As a result, looping with the touch strip is more useful for performances, not for mixing purposes). For example, when the strip is assigned to control looping for a deck, the loop is only active when you're holding your finger on the touch strip (loop length is controlled by where your finger is). You do this by holding a finger in the touch strip and pressing the loop encoder or one of the FX buttons, respectively. It can be assigned on the fly to two other features in Traktor, loops and FX. What makes the touch strip next-level, though, is that it can do more than just deck control. From a more utilitarian perspective, deck control on the touch strip (in combination with the tempo-adjustment feature of the loop encoders) gives you a very natural way to manually beatmatch tracks, especially if you have a turntable background. When combined with flux mode, it can be used for some creative real-time track manipulation, with everything falling back into place once you release your finger. Taken on its own, this deck control is quite useful. If you want more real estate on the touch strip, it can be resized to one side or the other so that the entire strip controls a single deck. You can also use the touch strip to quickly seek through a track on a stopped deck by holding the shift key. If it's stopped, it allows you to scratch the track. If a deck is playing, the touch strip does a temporary pitchbend-style tempo correction. By default it is split in half, with the two regions controlling the decks in an intuitive way. These have been showing up more and more in the gear world lately, but in the case of the X1 it's an especially meaningful addition that does quite a bit to enhance functionality. The touch strip is undoubtedly the biggest change to the X1. This is a thoughtful addition that makes things nice and easy when searching for tracks in a frenzied DJ booth. The upside to this is that the encoder is now touch-sensitive, which means that Traktor automatically switches to the browser view when you make contact with the encoder. Some X1 users might not like this change, as it requires you to use two (admittedly somewhat small) buttons to assign tracks from the browser to the decks. Sandwiched between the LCD displays is the new browse encoder, which replaces the two from the original X1 into a unified central version. Fortunately there are two new small LCD displays that provide some feedback based on what is presently being controlled. There comes a time where it is impossible to visually represent everything that you can do with a single control, and the X1 MK2 seems to have reached that point. This is especially true for the loop encoders, which lost their labels altogether and gained new functionality (tempo change) to boot. While this makes for a nicer overall look, it does mean that at least one trip to the manual is required to really understand what's possible. Aesthetically the controller has been simplified quite a bit, with much less text cluttering up the front. The same is true here-no additional mixing features have been added. Generally speaking, the original X1 was designed as a side-caddy to whatever is performing the actual mixing duties (volume, gain, EQ, filter), whether that's an external mixer or another controller mapped to Traktor's internal one. You can still browse and load tracks, set loop and cue points, trigger tracks with tempo adjustment and control the effects units directly from the controller itself. It retains the same overall purpose in the Traktor DJ workflow. If you're familiar with the original, it won't feel like much of a shock. The X1 is now back, with a refreshed update that Native Instruments calls the MK2. The O.G., though, is the X1, which first appeared in 2009. There are now no less than six Traktor-centric hardware units, from the do-it-all S4 to the remix deck-dedicated F1. One look at the Traktor DJ controller page on NI's website shows how fast things have progressed since then.
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