Oh... you're in for some fun.
I have a Surface too... and had in crash on me mid performance with SDJ at a festival.
After it working fine w SSL on radio shows for a few months, and after a fair bit of testing on my end with SDJ at home & the radio, I decided to take out the Surface on the road for a few gigs. Around the same time, about a year ago or so, Serato suddenly stated MS Surface products are excluded from support w Serato (which I ony stumbled upon after the crash at the festival...).
See
serato.com

So all you can do is file a support ticket with Serato to get counted as a user wanting to use a Surface device with Serato. As is, as there's too few of us supposedly, Serato is not looking into fixing this...

c.

Man, that's tough to hear. I'm a long time serato ssl/itch/dj user, but I use traktor as well, and i'm able to run no issues. Still though, can't beat serato's ux. It's always been more user friendly, and I find it soooo much better to scratch with as opposed to traktor on a controller. i've sent a support ticket in. Hopefully they have some sort fix in the pipeline, coz man, the Surface line of computers are pretty dope, and the Surface Book is a beast.

Yea... it's espcially odd since the only PC there is, that is built buy the OS manufacturer... is the Surface line...

Admittedly, Surface Pro's single (underpowered) USB port (On a Pro 3) is a piece of meh... plus aggressive power management of the hardware (for 30 mins of extra bettery for the business user...) does make things admittedly tricky...
And M$ is not very good at catering for the specialist market either.... so add those 2 together, and I do not have much hopes... although, a Surface would be my perfect travel laptop...

Also, this is what I did, flag it with M$ support too - supplying Seratos' warning page to them as well, as if enough people do that, M$ support will take notice as well that professional audio software producers excude their flagship products... which really should interest / if not even worry them if there's enough reports...

c.

Update: I got a reply from the serato team, basically saying the same thing as the Known Issue, and that my best option is to look for a different laptop... not exactly the answer I was looking for. Anyone have any optimization tips or anything, aside from unchecking the 'allow computer to turn off' power management option for the usb ports/hubs? If I find anything I'll post it here as well for any of the few folks looking for answers.

As a side note - Traktor and Rekordbox both do not exclude the Surface devices. I have not tried either though so can't speak about their stability.
Might be the better/more economic/sane option other than Serato Support suggestion of just "look for a different laptop"...
c.

Word. I mentioned that response was a little off putting, but I get it. They did suggest then to try to use a powered hub, see if that works, which I'll try again later. Again, I'll post whatever I find works or doesnt. I've rocked traktor pro 2.0 on my gigs the last couple months, and Its been stable on my surface book. I just love the simplicity of Serato though, especially with the UX, plus the feel of using the jogwheels is much more precise in Serato than it is in Traktor. No matter how much you try to tweak the jog wheel settings, it's still not as tight as it is in serato DJ. Hopefully, a fix is in line soon, whether its from MS, of Serato.

Another update - hoping this helps anyone in the same situation: after some late night digging, i found this post on reddit:

www.reddit.com

And it makes sense when Serato is saying that its a hardware issue with the Surface line itself. The post basically says that all the sensors and inputs on the Surface are piggybacking on the main USB hub chip. In effect, when plugging in multiple controllers, it'll lock up, or disconnect, or whatever other issue may happen, since in theory, the usb hub chip is maxing out. The solution was to get into the Surface UEFI Bios and turn off things you're not using (i.e. a surface dock, infrared camera, and rear camera in my case). I tried this and did a quick test. I was able to plug in both a DDJ-SB2, and a NI Maschine (in MIDI mode), and was able to run without any problems. Now it was super late, so I didn't get to do a real stress test, but it looks promising. Only thing i've noticed, secondary midi controller won't work if its plugged into a hub, which is plugged into the surface book. It had to be plugged directly into the surface book (meaning..a max of 2 controllers). I'll do more stress tests later today, but hope this info helps anyone using a Surface Pro/Surface Book.

Nice find!

Aye.
Was curious to read his follow up he hints at at the end "NEXT UP: choppy audio!"...
But no luck finding anything by him on reddit with the same:
www.google.co.nz

As a side note - my Surface Pro 3 SDJ crash when playing happened with a fully self-powered USB hub, and only 2 USB inputs, a USB HD and the SL4 box (all of which was fine on 20+ occasions/test-drives beforehand)... no midi controller or other devices.

c.

Funny...
Serato excludes Surface 2in1 laptops officially and warns about it....
Algoriddim on the other hand releases their DJay Pro for windows10 and promotes it by showing it off on the Surface Studio (admittedly not very DJ booth friendly... :D) and enabling the Surface Dial as a supported hardware device too.
If that isn't a big old tipping-their-hat in Seratos' direction as a thank you sign (for dropping the ball on this), I don't know what is...

djworx.com

c.

Somewhat similar to the new MacBooks with Touchbar. While Serato hasn't excluded the Touchbar Macs they are pointing to the Touchbar as the cause of some users troubles with crashes. Yet DJay Pro was the first and as of now, only DJ app to take advantage of the Touchbar. In fact they promoted it during the introductory presentation last year.

Surface Studio has waaaaay more connections is cool, but certainly built out more like a desktop than all of the sharing of BUS traffic like the Pro or Book.. I mean look at how many actual ports it has:

cnet4.cbsistatic.com

Yeah I'm sure the studio isn't sharing BUS traffic like the pro or book. I wonder though if there's a way to optimize serato dj itself, but then that asks the question if that's something they would even invest in.

In other news, another thing I've noticed in my testing is that even with resources freed up (I turned off the dock, and cameras), serato dj ran smooth with the ddj-sb2 plugged into the port towards the rear, and my machine plugged in the port closer to the front. If it was the other way, it'll error out saying it couldn't load (secondary) midi device. Haven't had any crashes, ram for almost an hour. There were a few times where the keyboard and track pad hang for a bit, but they came back, instead of the whole SB base shutting off. No driver errors under device manager. Still gonna do more testing though. So far so good

Yep, and that's where the issue is... last I filed a ticket about it it still ran as 'too small a user base (that use surface devices....) for us to care about or invest time in' as well as blame was being pushed onto hardware & driver manufacturers (for the SL boxes of all things...), which is odd as usually Serato Support can be very pro-active if they want to. But I guess this again is management speaking.
Shame for all of us who would like to use these 2-in1 laptops (of which there has been more new models than standard laptops at the latest CES show a few months ago... so Serato might be in for a backlash on this if this unstable behaviour is true across the board for 2in1s... we'll see).
c.

So I used this on a mobile this weekend (had another setup ready for worst case scenario). Good news, didn't have an instance where the base failed completely to the point where hardware got disconnected. Bad news, still ran into issues where the keyboard and trackpad stopped working ranging from a few seconds to a minute or two. It would start responding eventually, but it was pretty annoying and scary at the same time. Its as if the keyboard itself went to sleep. I'll look through the device manager settings, but if anyone has any ideas, feel free to share. My boys are saying I should go back to a mac, so that kinda gets me to want to figure this out and make it work even more. Lol. That and I really just like this damn machine.

WTF!!

These are $1200 - $4000 devices made by Microsoft for the express purpose of running windows 10. Quality software & hardware should run out of the box, no questions asked, no fresh reinstalls, no friggin around in the BIOS, No disabiling cameras, no lag when typing, no purchasing & trialing expensive USB hubs.

Wouldn't it be nice if Microsoft stopped acting like Volkswagen when it's to battery life? All these annoying "cheating" ways of getting anything close to a MacBooks battery life makes actually living with the machine frustrating.

No wonder everyone harks back to the simpler times of scratch live!! (I am not blaming Serato here)

I have been keeping an eye out for a new laptop/MacBook, why have apple & Microsoft dropped the ball?

Touch bars & other gimmicks, new USB-C ports that no one can confirm if Serato works with them, machines with only 1x industry standard USB port if your lucky, apple changing OS X that much that Rane hardware wasn't working on it for a good 6 months. Windows 10 endlessly wanting to update & restart, no SD card slots, Serato looking like a bees dick on a high DPI screen, I could go on :)




They sure dislike their customers!!

Just because they don't work for DJs, doesn't make them bad devices. I seriously doubt live music mixing was even on the development radar for these things.

I would have thought the whole reason u buy a expensive but light laptop is for content production, whether it be web design, photography, music production, etc otherwise you don't need the grunt of i5s & i7s.

Content production in many cases requires working with 3rd party devices, such as cameras, audio interfaces, etc

I agree, and both the mbp and surface line are dope machines that are awesome to create on - and not just for dj/music production. As a graphic designer by day I use both on a daily basis. It's just an unfortunate thing when you gotta wait for software and hardware sync up and be on the same page.

aight latest update - just did a 6 hour gig rockin with the SB on Serat DJ. So one thing I was thinking about, was that when I first got my SB, I forced serato to use the nvida GPU on the base. I was thinking about everything, and how that in itself could be hogging up resources on the usb hub...low and behold, once I put serato back on the integrated intel processor, there were no more issues. 6 hours straight, no hiccups, no lag, and no freezes. Everything worked like it was all back to normal. I ran the DDJ SB2 and my NI Maschine Mk2 as a midi controller and had no issues. I'm be going at it again this weekend, so hopefully that was it. Anyways, hope this helps anyone else using a surface book.

Hey Dose, does it still work without any problems? I have the same troubles with my Surface Book. How do you change the settings to run Serrato with the integrated intel processor as described above? Thanks for your help.

Yo, my bad for the late response, but yeah, still working good with the S2/maschine combo or turntables, although I did notice, when trying to use the maschine as a midid controller when using my searto box and turntables, that serato dj doesn't fails to connect with the maschine, throwing it off whack. Looking into that. As far as disabling the base gpu, in the control panel, click on hardware and there should be an Nvidia control panel. Click that and select the program setting tab. Select serato dj from the drop-down, or if it's not there, click add and add it to the list. When seratondj is selected, set the preferred processor to integrated. Should be good to go

Thank you very much! It works!

I have a DDJ SX and a Surface Book and had the same problems. I was very -let's say- sad.

It allways freezes the controller and the whole surface book. Had to turn it off the hard way. No task manager or other option worked.

After changing the settings in the BIOS it doesn't freeze anymore. I have an external docking station. The external USB-hub must be deactivatet. Deactivating only infrared cam and so isn't enough. The external docking station I can't use.

But still had performance issues after that. After following the optmizing instructions from the video everything works fine.

I've done a few days of mixing and cutting. Looks like everything is fine now...