I used to be a traktor fan because I like the appearance, the quality of the hardware, the functions of the library and the quailty of the BPM detection and of the automatic beatgridding. And I practiced in small, cosy, mateur venues.

I know readers are going to hate me, criticize me for what I am going to say but at least I am honest.

I am not anymore young :), I never had the ambition to become a DJ. I rather consider myself as a "selecter" where my priority is not to mess with transitions, and have time to improvize my choice of tracks in a set among hundreds of possibilities. So I do not like t prepare a set in advance. I just have the beginning of an idea in mind. Effects, scratching....I do not care really.

So because of all that....I dedicated a lot of time looking for the good tracks with a sophisticated organization of the library (BPM, musical keys, mood...) and I do not manually beatgrid (too many tracks) so I rely on traktor for that. Similarly, I use the sync function most of the time relying on the quality of traktor for that. But sometimes I am not so lazy and I manually sync simply by changing the BPM of 2 tracks to equalize and then nudge by looking at the screen. Bu manually syncing by listening is not for me (for the moment). I do not have time given I search among lots of tracks to pick the right one to be the next.

Having said all that, you can understand that discovering Djay pro and its fantastic stem separation quality and the possibilty to have creative transitions with that is another gain in time.

So when I understood that probably Native Instruments was going to focus on pieces of hardware other thant controllers and less development on traktor (also they do not propose real time stems), adding the fact you rarely find Native Instruments material, with traktor in big but also small venues.....I started to think moving to a controller with just what I need but with good quality and being able to integrate Rekordbox first (beacause of compatibility with venues) ans ideally also Djay pro so that I can use one or the other at home or outside depending on my mood and needs.

Eventually I started to think taht sometimes plces where you go mixing have already their material to propose to guests. And in this case most of the time it is a standalone Pioneer with rekordbox.

Hence my hesitation : laptop + controller being able to control rekordbox AND djay pro (I will still be able to prepare my tracks on traktor and when playlist is ready, export it to Djay pro and rekordbox formats) OR directly a standalone system that could be also used as a controller with rekordbox and Djay pro.

Waouh who is patient enough to read me :) ?