Today my BCD3000 arrived in the mail, just in time for my friends' birthday party and going away party. I was excited to get this mixer to use for podcasting, but mostly for improving my hip-hop dj'ing skills. Probably the most exciting feature about it is the ability to scratch mp3's in traktor, but just being able to play and cue music through mp3's really opens up a serious dj'ing ability beyond just using a regular mixer.
Overall, I'm very happy with it. Right out of the box, I just plugged it in, installed traktor 3 le, fired it up, navigated to my mp3 library and it worked like a charm. All of the mixer controls interface with traktor seamlessly. For playing and cueing music, it is amazing...
technorati tags:mp3, hiphop, dj, bcd3000
There are two problems I've encountered, though. One is the speed of the scratch control. It seems like with such a small control, its hard to really do much scratching. You have to hold down the scratch button and move the dial, which makes using the crossfader hard or impossible. In addition, the scratch control is so small, that you have to move it a lot if say, you want to scratch enough to repeat a particular word or phrase. I definitely have a lot to learn about scratching, but I'm not sure if the bcd3000 has enough flexibility to do what I want.
Another, stranger problem, is that after about 45 minutes of use, traktor starts having small glitches in song playback. This gets gradually worse until it is noticeable to everyone. For now, all I can tell is that I have to stop the software and start it up again and the problem goes away. I'm using a MacBook Pro 2Ghz Intel Core Duo with 1.5 Gigs of ram. I quit all other applications while using traktor.
Since there are external devices jacks, I may be able to use my ipod to fill in the software restart time, but when I tried it in the middle of the party tonight, the audio quality off my ipod into the phono jack on the back of the bcd3000 sounded awful, even after I adjusted to ipod volume.
This is my first experience with it, so hopefully I'll figure out how to overcome these problems. So far, though, I'm really, really excited about having an amazing midi controller that is great for dj'ing. I hope to try it out with vj software soon as well, because it really makes traktor usable on a whole new level for live sound performance.
Since anonymous comments on this blog are disabled, if you have thoughts on this reply, email me at lotu5 at the domain resist.net . I'd love to hear any solutions folks have for the problems I list above. Thanks!!!
update: when holding down the scratch button, it seems that the crossfader and volumes for each deck are disabled. could this be a midi limitation? or by design? or a limitationof traktor3 le? whatever it is, it means that real scratching is impossible.
