[lowlife]

Can you direct me to a shareware (or much cheaper) alternative to the Traktor MP3 mixer?
Should I just bite the bullet and purchase Traktor? It's for a PC, not Mac.
I'm itching to get some beats clashing and clanging round the house... Any advice will be very gratefully received by me, if not my neighbours.

[Monolith]

I'd get a knocked off copy of Ableton Live if I was you - a joy to use.

If you have a beet of cash, get yourself Serato Scratch Live. If you haven't used such a setup before no worries, it's easily mastered with some bedroom/studio practice. You basically drag and drop mp3's into a visual representation of your turntables. Each of the stock records that come with the package are timecoded. You're basically DJ'ing as normal but with a visual monitor. The major plus is that you can use high bitrate mp3s taken direct from your computer and if you're playing live through a laptop in conjunction with the hardware, you don't need to carry round stupid record crates. These are 'virtual crates' in Scratch Live.

Best of luck.

Ableton
Serato

[Bubba]

I would love Serato

[Monolith]

Well, if you're in the NW at any point Bubba, drop us a line and come have a play on it at le studio de West Kirby. Works so well on any laptop even with a measly 256mb of RAM.

[Bubba]

Thanks for the offer mate

If i got Serato it would give me the kick up the arse needed to digitise and sell all my vinyl.

[Monolith]

Or, even better Bubba, if you kick yourself up the arse and sell all that vinyl you'll have some funds towards Serato 

I promise you will love it. Just think about it, you'll be able to tour the land generating revenue from your soon-to-become legendary sets. Ah the beauty of being a self-facilitating media node cum mobile disco mastermind - what more could you ask of a software package!?

[Bubba]

well my days of DJing out are over but i would love to mix up all my old vinyl with stuff i've downloaded just for fun. can serato take 3 decks?

[Monolith]

I don't believe it can, but I've heard people mention in the past that Traktor Scratch can take up to 4 decks. Don't really know owt about Traktor though I'm afraid. You planning a hyper mashup Bubba!?

[Bubba]

No, i just have 3 decks, though one needs fixing tbh.

It would be nice to use one deck for loops, etc and then just use the other two to mix normally on. With software this would be really easy - you could create a whole library of funky loops, etc.

I guess people would usually use a samler/FX unit to achieve this but if you could do it all using software it'd make having a nice little library of sounds easier. I think.

I did used to be able to mix techno on 3 decks but i was practicing > 1hr a day at that time - i would suck balls now.

[Mike Tyson]

3 decks and effects!!

Remember I was after some decks before Crimbo last year Bubba? Well the Mrs pulled a blinder and bought me a set of 1210 mk2's and a djm 400!! Twas the best present I have ever had, before Golt jnr arrived I was locked in the attic with prog churning out for hours on end!!! 

Sorry, totally not related to this thread 

[Bubba]

Nice

Yeah, sry for the off topic'ness

[andy_e]

I've got something called virtualDJ which is pretty handy.

[lowlife]

Thanks for the suggestions and links monolith and andi e.
The screenshot on the Traktor site was enough to make me think it might be rather more professional than I can cope with and expensive to boot. The scratch version does claim to have 4 virtual decks.

The big question would be, will 4 decks make me sound twice as bad or half as good?

[Monolith]

Depending on your budget lowlife, I'd opt for Serato Scratch live. It's very intuitive to use, runs incredibly on minimal RAM and has an amazing forum of devoted users for any help you might need. It also depends on how much time you want to invest into things as to what software/hardware combinations you might like to use.

[lowlife]

thanks again mono - ableton looks even more involved than traktor tbh. will persue your suggestion of serato and see where that gets me. I don't run a monster pc so that aspect of your recommendation is v.interesting.

off topic always cool s'far as I'm concerned, particularly when it contains an admission like "i would suck balls now" .

[lowlife]

Respek for the man like bigphil, who possibly has or has not assisted me with this matter