If after marking 10 beats manually they are not dead on or you are not able to adjust the whole grid by pressing left arrow/right arrow (or shift+left arrow/shift+right arrow) it sounds like a music issue.

I would say SDJ has about 90% with my music. I do notice that it is not very good with Reggae music but then again Reggae music is some of the dirtiest files (tags & quality) known to man.

So it could be just the music i'm trying to analyze? That could be the issue but I just would have guessed the software would have been more accurate than this. I'm not bashing it by any means but it's irritating that I have to manually "show" the program the beats one by one...

By all means I get it LOL. This would certainly put a damper on my days as well. Maybe someone else will tell of a similar experience. I WILL say this is NOT the first time I have seen this. Just stating my persona experience is all.

Do you notice any "batches" obtained from any given source not analyzing well or is this an across the boards sort of deal?

Well... Not specifically batches... But I uploaded around 3,000+ songs and have been playing them at random just trying to get accustomed to the new software and controller. I would say about 20% of the songs have correct beat grids, all the others just seem like they weren't even analyzed, like the program just picked a tempo and dropped a grid on the song. Not even close.

Another thing that is strange is some albums get marked "corrupt" and even when I delete all the files off my computer and serato, and then put them back onto the computer and iTunes via my external drive, they still show corrupt... Strange because they play fine all the way through and I've had these albums on my computer forever...

Do me a favor. Download the new Beta and see if this fixes it for you. The last part of your comment
was happening recently and this beta fixed that. ......serato.com
Here is the Beta section for more info serato.com

Get that going and I am willing to bet your first issue is addressed which may in turn fix your second issue.

Ahh, another crazy thing happened the other day, I dropped my iTunes folder into the serato library to upload a few new tracks I put into iTunes and it doubled almost 200 songs in serato but into .m4a format. It didn't happen the previous times I dropped the whole folder into the library though.

Got the idea from here

support.serato.com

So I updated to 1.7.2 and no difference. The program can't even analyze Planet Rock or any Afrika Bambaataa songs for that matter. Even simple 4/4 electro songs fall off grid later in songs. This analyzer is junk. I have had a VERY small success rate with songs and It is still acting like its just picking random tempos and dropping grids on songs, thats even IF it puts a grid down at all. When there is no grid for a song I have to manually mark the first downbeat and even when I do that, the grid eventually is not proper half way through a song. I'm starting to get pretty frustrated with this...

Soo weird. I just did my daily updates consisting of 93 songs all EDM but various sub-genres. Trap, complextro, glitch hop, trance. house etc. Serato actually got 88 perfectly. Furthermore 3 of the 5 it got wrong simply needing the BPM to be doubled.

Yeah I'm super confused. This is not some dumb mistake, its just strait up analyzing tracks incorrectly. I don't expect it to be perfect but this is out of hand.

I'm on Serato now since February due to the Roland Dj808 device release, and it still pales in comparison to Traktor on beat grid analysis. I'm surprised they've survived this long with such a terrible algorithm... This is such a core function.

For sure, you need to do it on the fly but that is not how it is supposed to work ;)

I'm use Mixed In Key to analyze my songs. Not use SDJ analyzer.
Serato is terrible to analyze BPM.
I don't use BEATGRID because is not efficient and more disturbs than helping.

Properly set beatgrids are about the most useful and important parts of editing I can think of. While mixing popular music (electronic, mainstream, etc.) the beatgrids are more often than not correct. When mixing alternate genres (latin, hip hop, etc.) it is not as efficient. This is a problem for some but not most as obviously the majority are playing more commonly played/requested music. Thing is though this applies to all DJ apps as the swing in the beat and inconstancy of the music does not play out well when applying algorithms.

This is really my only real stand out complaint about Serato. As a long time Traktor user who moved over in order to use the Roland DJ-808, I was met with a very capable piece of software hobbled by an outright bad beatgrid detection system. Now luckily, the gridding adjustment tools (and integration thereof on the 808) are quite capable, but seriously, going through and hand gridding 1000's of tracks by hand is simply absurd when I've had near 100% perfect beatgrids applied via Traktor for literally years.

It was a jarring change, for sure. I don't have any issue playing by ear, but as mentioned above, it is 2017 and if you are clinging to by ear matching as some kind of badge of honor, you might want to rethink that. Useful skill, but dogmatically employing that method simply excludes you from the modern tools available to expand creative expression.

This goes triple for the DJ-808 - a joint Roland/Serato controller with a freaking sequencer on it. There is something fundamentally off about the fact that this amazing tool still requires the user to deal with terrible grid analysis on the software end, effectively rendering the sequencer section moot until the user has manually done what an algorithm should be able to do with ease. (see also: Traktor, circa 2010)

I do find the variable BPM / beatgridding to be an awesome feature of Serato's grids, but I worry that this variable nature might also be contributing to the near useless automatic grid/BPM assignment. I pretty much only play sequenced music with constant BPMs, so it isn't a matter of a variable BPM throwing off detection. The same 3500 track library, analyzed with Traktor 2.11 and SeratoDJ 1.9.6, Traktor will come up with about 100 tracks that might need adjustment, usually just a tiny slide to match the downbeat, NEVER the actual grid spacing. Serato? I'm not even sure but it has been much more than 50% of the tracks have faulty grids that need adjustment.

That said, I've gotten pretty good at adjusting on the fly, but what a pain.

Couldn't decide which part to quote, because ALL OF IT is 100% on point.

Truer words have never been spoken on this forum.

AGREED 100%. The DJ808 is a sick mixer/controller, but it's hamstrung by Serato. Also, to be fair, the Roland parts have their own issues. For example, the quantization of sequencing the sampler slots is awful. It's fairly rigid and it moves my off-beat hits to their grid. I'm actually debating about the Denon Prime standalone units right now. Maybe offloading CPU to samplers and live synths was the wrong avenue... Offloading the DJ rig from the CPU could allow the laptop to ONLY run Ableton or Maschine or KK or Output or any other software... Hmm.

Oh! and the sync is so-so between the TR-S and Serato. Unacceptable!

SDJ beatgrids have always been bad since the ITCH. That's why I do not use them. When I download a song or get it from someone, I do the following:

1)- Remove the empty spaces of beginning and the end with the software mp3trim.
2)- Check the mp3 structure with the mp3val frontend program.
3)- Remaster music with Platinum Notes to get the best possible quality and removal of unwanted artifacts. Always converting to 320kbps.
4)- Set tags with ID3-TagIT. I remove unwanted fields, wrong names, non-standard fonts, etc.
5)- Analyze BPM and key/tone with Mixed In Key.
6)- Import songs to the Serato.
7)- Analyze the songs with Serato but WITHOUT BPM and KEY ANALYSIS. I uncheck these options. It will only analyze the songs time.
8) - When loading the music on deck, the grid will already be straight and only one song or another that the grid goes out of time.

Remembering that Serato does not have engine for VARIABLE BPM like Pioneer Rekordbox. Then the grid will not fix properly on the song compass. It's normal. And in some specific cases of EDM's songs, it will also stay out.

Cheers!