![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() With the latest flux mode it is possible to work your chosen audio out of recognition and create build ups ready to drop back into the original audio track at the point at which the music would have been playing if you hadn’t decided to tweak your sounds into the realm of live remixing. Over the last few years, there have been plenty of improvements and upgrades to the software, including the much lauded remix decks as well as more traditional looping and cueing and FX control. It is often said that a controller’s worth is calibrated by the worthiness of its software, and aside from Serato DJ, you’d struggle to get much better, or more popular, than Native Instruments’ Traktor Pro 2. (If you’re a Traktor Pro user, you’ll be happy to know that the app syncs in both directions with the desktop software all of your imported library files, cue points, and beat grid fixes are automatically shared between the two via Dropbox.Rob Lee finds out what the subtle new updates in Native Instruments’ flagship controllers for their Traktor software have to offer. Perhaps the most fun comes when you tap the Freeze button on one of your tracks, which lets you trigger slices of a loop quantized to the set beat grid, playing them like a you would with a sampler. You can then easily surf and scrub a waveform with your fingers setting cue points and hacking out different-sized loops is incredibly intuitive. When you load a new track, it will auto-sync when it’s not perfect, you can go in and adjust the beat markers to tighten things up. You don’t need to use it, but the app has its own built-in recommendation engine, which uses tempo, key, and other metadata to determine which songs will work well with the one you’re currently playing. After the initial bulk import-which can take a couple of hours for big libraries-you select a track and load it into one of two decks. Traktor accesses the music directly from your iTunes library. It looks minimalist and feels intuitive, with hundreds of small-but-smart touches, like a popup jog wheel for tempo, and even a built-in tutorial to get you up and running. It’s all incredibly clean, dressed up slick in NI’s now-trademark black, grey, and orange color palette. There’s a crossfader and a tab system for using EQ, FX, and loop mechanics, as well as a dropdown X/Y interface for “playing” (and locking, should you so desire) individual effects. There’s nary a virtual knob to be found here, but that’s not the biggest leap made by the team behind Traktor DJ: Instead of looking at a virtual record on a virtual platter, your main means of interfacing with your music is via the waveforms of the two songs you’re mixing. The results, while a bit late to the table(s), are immediately playable and surprisingly robust. It does away with virtually all skeuomorphic detritus, opting instead for a more minimalist, laser-focused approach on usability. Conceived by the same team behind the desktop Traktor, the touchscreen-centric approach brings a new perspective to the entire experience, including everything from navigating your music library to adding effects and setting loop points. Native Instruments certainly took its time in bringing its flagship DJ software, Traktor, to the iPad. ![]()
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