Over To You: Seamless DJ Switchovers Using A Traktor Kontrol S4?

Digital DJ Tips reader Lee Falsetto writes: “I’ve got a gig at a small club, and the DJ before me and after me is using a Kontrol S4. I want to use the same S4 for my set in the middle, but I want to use my own laptop and copy of Traktor. How can we swap between laptops using the same S4 without breaking the music?”

Digital DJ Tips says:

In short, as far as I’m aware you can’t. The second you unplug that USB from the laptop of the DJ before, the music is going to stop. You can’t even have a track ready on your phone and plug it into one of the RCA inputs on the S4, because again it’ll stop when the USB is pulled out (even with the power still plugged in).

What I would do, assuming the club has a mixer the S4 is plugged into, is take a 1/8″ TRS to RCA lead, and plug your smartphone into the mixer on a spare channel. Have a song or two pre-mixed on your phone’s music player and when it’s time for you to start, play your first song or two through the mixer while you swap USBs and get set up on the S4. If your first song has a long, dramatic, beatless intro, you won’t have to be accurate on your mix, and as long as you know the BPM of the mini mix on your phone, you can set the S4 to the same BPM and take over easily enough.

If the club has CD players, you could of course burn the above onto a CD and simply mix across to one of those – no extra wiring necessary. You then mix “out” of the CD just as above. This latter is preferable for bigger clubs but for a small bar or lounge where they don”t have CDJs, probably nobody will notice anby quality difference between your phone and the S4, at least not for a few minutes.

Over to you: Have you faced this issue? How did you get around it? Please share your thoughts in the comments.