Spinning on the 1s and 0s: Traktor, Ableton, Serrato, Rekordbox - the digital DJing thread

it's just useful having all that stuff in there if I want to do fast cuts etc.

Can anyone school me on DJ pools? I'm having difficulty finding download sources for the kind of music I like to play out (mostly afrobeats/dancehall/soca/global beats) since the demise of Google Play. DJ Pools have been mentioned, but I've no idea how these work. I mean, really I don't want a massive glut of tunes - I like to download things on a track by track basis.

Is this thing on?

Getting ready to DJ some again and updating all my digital stuff. Updated Rekordbox and turned on the "phrase detection". Is this thing useful at all? So far everything I've analyzed has been pretty wrong. I mean maybe it's helpful if you take it as a symbol of some sort of "change", but it's def not getting "verse" and "chorus" anywhere near correct.

Yeah it's not so impressive at this point, although I guess it saves you some time if you previously did this all manually.

Speaking of apps & new features, I'm very impressed with Djay Pro 5 (came out a few months ago), I think these guys are ahead of the pack and I've particularly enjoyed two new tricks:
- 'fluid beatgrid' detection, this works remarkably well, obv most useful for funk/disco with real drummers but even machine-drummed songs with tempo changes benefit a lot from it. Basically, allows you to auto-warp your incoming tracks to the wavering tempo of your current playing track
- Crossfader FX, which auto-applies certain EQ/FX 'macros' to the crossfader. It kind of feels like cheating (like many other things in digital DJing do), but it does free up one hand to do other stuff

(and yes, feel free to make the obvious joke here)

Getting ready to DJ some again and updating all my digital stuff. Updated Rekordbox and turned on the "phrase detection". Is this thing useful at all? So far everything I've analyzed has been pretty wrong. I mean maybe it's helpful if you take it as a symbol of some sort of "change", but it's def not getting "verse" and "chorus" anywhere near correct.

Cute. I was just reading your Facebook posts about your new setup!

I believe I co-authored the method and wrote the implementation for their “phrase detection” feature (I’m not 100% sure, I see they included the compiled code in the package, but I don’t know whether they are calling it), so I took the plunge and bought an annual subscription and installed the app.

I cannot believe I just spent $360 on this. The app itself is Unity garbage and the web service functionality is half-baked. What about the analysis features? From a signal processing and machine learning perspective, horrible. Tempo? It’s the mean tempo. I play mostly dance music and useless when you care about phasing and want to to accommodate minor tempo changes. Key? It’s the mean key. Especially useless for dance music from a mixing perspective. I appreciate searching for an average tempo or key from the perspective of managing a large collection, but it is entirely useless for mixing. Finally, I knew beat detection would be an issue the moment it prompted me with the following dialog:

“Track Analysis Mode: Normal or Dynamic”

I can’t believe they show this to a user. The “Normal” option is followed by a list of seemingly arbitrary BPM intervals. If I were to guess, “Normal” means “register your track to some predefined grid” and “Dynamic” is “register your track to a predicted grid.” As far as I know, neither option is ideal for anyone. In my opinion, the far better option is what Ableton provides by letting users define their grid and the way the track is registered to the grid.

How do I turn on phrase detection? I really want to see it.

I found it. I don’t understand this. It looks like it’s doing some type of next token prediction but, like you said, it’s garbage.