You ever tried mixing 2 tracks when you only have 128 increments between +/- 12% or even +/- 35% like i use in traktor?! Its f**king impossible. With Decks, be they vinyl or CD, the analogue(or at least very fine grained digital) nature of the pitch faders means fine control to beatmatch. Christ knows why they even bother having pitch faders on DJ controllers, its totally pointless, and yet manufacturers keep building more expensive (and i might point out, still crappy toy looking and often plastic tack) controllers.
Just yesterday i figured out that i can rig up 2 of the continuos knobs on my Axiom 49 to control pitch of one deck, one for coarse (moves in increments of about 0.25%) and one for fine (about 0.01% increments) so i can quickly dial up whatever pitch change of up to +/- 35% and still have fine control for beatcmatching. This means i can mash up different genres and tempos quite easily.
It just seems mad to have sliders when what we need is a controller with a regular crossfader, and a say 4 sets of 8 continuous knobs in groups, and a few buttons. This would be useful for multi-deck mixing in programs like Traktor, or Live, or Conectiv, or DjDecks or whatever. No useless faders for pitch please!!
I know many softwares now offer the instant beat-match, but in most cases it requires pre-preparation of tracks for perfect sync (Live, traktor) and even though sometimes they can sync without using warp markers or whatever, this only works well with straight 4 to the floor stuff with a dominant kick. I love Tracktor(and live) but damn its irritating having to pre-prepare every one of thousands of MP3s i have.
its not exactly condusive to improvised, on-the-fly mixing and trying new things is it? isn't this part of the essence of mixing records?!
Anyhoo - someone, somehwere, for gods sake make a decent DJ controllers!!
