Traktor Team Shares Update: Legacy Controllers on Traktor DJ 2, Catalina support for TP3, New hardware

If you’re a Traktor DJ, or have been recently, it can be hard to read some of the more dire-sounding news recently from the Native Instruments HQ. But today, a message was posted by Friedemann Becker- one of the leads of the Traktor team – sharing more details around what’s underway. Keep reading for the full update!

“A Message From TRAKTOR”

Instead of extrapolating out each specific point, I thought it might be nice to share the full text of what Friedemann shared in the NI forums:

“We’ve been rather silent lately, but behind the scenes we only had one thought: “How can we deliver value to as many of our loyal users as possible?”

The answer has been easy: besides fixing more bugs, delivering much requested compatibility to our legacy controllers for TDJ2 users [editor’s update: this was actually delivered in a September 10th update to the software], we have to support macOS Catalina from day one, and we want to make sure that everybody using iTunes for managing their music can seamlessly continue to do so on their respective operating system – not a trivial topic, and one that required plenty of attention.

We intend to kick off a public beta of TRAKTOR PRO 3.3 in a few days, and everybody’s welcome to help us iron out any final undiscovered issues both on the current operating systems and (for whoever’s brave enough) on the current beta of Catalina.

We’re also due to release an interesting new piece of hardware later this year, as has already been hinted at in our press statement quoted by some of the tech blogs. Some test-units are being sent out to external testers this week – so we’re almost done on this front too.

That’s all I can say today, because I only want to share things that are basically ready for release. We have more cooking behind the scenes and most importantly: after the reorganization this summer, we have reached a good team velocity which enables us to deliver updates more frequently.

So stay tuned for even more news later this year, but also don’t overestimate our capabilities. Besides TRAKTOR PRO 3 we are also working on longer-term projects. So bear with us.”

Traktor DJ 2 Legacy Support

Let’s start with this point: at launch, the Traktor DJ 2 platform was touted as the future codebase on which the Traktor team would build upon. But since launch until earlier this month, it has only supported two pieces of Traktor hardware: the Kontrol Z1 mixer and the Kontrol S2 MK3. Earlier this month, they added support for Kontrol S2 MK2 and S4 MK3 – but as one of our commenters notes: “NI has stated that the S4 MK3 does NOT have a MFI (made-for-iOS) chip inside it so it cannot be used with an iPad. They are considering support for it on the desktop version of TDJ2.”

Perhaps we’ll see other class-compliant Traktor hardware get support next. Maybe Kontrol Z2 support?

New Traktor Hardware

This one is a bit more complicated. What will Traktor hardware could debut in 2019, reasonably? Can there be a new all-in-one controller that revives the jogwheel-free paradigm? Standalone gear, or a “just jogwheel” controller? Share your speculation in the comments below – we know no details yet, but are excited to learn more in the coming weeks.