Came across this on djhistory a while back. Someone was asking about Traktor and Francios K pitched in with some great posts. Not digital myself but I think it's very valuable insight from someone at that level and should be useful to some of you. Interesting that he's been digital nine years (so much so that there's a split in digital djing
) and reckons he's fairly close to future proofing his set up.
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• Do not use 'pitch correction' on playback as it clouds up the sound. (same as 'Master Tempo' warbling on Pioneer decks)
• Turn off 'automatic limiting' and just watch your levels instead so that nothing ever goes in the red.
• Use 'classic' as the EQ type, that one sounds the cleanest.
PICK THE HARDWARE CONTROLLER YOU WANT TO WORK WITH. (fairly important part)
Not specific to Traktor, but do not ever use mp3 files. If you encode your own vinyl, do it at high bit rate / high sampling rate using audiophile-grade equipment, not passing through a mixer (rather directly going from a stand-alone phono preamp properly matched to your cartridge into the A/D input) and pay attention to having as good a cartridge and A/D converter as you can afford. Budget soundcards are cheap for a reason. Don't record too hot, as it can create very nasty-sounding clipping artifacts.
Simplified version: Sh*t in = sh*t out.
The sum total of all of these things will make a huge, let me correct that -gigantic- difference IMO.
Then again, that's if you care about sound, and want to look at it from the professional angle. Not everyone does...
[sarcasm]
Alternately, you can buy a cheap USB turntable to save a couple of quid, only to have the priceless pleasure later down the line of spending hundreds of hours of your time to re-encode everything a second time once you realize it all sounded like pathetic crap. One clear advantage of this second method is: you can do your part in helping to reinforce the stereotype that digital DJ'ing sounds terrible and will not ever be up to par with anything else. When if fact it's not your DJ system that sucks, rather the consistently poor and wretched encoding quality of your vinyl rips due to your cutting corners in the first place, thinking you knew better and could get by without making the necessary investment into it.
As an added bonus, you should also expect an unusual high amount of people who don't know anything about how to operate it offering unsolicited advice on how bad it is and that it crashes all the time or whatever else, even though most times they have very little or no personal experience whatsoever with it. Go with the flow on this one, it's part for the course, and nowadays nowhere quite as bad as it was when people like myself started using it around nine years ago. But as with any disruptive technology, expect that it is bound to make certain people extremely uncomfortable. If this happens, then you'll know you're probably on the right path. Laughing out loud [/sarcasm]
Now about the most important part: budget a backup solution for both your music collection (the database, usually somewhere on your internal hard drive, where depends on if it's a Mac or a PC) as well as for your audio files. Back up both frequently. There's no going around that unless you want to lose all of your work. You may want to consider having your audio files on an external hard disk rather than sharing space on your system disk. Caveat Emptor.
Then there's tagging. As your collection grows it might become necessary to invest a fair amount of time into entering all of the proper information in their respective fields (artist name, song name, version, etc... as well as graphics) The more you pay attention to this, the better it will make it as your collection grows.That way you can search for stuff and quickly find it. That's what long winter nights are for....!
If saving disk space is a concern Traktor accepts FLAC as a format (no matter what bit and sample rate), which has the advantage of making your files have tags and graphics embedded into them if you feel this is important to you.
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Hey, that's merely my opinion from experience, but there's no doubt that I am in the minority with this. The way most people go about it indicates that they don't agree with it, as most often than not they seem quite content and unbothered playing those mp3 files.
Those are great at home on little computer speakers or on earbuds, but in a big club with massive amplification there is a noticeable difference. Also when you start pitching them up or down they seem to degrade far more.
Allegedly good MP3 = 320 kB/s
My audio files from vinyl = 4608 kB/s
Which do you think has more resolution to describe the sound when you scale up? (to use another analogy, would you take a jpg image from a web site and blow it up to billboard-size advert that's 4 meters wide?... same thing basically)
If you play noisy bar gigs and weddings no one might care, but if you get to deal with decent sound systems in bigger venues, that's another story... why start at the lowest-common-denominator which will limit you for the future, rather than aim high and be prepared for better situations to materialize?
That brought me to an interesting thought actually, about the difference between vinyl and DIY digital.
With vinyl you're basically playing back something that the mastering engineer took great care in putting together, so it's always bound to sound pretty great (unless they did a dodgy job, but it's presentable in most cases). With digital it's up to the operator to make sure that they use a high-resolution sound file to at least come close or match that, but to be fair most people don't care or know enough about it to actually understand what they should be doing to make it as good as what the mastering engineer did. So in comparison, the vinyl makes it easier to obtain good sound as that's already been done by someone qualified and out of the DJ's hand. Digital on the other hand could widely vary depending on how competent the DJ in question is with regards to preparing and encoding their music collection.... these added variables make it that many who try actually never manage to get very far, and certainly not at the level of quality that vinyl will deliver right out of the box.
Yet there are many examples of high-resolution digital files that sound truly glorious when properly prepared. Also many bad ones, like those over-maximized major-label CDs which are maximized to death and have audible distortion artifacts. That so few people care to only play the high-quality stuff has given digital DJing a bad name, but those stereotypes are only generalizations and need not apply to you or anyone else determined to use these new tools to their full potential. (which obviously requires far more work and dedication, but will also yield very satisfying results)
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Continues
here. Well worth a read even if you're on wax or digitising your collection. Talks a good bit about converting all his reggae.
