Tonight I went to the Traktor 2 Launch hosted by Store DJ at their Brisbane store in the Valley.

Presented by Jason Hearn a.k.a. JaseFOS (NI Product Specialist, CMI Australia) and DJ Kuya (Store DJ), the event got off to a rocky start and not the best sales pitch by saying how easy and awesome the new Sample Banks are in T2 and then failing to get the demo working and even later when trying again it was a poor demonstration. I hope it was just first time demo jitters and it gets better in Sydney.

Jason Hearn did most of the presenting and it's unfortunate he didn't just do more hands-on demos, as he talked about how he uses cue points to do quick jumps in his mixes, so it would have been nice to see him actually doing it.


Anyway, the event was about Traktor 2 and it was all about the new features such as the coloured waveform, which I'm still unsure how that's going to help but at least it looks pretty, right ?

The new Sample Banks which are from the S4 version of Traktor looks very cool, just unsure if I can assign all my effects (ala Midifighter) to each individual sample or the bank of 4 ... 5 new effects have been added with about 2 of those that I think I'll actually use.


There was a decent sized crowd there from all walks of life -- though the scratch DJs were outnumbered as there were only 3 people in the crowd. Clearly, everyone was there to see the S4 in action and it would have been nice to have seen more with that control and T2.

Sure, the S4 is a sweet controller and if I had a spare grand I'd get one, but I already have a setup that I'm pretty happy with - Behringer BCD3000 + Midifighter. But, if you're looking for the best setup for starting out in the realm of Digital DJing, then you should definitely consider the S4.


My mate who's into CDJs was pretty pumped about how you can use HID to communicate with Traktor and CDJ 900/2000s, thereby giving you a fully responsive and familiar midi controller. He's still not totally sold on the S4 though over a Xone 4D or DX controllers.

Still, if you're looking for a really nice run down of Traktor 2's features, you can't go past Ean Golden from DJ TechTools ten minute complete walkthrough.