It’s been completely rewritten for the third time. There is now a native version for Mac OS X -user. I had to finish it on a virtual machine since my MacBook died on me. That was very time-consuming. I’d rejoice a small donation so I can buy a new one (and continue developing awesome sauce). Alternatively you can also invite me to a beer in real life to kill the pain caused by that unspeakable slow development environment.

Download

Usage instructions

You can find those in the main article.

New features in detail:

Native Mac OS X-version

The old Traktor Scrobbler was also useable in OS X but required a lot of fiddling. This new version has been developed by using the plattform independant framework Qt. That also means that .NET isn’t required on Windows anymore. The new Scrobbler comes packaged with all required libraries. That’s also the reason why the program is much bigger now. I tried to keep the libraries small though. Many thanks go to Jens Bache-Wiig’s QML desktop components and the relentless help of the Qt Ambassador Volker.

Playlists are saved

Traktor Scrobbler creates a directory called ‘playlists’ where it saved the played songs of every session if you don’t disable this option.

Nicecast Support

This one is probably the most useful new feature. Many of the OS X user probably stream using Nicecast. While Nicecast is a great tool it can’t read artist or title of a song. The new Traktor Scrobbler can easily provide this data for Nicecast.

no PIN required anymore for Twitter-login

The process of granting Traktor Scrobbler access to your Twitter-account doesn’t require you anymore to write down a 7-digit PIN.

Send Twitter-messages from Traktor Scrobbler

You can now also send regular Tweets from Traktor Scrobbler. This may be helpful if you want to give some shouts to your followers while spinning.

Support for Unicode-characters in artist-name and title

Unicode-characters like German umlauts or  other languages will now be interpreted correctly.

customizable port

Traktor Scrobbler connects to Traktor through a network protocol. If the default-port 8008 is already in use by another application, you can adjust the value in the settings-file TraktionScrobbler.ini

copy current track to clipboard

A video-jockey wanted to use the current track’s title in his video performances. The easiest way for him to get this data was through the system’s clipboard. Therefore this feature has been implemented.

What is missing?

Although this was possible in the old version, you can’t attach yourself to a running icecast-stream to catch its metadata. I will fix this in the next version.

There is a Last.fm-tab now (so I don’t have to take the screenshots twice) but the Traktor Scrobbler still can’t ‘scrobble’. That’s the #1 priority for now and will be possible starting from the next version which I’ll hopefully complete soon.

These short tips I’m giving every now and then are pretty well received among you. Therefore here is another one.

Google Chrome is the best browser for me currently. However its similar to a partnership. There are always things which bother you about the other one. The main flaw I see is Chrome’s internal music-player which launches upon clicking on a mp3 instead of just download it. On the internal player’s page you can download the mp3 via pressing CTRL+S (respectively the option-key on the Mac).

I’ve been looking for a really long time for a proper solution and found one which works ok.

To download a file directly, hold the ALT-key during clicking on the link. You can get used to it after a while even if its not the most beautiful solution.

I will update this entry in the future if someone pops up with a better way to handle it. I’ve got an idea for a Greasemonkey-script which might do the trick. Those can be installed directly as a Chrome-extension.

Now that the work is done, it’s time to produce some dance-music.

However it is still possible to invite your friends (if they have a googlemail-adress). You just need to share a message to the E-Mail-adress of your friend. He will get an E-Mail and the opportunity to join Google+ then.
Just look at the picture below which illustrates how its done.

If you need an invite just leave a comment here and I will add you. E-mail-adresses in comments aren’t shown so don’t fear pesky spambots!

No one knows whether Goog’ can affront the 700-million pound golliath but from my point of view it’s looking damn good. I can finally open my online DJ school with the hangout-feature

Instead of having you read through a wall of text about it, I prepared a video-review where I walk through most of its features.

If you don’t like to see me looking out of the window during the first minute of the video here is also a short summary of it.

How does it work?

Since Trakor Pro doesn’t offer a plugin-interface EMULATOR has to use some tricks. It communicates with Traktor via MIDI. A virtual MIDI-device is good enough. That is a driver which fakes an actual MIDI device. Since Windows has no built-in way to create a such a device EMULATOR comes with the free LoopBe1 MIDI driver.
A lot of Traktor’s functions can’t be accessed like this. Therefore EMULATOR displays parts of Traktor’s original user interface like the waveforms and filebrowser through it. So its truly an overlay for Traktor.

The Good and the bad bits

Pros:

• Clean interface with vibrant colors
• As tight as possible integrated with Traktor Pro
• Use of Windows 7 built-in multi-touch capabilites

Cons

• No multi-touch gestures used
• No innovative controls used. *Where are X-Y-meters which work very well on touchscreens?*
• Only two decks are supported
• The layout of the controls is not optimal *e.g. it takes too many taps to be able to use FX*
• Due to relying on Windows 7 Input API, the latency is pretty high *however this is very difficult to solve*
• no way to customize the layout
• The only supported screen-resolution is 1280 x 800
• High price for the software *249 USD for a plain overlay is rip-off if you take into consideration that you can get Traktor Pro for as low as 200 USD*

Conclusion

Despite the sleek style-factor of a transparent multitouch-screen Emulator doesn’t have much to offer a DJ would want. I’d prefer my old-school buttons, knobs and faders any day over something which does exactly the same minus tactile feedback. To use the potential of multi-touch interfaces developers have to think outside of the box. Up until now the best way to control a DJ software was using external controllers. Now that you can interact directly with the user interface there are a lot of new possibilities to get our head around. For example how about adding an XY-meter which also controls a Z-value if you slide two fingers on it?

If you have interesting ideas for ways to interact with a touchscreen let me know about it! I may be cooking up something myself.