Library and Media management improvements

Dear NI,

I've been a traktor user for a few months and really like the features you created in the performance related aspects, but I humbly must say your asset management (namely music and sample management) leaves a lot to be desired.

I'm not an expert at traktor yet, and with my understanding of the playlist creation process, it is very tedious to look through lots of music folders with the current UI/workflow.

Actually, the playlist/set prepping aspect can take up so much time, that library management is Traktor's biggest weakness.

I'm proposing the following addition to Traktor to make playlist creation and asset management much more powerful. To boot, you could build a playlist in no time using this approach.

I created a couple UI mockups to help illustrate my concept. Sorry they're not great, but I didn't want to spend too much time making it pretty. I hope they will get the point across.

Browser mode:

This is supposedly the UI that should be used to build playlists, analyze tracks, and generally manage your music library. See Attached files.

From here, I would add a context menu item that shows up whenever you right click a playlist, either in the folder tree on the left or in the playlist stage above the track list.

This menu item would be " Edit Playlist". This opens a separate window (it could even be a standalone program launched without running traktor, only for the purpose of managing your asset library). This window is the Playlist Editor, as shown below.



The Playlist Editor (attached mockup)

The Playlist Editor shown above incorporates a regular file browser window on the left, to navigate your directories more easily, and in the right window you have the playlist contents. You can drag and drop files into the playlist, as well as entire folders. Dragging a folder will open up a prompt, asking whether you want to import contents once (which will add the playable media inside the folder and its subfolders), or you want to ad the folder as a watch folder (which will update the playlist contents whenever the folder is modified).

The playlist itself is just a set of links to files and directories on your drives. At the top is a set of toolbars, with buttons such as:

- Analyze selected tracks: When tracks in the playlist window are selected, they can be analyzed from here.

- All the add folder/add track functions listed below

- export playlist: lets you export your playlist to another playlist format, like .m3u, etc... that are understood by other media players

- import playlist: fills in the playlist contents by replacing OR appending an imported playlist. You could import .m3u, other Traktor playlists, etc..

- A low profile player to preview selected tracks

- a little window for album art display, to show album art on selected tracks (old vinyl dj's like myself have memorized their record libraries visually, from looking into the crates, rather than by track or artist names)

- Eventually, a set of functions to sort tracks by metadata for things like key, bpm, genre, or any tags.

In addition, right clicking (WIN) in the file browser or playlist editor could have the following contextual menus:


In the file browser window:

Right clicking a folder displays the following functions:

1) Add folder contents to playlist: (imports the folder into playlist once, note that, inside the playlist editor, you still see the folders as such, but once back in Traktor, the playlist only shows the tracks. This means some XML data will remind the playlist editor what is from a "folder selection" and what is from single item selection)

2) Add folder as watch folder: (updates playlist dynamically whenever folder is changed. Watch folders could have a different color/highlight.)

3) typical file browser commands, like copy, paste, new folder etc... Drag and drop should work just as in the OS UI.

Right clicking a file diplays:

1) Typical file browser commands

2) Add file to playlist: (using this function on a playlist file would import the entire playlist)

3) Edit Metadata: opens a metadata editor window

4) play track: (you can preview the track using a player, either traktor's or whatever selected in preferences)

In the Playlist window:

Right clicking a folder displays the following functions:

1) Analyze selected track(s)

2) import watch folder contents: (imports the contents and removes the 'watching' feature)

3) remove from playlist: (removes a watch folder, normal folder, or single track)

4) play in preview player

5) Edit Metada

6) Export selection as playlist: (to save selection a Traktor playlist file, or other playlist file)


When the user is done with what he had to do, he can hit a close or "done" button. This closes the Playlist Editor and you are back in the Traktor Browser, if that is where the playlist editor was launched from. All the changes you made while in the playlist editor are now reflected in the playlist in your Traktor browser. Conversely, the playlist editor could have been launched as a standalone app, in which case a playlist is saved in Traktor's playlist directory, and will be available next time Traktor is run.

Your comments and feedback are welcome. I put some thought in this and I hope you might find it interesting

Raphael

 

i strongly agree that the browser and library management in traktor is its weakest point, and requests in this area have been overlooked for a long time.

i'd be happy just having smart playlists, although other improvements would also be really appreciated, such as:

- enable the use of common keyboard shortcuts (shift+end, or cmd+right, etc. to interact with text in the search field or to edit tag fields)

- triple mouse click to select all text in a field.

- enable/disable nodes in the tree.

- increase the available tags list, let us choose which are the ones we need (itunes grouping and composer not shown in traktor collection)

- add support for more library managers (foobar2000, songbird...)

change the overall design, make it modular. it has to have flexibility. some ideas:

- allow the browser to be de-attached from decks (i.e. dual monitor support, somehow?)

- loved tracks: mark which tracks work well with others on the fly and have this information shown when a song is loaded, in a dedicated space (suggested by another user in a thread)

- the possibility to put playlists side by side, so we can create kind of a "next songs" list on the fly. the difference between the preparation list and this one, is that it should always be seen, please see attached (crappy) sketch.

- it should be possible for any module to be shown and arranged acording to each user's preference. also it could be interesting to let them be there and show or hide them as needed, as the advanced panel under each deck does.

- it should be possible to split the browser into two browsers side by side, each of them with its tree, "norton commander style".