Traktor Pro 4.1 supports the new lossless Beatport / Beatsource streaming format (FLAC).
This article describes how to migrate from the previous AAC-based streaming to the new format and explains the aspects not yet working in this context.
New Tracks you never played before in Traktor
You don’t have to take any provision for tracks you have never played before in Traktor and that are therefore new to your Collection. For new tracks, Traktor will automatically determine the current compression rate when loading the track into a deck and display the value in the kbps column.
All you have to do beforehand, is setting your Streaming Preferences on Beatport / Beatsource.com to Lossless (Flac) as follows:
Tracks you already played before
Tracks you played before in Traktor have the AAC compression rate of 256 stored in their kbps column.
This value will not automatically update on all the tracks that are stored in your collection when you change your Streaming Preferences on Beatport/Beatsource.com.
But be assured: the wrong compression rate displayed in the browser is only a visual bug and does not affect the lossless streaming quality you have chosen on Beatport/Beatsource.com.
You can update the wrongly displayed value after having loaded the respective track into a deck and then triggering a (re-) Analysis with the options "Special" and "Parallel Processing" enabled. This will leave all grid and key information unchanged and only update the kbps value of the tracks:
Unfortunately, there is currently no convenient way to update this value for your your entire collection until the next update of Beatport’s API. The update will provide the ability to set and query your chosen streaming format from within Traktor.
Until then, we recommend that you ignore the kbps column in the browser and trust the setting you selected on Beatport/Beatsource.com.
Tracks you stored in your Offline Library
Things are a bit different for tracks that you have stored in your Offline Library as they are physically stored in the lower format and need to be re-downloaded in the higher format following these steps:
- Go to Beatport/Beatsource.com and set your Streaming Preferences to Lossless (Flac).
- Start Traktor and copy all Offline Library tracks to a newly created playlist. This is to capture all tracks you had in our Offline library.
- Remove all tracks from your Beatport Offline Library.
- Close Traktor.
- Restart Traktor. The tracks will now be purged from the hidden folder on your computer.
- Select all tracks (or batches of tracks) in your backup playlist and select "Add to Offline Library". This will re-download the files in the newly selected format. As this can take a lot of time, please consider doing this over night or in batches.
- After the download is complete, select all tracks in the backup playlist (!) (not the “Offline Library”) and analyze them again by selecting “Special” and enabling only “Parallel Processing” as shown in the image above. This will update the kbps column in the browser and should now show bitrates between 600 and 1200 kbps.