Smoother 'mixing' from iTunes

Sometimes I'm DJing at a party for the night and I just can't be assed to carry on mixing properly. This might be because I want to be a bit more sociable, because I'm a bit the worst for wear or just down to plain laziness.

A few handy playlists in iTunes are a big help when this happens but iTunes is massivley clunky when it comes to switching from one track to another, especially if one tune's not right after the other, or in another playlist.

This is where a couple of handy iTunes scripts come in their own. Don't be affraid, it's easy to do, there's no programming involved and it should take ten or twenty minutes to do.

The best place to look for scripts is undoubtedly Dougscripts.com. It's worth having a look round this site. There's all sorts of useful stuff there, I must have grabbed twenty or so. From a script downloaded from there called "Play Selected Track Next" I made two new scripts called 10 Sec Fade Then Next Track and 10 Sec Fade Then Selected Track. They do exactly what they say on the tins and once downloaded and unzipped you should place these in the folder ~home/Library/iTunes/Scripts, if it doesn't exist then create it. The scripts will be available from the Scripts menu when you restart iTunes.

You can go one step further and assign them to function keys by using System Preferences/Keyboard and Mouse/Keyboard Shortcuts. Simply add a couple of entries to the list, but be sure you get the spelling absolutely spot on or it won't work. Use the help button for full instructions on how to do this - Apple's Help heading for this is "Creating keyboard shortcuts for applications".

I know it's not mixing but it does make transitions a lot smoother and most people don't notice by the time I get round to doing it anyway.

You may need to fully retstart your machine to make this work. It's worth it though.

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Traktor 3 screen/layout jumping

One day my Traktor layouts started changing by themselves. At first it only happened when loading or saving the collection, slowing things up, but then it started going crazy whilst mixing - not good.

I searched around for a solution and lots of people suggested deleting the 'Traktor DJ Studio 3 Settings.xml' file in the "~home/Traktor 3" directory. DO NOT DO THIS. It's a nightmare as it zaps all your settings and who wants to do this?

The answer lies at http://www.nativeinstruments.com/forum/showthread.php?t=62210 and is provided by Chopenko, who is a very clever person to whom I am deeply indebted. I'm going to copy their post here, but if you want to view the whole thread then follow the link above.

They're going to talk about a windows XML editor so ignore that and think Mac. Any xml editor will do the trick, search for a free one.

Do This:

"Open your "Traktor DJ Studio 3 Settings.xml" with a plain-text file editor such as "Notepad" on Windows or the one I used:
XML Wrench (for windows too)http://www.xmlwrench.com/download.html

If you use Notepad just drag your file into the Notepad Window.

You will find a lot of characters, now press F3 or click on "Find Next". Now search for "Browser.List.Count" (without quotes).

Once you have positioned the cursor (or caret) inside that TAG (<>) ahead you will see the property Value="xxxx", replace whatever value is in place of XXXX with 818333465 which is the default's Traktor value for this setting.

Save your file again, it is very important that you use a plain-text editor, if you don't then you will have a corrupted and or invalid XML file. It will be an XML file but without a valid file structure.

I think this value stores some kind of binary flags that affects the Browser Window's properties so if this value is corrupted Traktor won't be able to keep all the elements aligned within a specified Layout, so it's normal that it tries to load another layout until all things are correctly aligned. Of course, it'll never find such layout with corrupt parameter's values specified.

I'm amazed of the capability of Traktor to keep things separated, so in case of any kind of this problem occurs you can still browse, load and play tracks.

Also, it would be nice if we post the values we found in this property so we can find a pattern, mine was 126096849."

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