traktor-nowplaying 0.2.1

traktor_nowplaying uses Traktor's broadcast functionality to extract metadata about the currently playing song.

Traktor Now Playing

This project for Python 3 (tested on 3.7 and 3.8) uses Traktor's broadcast functionality to extract metadata about the currently playing song. This is really a very thin wrapper around some tinytag methods that can be found in ogg.py, where the original license is also included. There are no dependencies. Tested with Traktor 3.3, but this will likely work with older versions as well.

The reason this exists is because it's rather difficult to get this information through other means. You can use MIDI for this as well, but that requires that you add a fake controller.

Lastly, there are several other projects that do something similar such as Traktor Metadata Listener which is not open-source and likely will never be, and traktor-now-playing, which uses the MIDI approach mentioned above.

Installation

The preferred installation method is via pip:

pip install traktor_nowplaying

There are also binary releases available for Windows, Linux, and MacOS. These are created using pyInstaller and GitHub actions and can be downloaded from the project Releases page.

General use

In order for this program to work, you of course have to setup the broadcasting feature of Traktor - note that this completely hijacks that functinality, so while you can still record and broadcast through some other means (eg. using a splitter or other outputs on your controller/mixer, or from the recording itself), you cannot broadcast from Traktor itself.

You must configure Traktor to broadcast to localhost and the port specified with the -p, or --port option (defaults to 8000), or the port that is passed to the constructor if you're using this as a library instead. For the format setting you can use anything, but I recommend choosing the lowest bitrate for the sample rate of your system, so most commonly the best choice is 44100 Hz, 64 Kbps.

Note that there is a delay between when you change a song in Traktor and when the change is picked up.

Use from command line

If you run the program without specifying any options you'll be asked if you want to set the options interactively, or you can hit enter which uses all default options, which are to listen on port 8000, and output the currently playing song to the console:

traktor_nowplaying

Listen on port 8000, output to nowplaying.txt in the current directory and do not output to stdout:

traktor_nowplaying --port 8000 --outfile='nowplaying.txt' --quiet

The help text:

$ traktor_nowplaying -h
usage: traktor_nowplaying [-h] [-p PORT] [-q] [-o OUTFILE] [-a]
                          [-m MAX_TRACKS] [-i] [-v]

Use Traktor's broadcast functionality to extract metadata about the currently
playing song

optional arguments:
  -h, --help            show this help message and exit
  -p PORT, --port PORT  Port to listen on for broadcasts from Traktor
  -q, --quiet           Suppress console output of currently playing song
  -o OUTFILE, --outfile OUTFILE
                        Provide a file path to which the currently playing
                        song should be written
  -a, --append          If writing to file, appends newest track to end of
                        file instead of overwriting the file
  -m MAX_TRACKS, --max-tracks MAX_TRACKS
                        If appending to a file, the maximum number of tracks
                        to keep in file (by default there is no limit)
  -i, --interactive     Interactive mode allows for settings to be specified
                        at runtime. These override command line options.
  -v, --version         show program's version number and exit

Note that you must configure Traktor to broadcast to localhost and the port
specified with the -p, or --port option (defaults to 8000). For the format
setting you can use anything, but I recommend choosing the lowest bitrate for
the sample rate of your system, so most commonly the best choice is 44100 Hz,
64 Kbps.

To stop the process Ctrl + C should suffice.

Using binary releases

If you've downloded a platform specific release from the Releases page, the use instructions are the same as described above for the command-line.

Use as a library

traktor_nowplaying can also be used as a library. This can be useful if you'd like to leverage this rather simple functionality in other code.

from traktor_nowplaying import Listener

listener = Listener(port=8000, quiet=True, outfile='nowplaying.txt')
listener.start()

For a more elaborate example with a custom callback, see this project: https://github.com/radusuciu/traktor_ice, and this bit in particular.

Implementation details

TODO