If not why not ..

Al the while I am excited about the potential of Traktor 1.2 moving things forward in terms of MIDI management, the long list of gripes that I have with the beta does make me scared that 1.2 could in the end actually reduce flexibility since right now we have lost the ability to access modifiers between keyboard and MIDI mappings. All the more reason to keep the options open. Two of the critical things I think are needed for controllerism will surely not be met with Traktor Pro: no scripting support as well as lack of a proper XML configuration format. Of course bome MIDI translator can tide over the lack of scripting support and the pain with the MIDI mapping will continue to be big enough to inspire people to work their asses off to find work arounds. However, those two features are covered by Mixxx already! More importantly its cross platform and fully open source with a very nice bunch of developers that hang out in the #mixxx IRC channel on freenode. They just released 1.7 which now supports MIDI learn. In the past a lot of their time was wasted on hand crafting integration for new controllers, this work can now be handled by endusers, freeing up programming cycles for actual meat features. So they are confident that in the future they will be able to pump out more features in less time. Which is awesome since 1.8 looks very tasty for controllerists!

Mixxx of course misses a fair number of features of Taktor Pro and I must admit I still need to really start playing with it to learn about all the differences. The key things I see missing that a controllerist needs is support multiple MIDI controllers at the same time, being able to restore and load up hot cue and loops and loads of effects. The good news is that all of these 3 things are coming in 1.8! In case you are wondering where on the linked site I am seeing effects, they are coming by way of integrating LADSPA plugin support and there are already quite of a few of LADSPA plugins. I think once 1.8 is out all thats really missing is a sampler in Mixxx at which point I doubt anyone will be missing support for 4 decks. Something tells me that we will see a sampler sooner in Mixxx than in Traktor Pro.