Don't look at me like I'm stupid...

Following my rant yesterday about the shortcomings and bugs in the reworked effects section in Traktor, it seems there are a lot of people who feel the same way on the Traktor forums. The infuriating thing is that NI are trying to convince people that the problems they are having with the effects are purely down to the remapping of the MIDI controls and their lack of understanding of how the new effects work. In some cases, this is possibly true, however, they are not giving credit for the vast numbers of DJs who know what they are doing, and have crafted their sound from the effects present in the 3.2 version of Traktor - changing the effects is tantamount to playing god with a lot of artists signature sounds. Imagine if the makers of Morillo's filters turned round to him one day and said "sorry, we've stuck with this
design for too long, we've found a better way of doing it - now the knobs are on the other side to each other, and where it used to go whooooooooooooowhomwhomwhomwhom before, it now goes wheeeeeeeeeee", he'd tell them to fuck off faster than you could say 'Xone:92'!

But whilst it would be relatively easy for Morillo to switch the hardware he uses for his effects, it's much harder for users of a piece of software (at least in the DJ world) to switch to a competing product - first of all that software usually makes up 100% of the interface the DJ uses (and therefore switching means he has to change his entire way of working), and secondly all the work the DJ has done organizing his collection and getting it the way he wants it will generally be lost if he switches. Unless a user is 100% happy with the way the software works, he has to keep up with upgrades in order to use new features and take advantage of increased stability. Unfortunately, there has never been a version of Traktor that anyone has been 100% happy with (anyone?), and therefore it's users are locked into the upgrade cycle. For me, 3.2 only needed a few little changes in order for me to be very happy with it, and everything apart from the effects was a step forward towards this happiness. The effects section, however, was a major step backwards, one big enough to make me not want to use the new version.

NI seem very confused right now, as the testing team had all supposedly given the thumbs up to this new release - now it's in the wild though, the story seems to be a little bit different. I realize it's difficult for a company to know the true extent of people's opinions, however, as most users will just get on with using a piece of software and not say anything for as long as it works. Because of this, I'd like to propose a poll of Traktor users, to find out the true feelings regarding the new release - if there is a vast segment of Traktor users that feel a certain way, hopefully NI will do the right thing with this information! You don't have to answer all the questions, but obviously the more people answer each one, the more accurate the information will be. If you have anything further to add, please leave a comment on this post. If you would simply like to voice that you'd prefer to have the old effects back (or at least have the option to use them), just leave your NI forums user name in the comments.

Thanks so much for your input in this survey, hopefully NI will take this information on board with regards to the next update to Traktor.