There has been some hype about EMULATOR, a multi-touch-overlay for Traktor Pro. Its presentation on a big glass panel wowed a lot of people. Today I’m going to answer the question if its really the future of DJing.

DJing,ReviewsInstead of having you read through a wall of text about it, I prepared a video-review where I walk through most of its features.

If you don’t like to see me looking out of the window during the first minute of the video here is also a short summary of it.

How does it work?

Since Trakor Pro doesn’t offer a plugin-interface EMULATOR has to use some tricks. It communicates with Traktor via MIDI. A virtual MIDI-device is good enough. That is a driver which fakes an actual MIDI device. Since Windows has no built-in way to create a such a device EMULATOR comes with the free LoopBe1 MIDI driver.
A lot of Traktor’s functions can’t be accessed like this. Therefore EMULATOR displays parts of Traktor’s original user interface like the waveforms and filebrowser through it. So its truly an overlay for Traktor.

The Good and the bad bits

Pros:

• Clean interface with vibrant colors
• As tight as possible integrated with Traktor Pro
• Use of Windows 7 built-in multi-touch capabilites

Cons

• No multi-touch gestures used
• No innovative controls used. *Where are X-Y-meters which work very well on touchscreens?*
• Only two decks are supported
• The layout of the controls is not optimal *e.g. it takes too many taps to be able to use FX*
• Due to relying on Windows 7 Input API, the latency is pretty high *however this is very difficult to solve*
• no way to customize the layout
• The only supported screen-resolution is 1280 x 800
• High price for the software *249 USD for a plain overlay is rip-off if you take into consideration that you can get Traktor Pro for as low as 200 USD*

Conclusion

Despite the sleek style-factor of a transparent multitouch-screen Emulator doesn’t have much to offer a DJ would want. I’d prefer my old-school buttons, knobs and faders any day over something which does exactly the same minus tactile feedback. To use the potential of multi-touch interfaces developers have to think outside of the box. Up until now the best way to control a DJ software was using external controllers. Now that you can interact directly with the user interface there are a lot of new possibilities to get our head around. For example how about adding an XY-meter which also controls a Z-value if you slide two fingers on it?

If you have interesting ideas for ways to interact with a touchscreen let me know about it! I may be cooking up something myself.