can also use this master tempo to change the speed of multiple decks simultaneously by enabling the Slave setting on each deck. That way, you could have a mix of three tracks going and speed them up while still retaining sync. Most people won’t be using four decks, but the ability to keep two decks synchronized by setting one to master and one to slave is definitely of broader appeal.

4-band EQ

Newer versions of Traktor have brought emulation of real-world mixer EQs and instead of throwing the old versions away, you are able to choose from a list of available EQs (the top three all being different 3-band versions):

It may seem really redundant to have three 3-band EQs, but audio people are more fanatical than religious zealots, so heads would roll if they disappeared. Version 3 added a four-band EQ designed after the Xone:92 mixer.

It’s hard to say whether the sound and cut for each of the four EQs is exactly like the Xone:92 but I’m assuming that if the company would license Native Instruments the name, then they’d have to do a good job of imitating it. Either way, the benefits of a 4-band EQ are clear and having more control over the depth of the mid-end is only going to make your mixes potentially fuller-sounding.

Keep in mind though that if you’re going to use the Xone:92 as your choice, the kill button for bass disappears. Fortunately, there is a simple way to get the same channel kill functionality back: right-click the + sign next to the EQ and choose Switch. This makes hitting the -/+ buttons work like a kill toggle.

Filters

If you live and breathe filters for mixing, then Traktor might disappoint since it provides only six and there is no plug-in support for adding your own.

The good news though, is that filters can be applied to either the master, the deck, or both. That way you could put a flanger on the deck and slap in a receding delay with the master channel. Still, this is the part most in need of updating in Traktor and hopefully the future version will bring VST and Audio Unit/Direct-X plug-in support.

Mix recording and reworking

Although Traktor supports the usual recording straight to an audio file, it also lets you record to it’s own Native Mix recordings, which are like event scripts and not actual audio files.

One benefit of this approach is that you can play back a full mix that’s much smaller than an uncompressed audio file and relies on your existing library. But the main advantage is being able to rework mixes to perfection and not having to rely on an audio editor to remaster a mix by splicing together multiple audio files. To edit a mix using the Native Mix Recorder once you’ve recorded a mix, hit play and then when you find the spot you want to rework, hit record again and release the play button to start overwriting the changes.

This is a huge time-saver and you can use this to rework and hone your mixed CD so that people think you’re a superstar. Just remember: you’re not avoiding playing in public because you can’t actually play that tight, you’re just “increasing the mystique.”

Playlist management

Most DJ programs are happy to let you add your collection and organize them fine and Traktor has very nice options for saving sets and things, but the most important playlist feature it has is Consistency Check—the ability to save you time redoing anything by relinking files and maintaining a clean library. If your collection is a mix of dead links in most apps, you’re often left to fish them out individually or start from scratch. If your application manages cue points and loops with an internal database then that’s not an exciting option, throwing away your database of loops, cue points and track analysis. The Consistency Check in Traktor looks for the physical file on your drive and sees if it’s missing and then lets you connect it back up if you can find the missing tracks. All the associated metadata is then relinked to the files.

This kind of polish is what makes Traktor a good long-term option since it is made for professionals who have extremely tight mixes and gigs to play.

Traktor gripes

Overall, Traktor is enjoyable to use and in its current version, has very few bugs that I can see. That said, stability is still a mixed bag for the Native Mix Recordings. In my experience, I’ve crashed numerous times in a day reworking a mix with the Native Mix Recorder. While it fortunately doesn’t affect live playing, it still needs to be fixed since most metadata changes in Traktor are not written until the app quits, so you can lose work if it crashes.

Also, the zoom +/- buttons for tracks are overlaid at the right of tracks and it’s way too easy to click and stop the track by missing the buttons.

Conclusion

For my own needs, I like Traktor DJ Studio and unfortunately for Mac users, it’s really the only good choice for serious DJing software. I think that while some potential bedroom DJs might be turned off by its austere design, it provides a ton of growing room and creative mixing potential. In its strict emulation of a hardware rig, Traktor lacks a built-in sampler or some of the cooler innovations like an EQ crossfader; sure, you can accomplish the same thing with two knobs going in the opposite direction, but that’s not an option for people without a midi controller; hopefully upcoming versions will fix that. Also, of the high-end packages, Traktor is the most closed with regards to filters, forcing you to use only the ones provided. If it had support for VST plug-ins or OS X Audio Units, it would be near-perfect since what’s in Traktor is executed flawlessly, not the least of which is the high-quality 4-band EQ.

At its usual price of $280, it’s probably too pricey for many who just want to have something for parties, and there’s no Universal Binary yet. That should be out within the next few months and will be a free upgrade for existing users. If you’re considering picking it up, be sure to test it, as it’s the most demanding on hardware of the DJ apps tested.

Pros

• Professional-quality mixer EQ emulation, one with four-band EQ
• Interface is highly customizable while remaining clean at different resolutions/aspect ratios
• Unmatched loop editing
• A wealth of presets for beatjump/looping/etc.
• Top-notch playlist management
• Reworkable mixes
• Master/slave tempo syncing
• Exhaustive tag editing support

Cons

• No EQ crossfade
• No sampler
• No undo for any options like beat grid edits
• Hardware activation is too sensitive to system changes
• Supports only included filters, not plug-ins