Give tracks a color box in traktor?

DJ Life & Community General Discussion
1

Give tracks a color box in traktor?

Hi there,

I’ve recently made the switch from Serato DJ to Traktor 2, and I really dig it.

There’s only one thing what I’m missing on traktor (which I was able to do on Serato DJ) and that’s giving each track a color in the playlist, which I find a super handy tool to make playlists.

Anyone knows an alternative to it?

2

Star rating any use?

3

Yeah, think that’s the only option at the moment.

Thx

4

yes i use the stars, im pushing for colored hot cue markers myself

5

They’ve stated that they will never give us colored hot cue markers because it conflicts with their intended user experience.

6

Do it yourself with the artwork field. Just change the artwork for all your “red” tracks to a jpeg of a red square.

7

^Not a bad idea…

Combine it with a Smart Playlist based on the “colour” that you assign to a track (in a text field) and you are golden.

8

There was a thread here with the same idea but for keys. Poster added his own color artwork in a .zip file :wink: Awesome idea.

9

Pretty good idea.

Thanks!

10

Unless you’re an old dude who’s memory has gone to complete crap and you rely on album art to trigger some latent memory about what track it is only for it not to be the track you were thinking of so you spend an hour looking for the track you sort of remember, but never find.

11

i guess the intended user experience doesnt include marking tracks for 3 deck mixing…

12

Hard to say where it comes from… I personally think users should be allowed to configure their workflow however they like.

13

I think the reasoning behind controlling the user experience in cases like this is that people that don’t really know what they want will tend to make a mess of what they have. Then they’ll blame the software for being crap when it was really their inability to use it efficiently that was at fault. Kind of like how the iPhone allows very limited customization.

14

EXACTLY !!!

NI will not give users the ability to have custom colours on cue points for the simple reason that it throws the manual out of the window.
It’s ok saying it’s Pro software and we should not have to pander to the idiots that get confused be we don’t work in NI Support (or rather you don’t - I have some involvement as a mod) so fielding loads of support questions on “why have all my hot cues gone pink” is just not something anyone would want to deal with.

I agree that the Traktor browser is dreadful. I’ve said it on here and I’ve said it on the NI forum an I’ve even told the devs on the beta team - there needs to be some customisation and I’d love some colour options for genre or whatever I choose but some things ‘must’ be consistent and hot cue points are one of those things. It’s pretty fundamental to consistency.

Custom hotcue colours is a vanity request, not a ‘must have’ request.

They need to add another column field that you can assign a colour to. You can then use that field for whatever purpose you like. Just like the comment field but more visible.

15

This is the only part I disagree with - meaningful colors for my cues was one (though by no means all) of the reasons I ended up writing my own DJ software.

16

I never realized how much I relied on the CD art to ID my music until I switched from CDs to a computer. It was a much longer transition that I would have thought.

Today, I would sooner hide the “Artist” tag than the “Comments” tag. :wink:

17

Humans are visual animals. No matter how quickly you can read, you can recognise an image much quicker.

18

i started to write a batch program that would draw on whatever artwork there was - or add a new random pic if there wasn´t - with key and energy and stars modifying the color and shape of the “blob” on top of the original - but got bored and never finished the thing.
As of now i have key (01A ) first in comments, type (0= fx, 1-8 energy) in comments2 and stars for eh wowness instead.
that way i can order by key first and type after and get a reasonably good overview of whatever i have in my list.

19

What?!? :tada:

I’ve been looking for a program like this for YEARS! Something that would generate and attach .mp3 artwork based on Tags.

Can you do it? I thought of having a set of source pics (probably 1 per genre) and then overlay that with artist and title info…

20

I’m surprised mp3tag can’t do this. I’ve just had a look, and it can import cover art, but there’s no way to tell it what cover art to import depending on key etc. If only the actions section had if statements…