The following Windows tutorial will get Traktor and Ableton all synced up and implement the concept of smart mixing into your set up. Some of you may be thinking, “What is smart mixing”? This is a good Question, and the Belvario Smart Mixer site answers it well. “”Smart mixing” is a term introduced by Moldover, a controllerist digital musician who uses a sophisticated software and hardware configuration that allows him to make fast changes to the mix with a minimum of control movement. One component of this is his “smart mixer” Reaktor ensemble, which makes it easy to do basic automated EQ mixing with a simple fader move in Ableton Live (in Live 7 it’s possible to do with only native audio effects).
You will learn how to:
1) Route Audio From Traktor and into an Ableton Live smart mixer.
2) Sync Abletons Midi clock to Traktor which will be hosting the master tempo
3) Allowing use of a midi controller in two programs at once.
You will need:
1) Midi-OX (free)
2) Midi Yoke Junction (free)
3) Asio4all (free)
4) Virtual Audio Cable (not free) - If you find a free alternative please leave a comment.
5) Traktor (not free)
6) Ableton Live (not free)
7) Belvario’s Ableton Live Smart Mixer (free)OR if you want to use moldovers smart mixer
Moldover’s Reaktor Smart Mixer (free if you own Reaktor5)
8) If using Moldover smart mixer you will need Reaktor5 (not free)
9) If using Belvario smart mixer you will need slim slow slider side chain compression VST(free)
Note: If your sound card that supports internal audio routing consult your manual for the steps that involve internal audio routing. Also do not use virtual audio cable or asio4all, instead use the software and drivers that came with your sound card
Getting Started!
I suggest starting small and working your way up so start with the Belvario smart mixer. You will also find the Belvario smart mixer to be much more CPU friendly and simpler to use. After you have the hang of this you can use some of Moldovers effects in your effects chain, or change over to Moldover smart mixing if you prefer that. Both sets of files have an Ableton live file that you can open to help make setting up smart mixing easier.
Step 1: Setting up Virtual Audio Cable
After installing the software mentioned above and rebooting your computer, The first thing we need to do is create two virtual audio in/out sets of cables that will enable Traktor to export its Audio to Ableton Live. You will need to open the Virtual Audio Cable Control Panel to do this. Change the set of cables to 2 sets(top left of control panel) - it should then look something like this :
Note: The more decks you want to work with the more sets of cables you will need, 1 set = 1 deck, 2 sets = 2 decks and so on. Here we are setting up two decks but this is easily scales to 3 or 4 decks.
Step 2: Setting up Midi-OX.
Windows does not normally allow two programs to access the same midi controller at the same time, so we will need to get around this by creating two virtual midi devices that export the data from your midi device. To do this we open Midi-OX and click Options then in the drop down list select midi devices, In the Midi Inputs box you need to select your midi device, then in the outputs box select midi Yoke 1 and midi Yoke 2 as shown above.
Step 3:Setting up Traktor
Open Traktor, Click File then Audio Setup. Set your Audio Device to ASIO4ALL. Next click Control Panel, click advanced to enable more options in the asio4all panel. You will need to disable all other audio devices besides Virtual Audio Cable signal outs. The more decks you want to work with the more Virtual Cables you will select here, one cable for each deck. In this instance we are using two decks as shown above
Next we need to route the decks to their respective Virtual Audio cables, exit the Asio4all panel after setting it up as shown above. Now on the left hand menu in the Traktor settings menu click Output routing as we will be mixing externally in Ableton the first thing you need to do is select external mixing mode. Now you need to tell Trakor which Virtual Audio cables to use on which deck, adjust with your settings so they look like whats shown below:
Note: The more decks you wish to use the more Virtual Cables you will have to select here.
Traktor will be hosting the master tempo so we have to set the midi clock up to a midi pathway Ableton can access. Expand the menu and select Midi Clock, set the midi interface to ‘Out To MIDI Yoke 3′. Make sure to tick the send midi clock box as shown here. Once you have completed this tutorial you can come back and tweak the midi clock delay to get everything perfectly on time.
Now its time to select the midi device Traktor is going to use, on the preferences menu expand the “Hotkey and Midi setup” menu, then select Midi Interfaces from the Menu. Next set midi yoke 1 on just the in as shown below:
Step 4: Setting up Ableton Live
Open Ableton Live then open the Belvario or Moldover’s Ableton Live file. Make sure you put it into your Ableton VST directory and enable VST support in Ableton file settings menu like shown:
Click options on the Ableton Live menu, then preferences. You need to select the driver type to Asio, then the audio device to Asio4all. Click hardware config and set up your Asio Panel as shown in the diagram below. Once again the more Decks you want to have control of the more Virtual Cables Ins you need to select, for every one deck you need one virtual cable in activated. You also need to enable your main audio device this time, in my case this is the Sigmatel out which is the chipset on my laptop. If you have a sound card with two outs, you should enable both of these outs to allow monitoring in Ableton live. I only have a single channel out from my laptop at this time, this is why only one is showing and activated.
Ableton needs to know what audio ports you want it want to work with so click the Input config button on the Audio config screen. In my case Virtual Audio Cable routed my audio to Stereo 9/10 for Deck A and Stereo 1/2 for Deck B, strange outputs but at least the program is functional ;) You might want to turn all the inputs on to start with to work out which cable is which, then disable the unused cables when you work out which cables are been used by Traktor. In the end it will end up looking something like this :
Now click Output Config, if you want to do your mixing externally on a mixer you will need to select one stereo channel for each deck you want to route. If your mixing with midi controllers you will need 2 stereo outputs enabled, one for your mix and the other for monitoring. I personally only have a single stereo channel sound card so i only have the one output enabled as shown :
The midi interfaces that Ableton will be using has to be set up next. Click Midi Sync on the Ableton menu then select Midi Yoke 2 and 3’s Track, Sync and Remote all to on. As shown here:
Now close the Ableton setup window and enable external sync by clicking the EXT button on the top left of the Ableton Live main window as shown below:
Change the inputs for the first two tracks in either the Moldover setup or the Belvario setup. Click the IO button to configure the inputs and outputs in your Ableton channels(circled in the picture), then change the inputs as shown in the rectangle.
You have now successfully set up from beginning to end the very basics of a synced smart mixer setup from Traktor to Ableton. I suggest assigning midi controls on your device for your EQ’s to control the sends on the Belvario smart mixer, or alternatively assign them to the smart mixer in the reaktor5 ensemble.
Personalize your mix by adding in VST’s and assigning them how you like, its also possible to add extra audio channels and add sampled(or your own content) to these tracks and have these channels smart mixed. This is only scratching the surface the possibilities are endless, all thats left for you to do is explore them.
Bravo, and that’s just the *first step* of the process!
Yups, I’m gonna stop the jibberjabber and try that sucka out soon! :D
Is there anything comparable for Mac?
Look at the sound flower post. That will get your audio into Ableton.
http://www.djtechtools.com/2008/03/29/route-any-dj-software-into-ableton/
GREAT WORK BENTO SAN!
THX
very cool
Sorry, I tried everything like u were saying & some other ways… but nothing works. The audio cables send no signal. I really don?t know what i?m doing wrong. what kind of system do you use? xp, vista?
Greetz from germany…
oh yes…now it works :-p nice!!!!
ok i have got much much latency…will try some tomorrow…
GREAT WORK!
I made a partition with XP installed just for producing and live mixing. I found vista would produce audio fragments in my setup that went away when i installed XP.
Yeah, you will have to tinker with all your latency settings in asio4all to get optimum latency settings.
If we can find an alternative to Virtual Audio Cable with lower latency thats preferably free this might help a little, i will try to explore the alternatives but i invite everyone to help.
If your audio card has quality drivers with its own virtual audio routing i imagine this would also help reduce the latency. Ive heard these exist but its not exact a marketing. So this is another thing people can help with, what external usb/firewire sound cards have quality low latency virtual audio drivers.
So thats two things everyone can help with-
1) Help find a Virtual Audio Cable alternative with lower latency - preferably free - this is not desperate but i believe there it potential room for improvement.
2) A list of external Audio Devices with at least 4 independent channels (bare minimum for mixing) that have their own low latency virtual audio routing drivers. (Mac users even might be able to help here)
All help is greatly appreciated !
Also thanks heaps for the nice feedback guys, its nice to be able to help out around here.
Erm by that i do not mean this will not work in vista, 90% sure it will - its just that i ran into some audio problems producing, not with this setup in particular.
but who is using vista :-p
No one i hope ;) Though some users may have hardware that do not have XP drivers, so lets try to keep them in mind too, but obviously this should not at the cost of XP users - so if you find something that only works in XP or vice versa feel free to post that too.
If anyone can confirm this works on Vista that would be great too.
Sweet, got my overall latency down to 3.33ms with just a inbuilt sigmatel audio chipset in my laptop! To lower your latency use the Asio4all Control panel to decrease the latency on Asio4all, make sure to change the latency both both the soudcard/chipset AND the Virtual Audio Cables in both Traktor and Ableton Live. Problem solved :)
Rather : To lower your latency use the Asio4all Control panel to decrease the latency on Asio4all, make sure to change the latency on both the soundcard/chipset AND the Virtual Audio Cables in both Traktor AND Ableton Live.
Thanks for your contribution Bento San!
Its been a pleasure.
Also guys make sure you press the send button on the Traktor Master Tempo, otherwise Traktor wont be getting the tempo sync signal.
Rather : Also guys make sure you press the send button on the Traktor Master Tempo, otherwise !Ableton! wont be getting the tempo sync signal.
Damn its my day for typos, grr.
Has anyone tried to get this working on a Mac yet, beyond the audio/soundflower bit?
Meaning, can we natively / easily get sync to happen and share midi controllers across the two apps? I haven’t explored this personally, yet.
Set your audio sampling rate on Ableton and Traktor both to 48000khz, this will enable you to lower your latency considerably.
Reaper offers similar functionality with ReaRoute, their virtual ASIO driver (the downside is you have to be running reaper for it to operate) I used to use it to route torq into reaper to use vst fx. I never got it working between reaper, torq, and live — maybe because I was working on an under powered machine and maybe because the rearoute driver isn’t designed to have more than one program address it.
Live can run as a rewire slave, so you could use reaper to host live and then rearoute to pump audio from another program into reaper.
I am totally excited BentoSan, simply can’t wait to get this running. Awsome dude!
I routed the audio signals from Traktor from Soundflower today. The trickiest part is getting Ableton configured, but the last screenshot from the article above is pretty much what I have setup.
However, I didn’t try mapping any MIDI controls. I’ll give that a shot tomorrow and report back.
I routed the audio signals from Traktor from Soundflower the other day. The trickiest part is getting Ableton configured, but the last screenshot from the article above is pretty much what I have setup. I tried the MIDI stuff today, and yet, both Ableton and Traktor receive the MIDI data.
Does this work for Mac…sorry if this is a dumb question?
Thanks from Canada
Thanx Man !! I made it happen although my latency is way too high..not even thinking about using timecode vinyls…anyway…i googled my ass off this night and found a pre release of JACK for XP :
http://www.grame.fr/~letz/jackdmp.html
There?s also an interface qjackctl for download…i?ll check it out tomorrow..how about we try that out and share our thoughts ??!!
Peace.
After a couple of hours, I managed to hook up traktor with ableton with JACK and NO (!!) Latency….works wonderfull….i just recomend to download the latest version of jack and try it out…if there are still people around who want to know - let me know, and i send a little tut…
Happy djaying !!!
Does anyone know how to get both tracks to mix in the headphones rather than both blasting away at the same volume?
Cue-ing?
Incredible, it works! Next question: is there any way to get Traktor Scratch playing through Live on the same laptop? Thanks a lot.
Hazza! grats on getting it to work Jokko :)
Sorry i don’t own a copy of Traktor Scratch so i cant test it. Keep us informed if you get it working.
Yes, cueing.
Baaah… Routing traktor into Ableton has eaten the crossfader out of my traktor interface. XD
LoLz… just found out, routing this through Ableton needs deck a to be on the left side, and deck b to the right side.
If this is forced, Traktor takes the crossfader out of the view. (At least, that is what I could find in the manual)
hey anonymous (may 23rd)
could you hook us all up with a tutorial on how you got it to work with Jack? would be good cuz jack is free.
Tekki your externally mixing in Ableton, this means that you need to use the crossfader in Ableton. This tutorial was already massive as it was without teaching people the basics of using Ableton.
I’m going to write one for Jack the day its easier to use, going by the responses some of you guys are having a hard enough time getting this one working. Jack for windows will make this 10x harder, trust me i am presently using Jack, its still very much in beta stages and you need to crawl around the windows command prompt to set everything up. The future looks promising to Jack for windows though :)
what if I have two laptops, one with traktor, another with ableton? How can I sync up both systems? I have a M-audio 410 interface. Any site where it explains this method?
Hi, I’ve done everything like the manual said.. (perfectly explained btw)
And everything works except… I don’t have sound! There’s probably something wrong with my asio setting but I don’t understand much of all this (Rooookieee :) ) euhm but anyway.. I’ll try to explain my settings in asio and we’ll see if someone can help me.
I’m using only a laptop so no other cards or anything, just the basics of the basics..
In the tutorial BenSan said: “You also need to enable your main audio device this time, in my case this is the Sigmatel out which is the chipset on my laptop. If you have a sound card with two outs, you should enable both of these outs to allow monitoring in Ableton live. I only have a single channel out from my laptop at this time, this is why only one is showing and activated”
When I open those settings in asio for my laptop I get this..
Conexant High Defenition SmartAudio 221
> Conexant HD Audio aux in
IN: 2x 44. 0-96 ….. (disabled this)
>> Conexant HD Audio Headphone
Out: 2x 44 …… (enabled)
>>> Conexant HD Audio input
IN: 2x …. (disabled)
>>>> Conexant HD Audio output
Out: ….. (enabled)
& than the Virtual Audio Cable where I enabled the Ins and disabled the Outs
With Traktor I’ve done it exactly how the tutorial said it.
I’ve tried every different combination with my standard main audio device and I don’t get any sound.. What can I do about it? I hope someone can help me.. Thanks in advance..
Tical