Harmonic mixing has become an integral part of a lot of digital DJs arsenals,
reflected by the presence of key detection algorithms in a variety of softwares.
We last stood just three entrants against each other in a harmonic showdown in 2012, but this year we’ve got 12
different algorithms competing in our key detection comparison. How does Traktor
Pro fare versus Traktor DJ? Is Rekordbox reliable? Is the new Mixed In Key worth
an upgrade?
THE TWO TESTS
Major / Minor Triads (“Control”) - In this test, we
constructed incredibly simple 30 second long songs with a drum loop and a piano
playing a major or minor triad for the 24 keys. The fascinating results below
show how some applications are optimized for detecting chords and others
struggle with telling if they’re major or minor.
Real World Test - Instead of doing a test with music across
all kinds of genres, we decided to focus on what almost each of these
applications claim to do well – music that DJs are commonly playing. By that
right, we took 61 of the top songs from Beatport, using all genres on
the site, and ran them through our human testers and all 10 software
options.
Editor’s Note: We’d really like to run a third test as another control
that uses very common three chord progressions. There wasn’t time before
publication but it may be added here soon.
Common errors that you’ll see notated in the results below include a mixup of
major/minor – something that can be hard to detect even for a human at times, as
well as “harmonically forgivable” analyses, which are off by 1 fifth. The latter
error is less likely to cause DJs an issue in the mix, as there’s still a good
chance that it will share many of the same notes as the track that you’re mixing
in to/out of.
HUMAN BASELINE
We mention the old adage “trust your ears!” in almost every single article
about harmonic mixing. It’s critical to not build a dependency on tools, but
instead use them to augment a sense of when something works or doesn’t.
We’ve heard from some sources that even a groups of pitch-perfect classically
trained musicians have a significant rate of disagreement about the key of
certain songs.
With that in mind, we’ve only used songs in our test that had a clear
consensus (read: simple majority) from our human test group. Our test group
included myself and 6 awesome well-suited volunteers with experienced ears (even
a few perfect-pitch ears in the group) keying tracks from the DJTT community –
thanks for listening to these tracks and helping out! It is possible that our
ears are somewhat fallible, which is why we’re putting all of our data at the
end of the article. If you disagree, feel free to make a case for a different
consensus on a track in the comments.
THE COMPETITORS
Beatport’s Key Detection
Beatport has their own detected key for almost every song in their catalog –
which is why we started with their own catalog as a place to source tracks.
Artists aren’t given the option to report their own keys to Beatport – so even
if the author has an associated key that they know they wrote the song in, it
apparently gets tossed out and replaced with a detected key. The algorithm has
always needed some work (“We’re still refining our BPM and Key detection” reads
their support page), but if an avid fan or angry artist spots an error, they can
report incorrect keys and BPMs.
Major/Minor Triad Test: Not possible – no way to manually
test.
# of correct tracks (vs human volunteer
consensus): 40 (66%
correct)
# of Major / Minor misreads:
10
# of results off by a single fifth: 7
Mixed In Key 6.0.2
This is the most recent
version of Mixed In Key’s algorithm, having first made a début hiding inside
of the company’s DJ software, Flow. The update was released at the end of
December 2012, with a number of changes to the algorithm. At the time, MIK’s
founder Yakov noted that the changes were significant, ”the old version
would group the bassline together with the lead synths, the pads, and so on. The
new version can “hear” music in higher resolution, and analyzes each track in
6.83x times more detail (over 600%) because it listens to the entire piano
roll.”
The 6.0 version of Mixed In Key costs $58 for new users who have never
purchased a copy before, and $29.99 for users of 5.0 or earlier – and perhaps
worth the money, considering the impressive results below.
Major/Minor Triad Test: Perfect 24 out of 24 – every single
key correct.
# of correctly analyzed tracks (vs human
consensus): 58
(95%)
# of Major / Minor Misreads:
0
# of results off by a single Fifth: 2
Mixed In Key 5.6
We make it a point to include the previous version of Mixed In Key here as a
simple point of comparison – most people who own the software likely don’t own
the most recent version and want to know if it’s worth updating to. This
version of MIK likely performed better in this roundup than the 2012 one because
this test included mostly DJ-oriented tracks.
Major/Minor Triad Test: 20 / 24 correct.
# of
correctly analyzed tracks (vs human
consensus): 55
(90%)
# of Major / Minor Misreads:
0
# of results off by a single Fifth: 4
Algoriddim Djay 4.2.2 (Mac)
Algoriddim’s software has been around for a while, but found major success on
the iPad. Unfortunately the iOS version doesn’t have key detection, so harmonic
mixing and testing the most common use of Djay isn’t possible. Instead we’ve
tested it with the Mac
desktop version.
Despite doing well on our rudimentary major/minor triad test, Djay struggled
to have a precise analysis of the keys – often being off by just one fifth.
It’ll do in a pinch, but serious harmonic mixers might need something more
accurate.
Major/Minor Triad Test: 23/24
# of correctly
analyzed tracks (vs human
consensus): 42
(69%)
# of Major / Minor Misreads:
4
# of results off by a single Fifth: 12
Pioneer Rekordbox 2.2.0
Pioneer’s library analysis and
organization software is where most CDJ-based DJs go for setting cue points,
making playlists, burning CDs, and compiling flash drives for their sets. It
also has built-in key detection, which makes it yet another candidate for our
roundup!
One thing we found about Rekordbox was that it was painfully slow compared to
all the other applications. Even loading in a single track for analysis brought
the app to a crawl, making it difficult to do anything else while waiting for
the results – which as it turns out aren’t that amazingly accurate. Perhaps you
get what you pay for, as the Rekordbox application is a free download.
Major/Minor Triad Test: 21 / 24
# of correctly
analyzed tracks (vs human
consensus): 35
(57%)
# of Major / Minor Misreads:
9
# of results off by a single Fifth: 9
Keyfinder 1.25
Keyfinder is
the free open source answer to the paid solutions for key detection on the
market. It’s cross platform, and is capable of analyzing a massive number of
audio codecs and can write to metadata tags just like any larger paid option.
Interestingly, the software is capable of doing a detailed analysis that
displays a “chromagram” of the notes in a track and assigns a primary key for
different sections of a track (see image above). Most users aren’t
looking for this level of analysis – but for a completely free software, it’s
probably the best value of any of the programs in this test.
Major/Minor Triad Test: 18 / 24
# of correctly
analyzed tracks (vs human consensus): 47/61 (77%)
# of
Major / Minor Misreads: 3
# of results off by a single
Fifth: 7
Traktor Pro 2.6.6
Traktor is another recent entry to the key analysis game, having implemented
key detection in Traktor Pro 2.6.1 almost one year ago. The key detection
algorithm originally was shown to be roughly equal to Mixed In Key 5′s in a
casual test done by the developer behind Keyfinder. In reality, we found that
the software wasn’t so good at our short sample major/minor triad tracks –
but absolutely crushed when it came to real world track examples.
Update: We’ve run the Traktor Pro test a third time with
a brand new set of these audio files – apparently stripping ID3 tags isn’t
enough to remove all of the key information from Mixed In Key. We’ve revised our
results – which are actually nearly identical with Traktor DJ on iPad.
Major/Minor Triad Test: 11/24 – perhaps it requires more
context than our simple tracks?
# of correctly analyzed tracks
(vs human consensus): 33 (54%)
# of Major /
Minor Misreads: 9
# of results off by a single Fifth:
11
Virtual DJ Pro 7.4
While we continue to wait for updates on the ever-forthcoming Virtual DJ 8
(potentially next week at NAMM), we’re forced to use the available software to judge Atomix
Productions’ key detection abilities. We’re betting that VDJ8 will have an
updated algorithm – and will likely do a bit better at telling major and minor
triads apart than VDJ7.
Major/Minor Triad Test: 12/24
# of correctly
analyzed tracks (vs humans): 40 (65%)
# of Major / Minor
Misreads: 1
# of results off by a single Fifth:
14
beaTunes 3.5.17
BeaTunes 3 has been out since 2011, but since it received an update in November to the most
recent version, it remains on our list of software to use for key detection and
analysis. The application can actually be used for a lot of very useful
automated library cleanup work in addition to key and BPM analysis – including
fixing incorrectly tagged file names and ID3 tags. That being said, the key
detection algorithm needs a bit of work for it to be at all reliable for DJing.
The software is available for Windows and Mac OS X for $35.
Major/Minor Triad Test: 23/24
# of correctly
analyzed tracks (vs humans): 27/61 (44%)
# of Major / Minor
Misreads: 8
# of results off by a single Fifth:
16
Rapid Evolution 3 Beta 58
Unfortunately Rapid Evolution hasn’t seen any development since our
last roundup in 2012 – but we know there are some users out there who are loyal
to it still, so we included it here. The software doesn’t fair that well in the
outcome.
Major/Minor Triad Test: 19/24
# of correctly
analyzed tracks (vs humans): 36 (59%)
# of Major /
Minor Misreads: 9
# of results off by a single Fifth:
7
Traktor DJ 1.3.3 for iPad
At the request of a few of our readers upon finding out that we were doing
another key detection showdown, we’ve separated out Traktor DJ on iOS from the desktop app.
Update: Just two of the keys detected differ – meaning that
there isn’t that much of an inconsistency versus Traktor Pro. Have a look at the
numbers:
# of results different from Traktor Pro: 2 more
incorrect
Major/Minor Triad Test: N/A
- Traktor DJ can’t view our 30 second test files. We’re
investigating.
# of correctly analyzed tracks (vs
humans): 31
(51%)
# of Major / Minor Misreads:
10
# of results off by a single Fifth: 11
CrossDJ 1.6.1 for iPad
CrossDJ
earns the title of being the other iOS application to make the list. Not only
has the software expanded to the Android platform, but it continues to see
numerous updates and support with regularity from a dedicated development team.
Worth noting is that CrossDJ is developed by MixVibes, who are also the team
behind Pioneer’s Rekordbox software.
# of results different from Rekordbox: 26 – clearly not the
same algorithm at all.
Major/Minor Triad Test:
#
of correctly analyzed tracks (vs humans): 48 (79%)
# of Major /
Minor Misreads: 3
# of results off by a single Fifth:
7
THE DATA FOR YOUR INSPECTION
Each test was run twice to make sure there were no testing discrepancies –
and we also eliminated any songs where there was no clear consensus among our
human listeners.
You can access the full Google spreadsheet here – there’s a
lot of interesting info in here that could be extrapolated, and even links to
all the songs on Beatport if you want to listen in.
Want to dispute a key that we chose as the “correct” key for a song? As we
noted earlier in the article, there’s always going to be a bit of disagreement
on certain tracks – which is why we ran a control test.
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