![]() That said, though, I don’t hate the design of the 4Trak by any means. Essentially, designing controllers like this requires a user to learn the muscle memory for twice as many things, something that could be avoided – and in the process more closely follow the design principles of ‘classic’ hardware separates. Most of the controls are vertically symmetrical, and this is something I’ve moaned about on controllers before. Being almost the size of a couple of CDJs and a four channel mixer gives everything room to breathe, and I felt much more like I was DJing the way I remember it standing behind actual, honest to goodness pieces of hardware, rather than hunched over a piece of hobby gear and ‘emulating’ the DJing experience. Numark haven’t really signed onto that philosophy – on their pro gear at least – and it makes a huge difference to how the 4Trak feels. Moving from turntable and mixer setups to controllers seems to have meant, for many developers at least, that just because they can go smaller, that they should. Some of the controls on the unit, the throwbacks to the NS6’s Itch implementation, have been left unmapped – bravo to Numark for leaving them available rather than blocking them off underneath a revised faceplate. Everything’s laid out logically and works exactly as it should, and most impressively the jog platters are absolutely flawless – something that almost nobody else has done. If you’re planning on crazy remapping then you’re going to have to jump into Traktor’s controller manager and get your hands dirty just like everyone else, though, and of course that means all the pain and headaches that come with trying to edit a mapping that tallies up tons of lines of assignments and modifiers will be yours to endure just like everyone else.Ĭustomising aside, the 4Trak has some of the best factory standard Traktor implementation I’ve seen from a 3rd party controller – if not the best. For all Traktor’s advanced configuration opportunities buried in its myriad settings, having a piece of gear that feels essentially like a 1st party option is a huge boon for Numark and the 4Trak both in control and audio settings. If you don’t already own Traktor Pro, there’s a special ‘4Trak Edition’ version of Traktor in the box that has most of the features of the Pro version, save a couple of options for effects modes and, of course, none of the 2.5 remix deck goodness. Plenty of controllers ship with mappings for Traktor straight out of the box, but 4Trak goes one further and can simply be plugged in and selected from Traktor’s setup wizard.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |