1. Virtual Dj Beat Grid
2. Traktor Beat Grid

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This topic contains 11 replies, has 4 voices, and was last updated by 5 years, 4 months ago.

• Beatgridding is one of those things that is proprietary in DJ software. It’s one of the things that defines DJ software and companies keep the way they do their beatgridding close to their chest.

  Traktor for example works great with EDM/electronic beat music, but frankly, imho, sucks at working with less tightly drummed material. Serato and Mixvibes Cross on the other hand have great flexible beatgridding and allow for you to tighten up just about any track. Don’t know about VDJ because I haven’t used it since version 3 😀 .

  Beatgridding therefor is not a general technique, let alone standardized.

  If you are saying that you had cue points (do you really mean cue points or hot cues that you set manually or are you talking about load points, the point a track is cueued up to when loaded into a deck and is set automatically by the software?) and they are now off, that seems to be a VDJ problem. If your database was good under windows and now it’s shot under Mac OSX, that seems to be a really bad consequence of you migrating platforms and you should be in touch with VDJ people about this.

  I am gonna take a wild stab at things and say that what you mean is that you didn’t have this in order for 20.000 tracks on Windows and it still isn’t in order now that you are on Mac.

  My comments and thoughts on that (just me of course):
  1) There is no software that will do what want. Beatgrid info can only be used in the softwware you beatgridded in.
  2) If your DJ software gets the beatgrid wrong, the only way to fix it is manually.
  3) Depending on your DJ software fixing it is easy and fun, hard and cumbersome or even impossible (like fixing non-lineair beats in Traktor)
  4) You have too many tracks in your main collection (about 2,000 sounds about right and you have 10x that). Nothing wrong with having more (mobile DJs typically have 20,000-40,000 tracks for request purposes), but you don’t want/need to beatgrid everything.
  5) Get off your lazy butt! LOL. Start doing the work my man. Even in this day of advanced technology some things are a manual labor (of love). Also by beatgridding and setting hot cues and loops and such you gain intimitate knowledge of your (key) tracks. This will make you an unmeasurably better DJ.
  6) Be proficient in manual beatmatching. Once you are comfortable doing that, it really don’t matter to much if you run into a track that isn’t or can’t be (maybe 20% of tracks are near impossible to grid properly or without too much work) beatgridded, you won’t be fazed but just do it manually and be done with it. This is also true when transitioning from one DJ to another or when being presented with music on memory stick or CD or just when playing on some older CDJs (without sync).
  7) The point where a track is cueued up to when loaded is usually dependant on the volume level (it needs to be louder than a certain level to be recognised by your software as having started) and things like snap make sure it cues the track to the first beat over the treshold (or even first downbeat).

  So, long story short: select your top 1,000-2,000 tracks for your core collection, run them through the beatgridding and cue point setting process and guard these tracks with your life (i.e. make back-ups!). Assuming about 60% will be right, that leaves 400 to 800 tracks needing work. Let’s say 5 minutes per track average (can be done quicker once you get more experienced in it). That’s 2000 to 4000 minutes. Roughly 35 – 70 hours of work. Say 10 hours a week and in 1-2 months you will have your stuff in serious order. Think you will value your music collection more then? You bet! Think you’ll feel good about yourself and having done the grind? Seriously yes! Think your knowledge of the core collection has risen? A lot! Think it will make you a better DJ? I almost guarantee it.

  Hope that helps.

  First off, sorry that I misunderstood. I rectract parts of my words and by all means stay on your (not so lazy) ass 😀

  

  In my opinion, you either didn’t migrate the beatgrid/cue info, or – as I said before – something has gone wrong in the migration and the problem really sits with VDJ.

  I really don’t recall anything about software that can batch process beatgrids, specifically since beatgrid (and cue point) info is usally kept in a proprietary database belonging to/with the DJ software.

  I don’t know how VDJ does it, but Traktor has a seperate folder where it keeps all the files that contain proprietary information (like beatgrids, waveforms, cue points). Mixvibes has something called Peak Folder that has that kind of information. It is different from the collection file! and you need to have both migrated. I am sure Serato and VDJ have something similar.

  So when you migrate, it isn’t enough to move your tracks over, you have to move those folders too and make sure the software is pointed to their correct new location (folder naming is different on mac than it is on PCs).

  Please let us know what you did when you migrated so somebody with more VDJ knowledge might help you out some more.

  When you now load a new track now, does VDJ take time to analyze it?

  If it does, then perhaps you have not copied over your database settings.
  I’m on Windows, and I’ve kept all my tracks sorted by type and genre, and kept them in one master folder. Just outside the master folder, VDJ has created a .xml file (I can’t remember the name, but it said something like “Virtual DJ Database.xml”) or something similar.

  That was for Windows. I don’t know if the Mac version does the same. Try asking on the VDJ forums.

  Sorry m8, as I said I don’t use VDJ and can’t help you any further. Hopefully the VDJ support people WILL come up with an answer/solution for you.

  You’ve just discouraged me towards owning a Mac ðŸ™x81

  Don’t see why that is Cheeku. The OP has a problem after migrating his VDJ collection from PC to Mac. It could have just as easily happened the other way around.

  I have gone back and fro between Mac and PC a few times and actually had both in use at the same time at one point (been a while, but had a Traktor setup then with everything on my external HD).

  Hard to tell in hindsight, but somewhere something went wrong, if this was a VDJ issue (some kind of file or rights incompatibility) or user issue (making some – minor – mistake he wasn’t aware he was making), but it most decidedly, imho, has nothing to do with the Mac platform.

  I use my Mac only for DJ-ing. All my other computers and laptop are still windows and will most likely stay that way, but I have to say that it is very well suited for DJ-ing.

  Just my two cents.

  I think what happened was that, to VDJ, your files are in a different place and aren’t the same files. I use it on windows and i would check in the config menu to check and fix the database. Make sure you back up the file first just in case. Let me know what happens.

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Mixxx Mixxx computed onces. If the id3 bpm tag of a track exists, TrackDao::getTrackFromDB will create a BeatGrid object, but Mixxx beat grid are BeatGrids in version.

OK OK you've probably thought through everything in this thread before, plus had it pointed out a dozen times in the past, but this really is where Mixxx gives me the most headaches, as correcting tempo and aligning the beatgrid in MIxxx takes up so much more time than it should!!
Before I start can I ask what the right-click on the set beat grid button does? The tool tip says something about aligning to other playing deck but not sure what it means. Doesn't seem to have any mentioned in any of the manual pages I can find.. Wondering as I'd like to give it a new function.
So one of the main things with the beat grid there is another very recent post about, marking the downbeats. Personally I'd quite like to see a beats-per-measure option but many other mixing programs assume a four beats, and as loop set/half/doubling, beat jumps etc usually work on this assumption it's not too bad a one to make.

Virtual Dj Beat Grid

I would like to see it when you click on the Set Beat Grid Button (or trigger it in another way) you set the position of the first main measure. So this downbeat would be marked as 1, the next as 2, 3... Optionally negative numbers going back towards the start of the track.
Once you have a first measure marked in this way any changes to the BPM should use this as their anchor point! (Currently the beatgrid is always anchored to the beginning of the track and this can be really annoying if there is no beat for a long time and the calculated tempo is well off!)

Traktor Beat Grid

If you have a first measure/anchor point set then right-clicking on the beatgrid marker button should move the closest beat to the current cursor position and recalculate the BPM (you can get exact BPMs of a track in just three clicks and a little scrolling this way! It needs to be beat and not measure so that it still works with non 4/4 music.) -- If the track is not set to be constant BPM then guess this would have to enter data into whatever BPM table is used..
Do keyboard/MIDI shortcuts for changing BPM of the track exist? Thinking of like the Novation Twitch will allow you to change BPM of tracks (not playing BPM) with a knob, again much easier to see when you're getting close then final adjustment could be done either manually or with the method mentioned above.
Does this sound feasible at all?