VirtualDJ - Traktor S4 Tempo Fader Dead Zone

PRO InfinityMember since 2022

Hello all 👋 first time poster here

First of all, thank you to everyone who contributes to the forums and all the VirtualDJ team for creating such a hacker-friendly platform.

Now to the issue:
- the pitch fader on my Traktor S4 seems to have a "dead zone" around 0.5
- a.k.a. small adjustments near the middle position do not affect the pitch in VirtualDJ
- when you move outside this "dead zone", the software pitch suddenly "jumps" to match the hardware

I remapped the pitch fader to save the value to a variable for debugging:

pitch & set_var pitch_test & var_list

Here are the resulting numbers that demonstrate this "dead zone" around 0.5:


hardware | software
---------|---------
0        | 0
0.25     | 0.25
0.47     | 0.47
0.48     | 0.5
0.49     | 0.5
0.5      | 0.5
0.51     | 0.5
0.52     | 0.5
0.53     | 0.53
0.75     | 0.75
1        | 1

I'm look for a way to make the software fader match the hardware in all positions, as the sudden jump when leaving the dead zones makes practicing beat-matching by ear impossible.

Let me know what y'all think or if there's any more information I can provide

Posted Sun 23 Jun 24 @ 8:37 pm

djdad

PRO InfinityDevelopment ManagerMember since 2005

Is it the S4 MK2 ?

What are the "hardware" values in your table ?
Are they the actual position of the S4 fader ? How exactly do you measure it ?

Posted Mon 24 Jun 24 @ 11:43 am

konrad.izykow Country: CA

PRO InfinityMember since 2022

- yes it's the MK2
- it's my approximate guess based on the physical position. When I sweep the fader top to bottom, I see pitch_test smoothly go from 0 to 0.47 => jump to 0.5 and freeze => jump to 0.53 and smoothly go up to 1

Posted Tue 25 Jun 24 @ 5:11 am

xXCpt_NemoXx Country: US

PRO InfinityMember since 2021

Is it possibly something to do with your crossfader curve settings in options? Or at least perhaps it is fixable by way of this setting? It seems to me you are getting values similar to the third image, bottom left graph on https://www.virtualdj.com/wiki/Crossfader+Curve.html.

Posted Tue 25 Jun 24 @ 7:26 am

PhantomDeejay Country: GR

PRO InfinitySenior staffMember since 2007

The faders e.t.c. on S4 MKII are HID.
Therefore they have very high resolution and they are very sensitive on minor touch/movements/changes in positioning.

For this reason, VirtualDJ uses a "dead zone" around center on all faders that make sense to have such.
So, EQ knobs, Filter knobs and Pitch sliders have this setting.
Without that setting it would be almost impossible to set EQ to be completely flat, and pitch to be preciselly zero 0.000000000%

Posted Tue 25 Jun 24 @ 9:37 am

locoDog

PRO InfinityModeratorMember since 2013

I understand the need, and eq, ok nobody is going to care about a couple of hundredths jump off neutral, but pitch should be scaled smooth upto the deadzone, especially when it's 14b

Posted Tue 25 Jun 24 @ 2:00 pm

konrad.izykow Country: CA

PRO InfinityMember since 2022

@PHANTOMDEEJAY Ahh now I understand, thank you. Now that you've pointed it out to me I can see the same behaviour for EQ and Filter knobs.

I understand the need for some kind of "dead zone", and that this behaviour is likely not a problem for most. However I have a few ideas to improve the user experience:
1. As @LOCODOG suggested, a smooth transition into the "dead zone" would be ideal
2. An option to configure the size of the "dead zone" would be ideal. Some controllers allow for more precise input (larger faders, higher quality components, etc.), so jitter would still be avoided even with a smaller dead zone. Configuring "dead zone" size to 0 would effectively disable it.

I was able to recreate a rough version of option 1 by writing some code to remap pitch:

param_greater 0.51 ?
  param_add -0.03 & pitch :
  param_smaller 0.49 ?
    param_add 0.03 & pitch :
    pitch

The one shortcoming is that final output range is only 0.03 to 0.97. I tried an alternative using param_multiply that would output the full range of 0 to 1, but I found that wasn't as smooth going in and out of the "dead zone".

@XXCPT_NEMOXX seems unrelated to these options, but thanks for pointing them, I hadn't come across them before.

Posted Tue 25 Jun 24 @ 5:48 pm