TraktorLauncher - Take your Traktor settings with you (portable app)
Hi people, here’s my small contribution to the Traktor user community. I choose to post it here rather than on the NI forums as I feel more free and “at home” here on DJTT.
What is it?
TraktorLauncher is a launcher for Traktor, which can be thought of as an intelligent shortcut. With TraktorLauncher you can:
- Run Traktor on multiple computers without having to manually copy your settings across to each machine.
- Store all Traktor data, including music library and settings, on one or more external drives.
- Share Traktor on the same computer among multiple users, each using different configurations.
Motivation:
If you store your Traktor settings and music collection on an external drive, or even across several external drives (think large music collections), it is very possible that each time you connect your drives to a computer the drive letters assigned by Windows may not be the same, and so the paths you specified in the Traktor settings window will be wrong. Furthermore, it is possible that several DJs might want to share a computer but each DJ will most likely have configured Traktor in a different way, and Traktor is not designed to be multi-user so it’s not easy to quickly switch between configurations quickly.
TraktorLauncher solves these problems by modifying the file Traktor Settings.tsi (which is where Traktor stores its configuration) prior to running Traktor. Therefore, by the time Traktor starts it will find a .tsi file with all settings good to go. In addition, if you store all your Traktor data on an external drive, you don’t need to worry about backing up your settings before you re-install Windows, for example.
First time use instructions:
(backup your settings just in case!)
- Install Traktor
- Double-click either TraktorLauncher.exe. The Options dialog opens.
- Fill in the path fields and ensure there are no red icons on any of the specified paths (green = good). Experiment with the Validate and Portable buttons.
- Click the Save and launch Traktor button. Traktor should now start with the paths set in the previous step in place.
User interface walk-through
TraktorLauncher’s user interface should be fairly self-explanatory, but do post your questions if something is not obvious. Once everything works as expected I will put together detailed usage instructions; for now, here’s a quick and dirty usage guide:
Note: Some buttons are only enabled only after you select an item from the top or bottom list.
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Restore: Restores the last saved path (think of it as Undo).
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Browse: Click this to change the path of the selected target.
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Portable: Toggle selected path between portable/relative and absolute. Relative paths are relative to the TraktorLauncher folder. Portable paths reference drives by their label rather than by the drive letter. The letters P and R will be shown in the corresponding row to indicate how the target is being referenced. The absence of a letter means the path is absolute.
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Validate: Toggle between validate/do not validate. TraktorLauncher will prevent you from launching Traktor if any paths with the validate flag set do not exist. Generally speaking it is a good idea to validate all paths, except the iTunes library path (if you don’t use iTunes).
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+ : Add a music folder path
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- : Delecte selected music folder path (the actual folder is not deleted, of course)
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Browse, Portable, Validate: Same as above but for music folder paths.
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About: Show About dialog.
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Refresh: Refresh path status icons (in case any of the reference paths has been deleted, moved or renamed externally.
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Cancel: Exit TraktorLauncher and don’t save changes.
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Save: Save current settings to file. The settings file is TraktorSettings.ini, which is located in the same directory as TraktorLauncher. This button is disabled is there is nothing to save.
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Save and launch Traktor: Saves settings to file and launches Traktor. This button is disabled if not all paths validate (i.e. red icons are present).
Notes:
You can place TraktorLauncher anywhere: it will find the Traktor installation path automatically from the Windows Registry, so you don’t need to worry about it.
TraktorLauncher supports both relative paths (relative to the location of TraktorLauncher itself) indicated by an “R”, and portable paths, indicated by a “P”.
In order to use portable paths, you first need to manually edit the label of the drives that will be used by Traktor. This only needs to be done once. For example, the drive where you store your music may be labelled “Media”, and so on. The default label “Local Disk” is not a valid label!
TraktorLauncher.exe and TraktorLauncherQuiet.exe both will launch Traktor, but the “quiet” version basically by-passes the TraktorLauncher options window where you set the paths. This is useful once you’ve set your paths correctly as it enables you to start Traktor directly. However, the options window will still be shown if there are any missing paths with the “V” (validate) flag enabled (more on this later).
Running the quiet version is equivalent to running the normal version with the following command-line switch:
TraktorLauncher.exe /q
Download:
TraktorLauncher v0.01b.zip (833 KB) Released on 13 October 2014
PS: Make some noise on this thread if you like TraktorLauncher, thanks! 