Everywhere you look these days there is a new DJ control surface which supposedly allows you to get 'hands-on' control on your favourite DJ software. We have tried almost everything on the market and many of those control surfaces are available to our students: from the humble Hercules DJ console (actually quite good) to the luxurious Allen & Heat Xone 3D (very good) there is something for everyone.

All these controller come with a layout or a preset for Native Instruments' Traktor, and actually some of these controllers come even bundled together with a 'lite' version of Traktor.
You will be then forgiven for assuming that Traktor is, you know, like.. a software that can be used to ...err ... mix records. Like a DJ. It certainly is the world's best known product claiming to be a DJ software.
Why otherwise would every manufacturer worry about reassuring the world about Traktor compatibility?
Maybe, I dare suggest, because they all wanted so desperately to see the emperor's new clothes.

Native Instruments has over the years created great and greater products, fantastic synthesizers and samplers: thanks to the sound quality, reliability, stilish graphic interface of their instruments they have  grown in to quite a big company, and their marketing skills have grown likewise. When two or three years ago no one cared about guitars and DJs were the new big thing, everyone rushed in to this market. Native Instruments did so too, allowing their Traktor 2 (which wasn't too bad) to be developed in to the monster it is today: obviously they never felt like asking a real DJ about the new user interface.

When the new software was released, ambitiously named 'Traktor 3 DJ Studio' I must admit I fell for it like everyone else: the new interface looked glorious, maybe a bit complicated but you always assume it will all become obvious as soon as you familiarize yourself with the controls. There is a built-in online record store, great! Software emulations of 4 different mixers, Wow! and 4 turntables! and support for time code vynil, and effects, and more effects, and the ability to assign midi controllers to everything, and more and more and more.
But can you find the first beat of a track and set a CUE point? no. It creates automatically a temporary CUE point which is lost as soon as you stop again. Or you can go to extreme lenghts to create a permanent cue point, but you have to go to a special panel, choose from a list of different markers, give it a name (!) and then there is no single button to recall it.
Can you assing a midi controller to the pitch control? Yes, but it won't work as you expect it to work (this would require a lengthy explanation, just try yourself to assign a fader control, like that of a technics turntable. In fact try to assign any controller to anything and enjoy the experience!).
These little details, together with the general mess that is the interface, make Traktor simply impossible to use. For one year I have tried and tried again, I have read the manual twice and I have asked everyone I could find. And the only people I found using Traktor, when questioned about mixing, admitted they don't use it 'like that' – they use it as a juke-box, or just with time-coded vinyl (therefore essentially bypassing the stupid interface), or they claim they can mix but actually do not attempt more than three consecutive (pre-prepared) tracks. In fact the more I asked the more it became difficult to find a single DJ in the world that actually uses Traktor. In the meantime Native Instruments has introduced a few fixes, dramatically dropped the price and dropped the pretentious 'Studio' part of the name. Is it better now? No.

How bad is Traktor 3 becomes even more obvious as soon as you try a different solution. Virtual DJ is exactly everything that Traktor is not, it does pretty much the same stuff, actually it does more because it allows mixing and scratching with video files too, and is so far the best DJ software I have tried. The problem with Virtual DJ as far as we are concerned is that it works only on Windows. I can always reboot my macbook in Windows and use it, but we'd like to be able to have a software that we can teach for our DJ courses that is compatible with both platforms.

Now good news might be coming from Numark: thety have adopted Virtual Dj and renamed it Cue (ironically naming it with the main feature broken in Traktor), and apparently a Mac version is on the way. If everything goes well we  will be trying it soon and we will include it in our DJ classes.

There are a few other options available out there, Serato Scratch is probably the best but also the most expensive and it only makes sense when used with time-coded vinyl, and M-Audio Torq is new on the market, we'll see. If any one out there has a suggestion for which system we should adopt we'd like to hear it. As long as you don't mention Traktor.