The Player Status Window

Beat Link Trigger can take advantage of track metadata and related information from the players to provide you a rich view of what is happening right now on all the decks. As shown in the example view below, this can be an invaluable resoure on its own for running visuals for a show, even if you don’t have any triggers set up:

Only players currently visible on the network will appear in this window. The player number will be bright green if it is currently playing, and gray if it is stopped. (The playback position indicators in both the full track preview and, if you have it showing, the scrolling wave detail view, will also be white when playing and red when stopped.)

In addition to the current track time (position) and remaining time, the current playback pitch (speed, shown as a percentage change from normal speed, + meaning faster and - meaning slower), the current effective tempo (combining the track tempo with the playback pitch) and master/sync status are displayed above the track waveform preview.

The current beat playing is shown above the player number, and individual beat (white) and bar (red) marks are drawn in the waveform detail view (although if you zoom out to see more of the track, the individual beats go away, and only bars are drawn).

The white tick marks below the full-track preview waveform at the bottom of a player row are minute markers, so you can see at a glance how long the track is and how much is left.

Hot cues are shown above the waveform as green triangles (or, if the DJ has assigned them a specific color, that color will be used instead of green). Memory points as shown as red triangles, and loops as orange triangles. The loop body is shown in the scrolling waveform detail section. Only loops that are stored in the track can be displayed; loops and memory points created on-the-fly by the DJ are not visible over the network.

If the DJ has assigned a label (text comment) to a memory point, loop, or hot cue, that will also be shown in the scrolling waveform detail section (but not in the smaller full-track preview). For hot cues, both the letter identifying the hot cue, and the text comment (if any), will be drawn using the color assigned by the DJ.

If you are using a compatible mixer, and it (and the players) are all configured to display their On-Air status, and the player numbers are properly configured to match the mixer channels that they are connected to, then you can use the "On-Air" indication above the player number as an additional hint about when you need to pay attention to it.

To create a metadata cache, have your DJ insert her (rekordbox only) media into a player before the show begins (and before four players are in use), and then click on the gear button next to the corresponding player slot, choosing the Create Metadata Cache File option:

This will open a dialog where you can choose to cache either all the tracks present on the media, or only those associated with a particular playlist. If you have limited time available, and the DJ will be using a particular playlist for the tracks that you need metadata for, the playlist option can save you a lot of time.

Also choose the file where you want to save the cache:

When you click Save, Beat Link Trigger will download the metadata, artwork, cue list, beat grid, and waveform information about all the tracks you specified, creating a zip file that can be used to retrieve them when needed, instead of querying the player itself. This takes a couple of seconds per track, so it can be a time-consuming operation for large amounts of media.

Once the cache is created, it will automatically be attached to that player slot, so Beat Link Trigger will use the cache instead of asking the player for metadata. If the media is ejected from the slot, the cache is automatically detached. You can also manually detach or attach caches using the gear button next to any player media slot. The gear will be filled in when a cache is attached, and the cache file information displayed next to it, as shown here:

If you have created a metadata cache and want it to automatically be attached to the appropriate player slot whenever your DJ inserts the corresponding media (since it can be hard to predict where it will end up in a busy show), you can ask Beat Link Trigger to watch for media that matches the cache, and automatically attach it. To do this, choose Auto-Attach Metadata Caches in the File menu.

This will open a window where you can configure the cache files that should be watched for. Click Add File to add one:

This will open a file chooser dialog you can use to find the file or files that you want to be watched, and they will appear in the window. Whenever a new media stick or SD card is inserted into one of the players, it will be checked to see if it has the same number of tracks as one of the caches (or, if the cache was created from a playlist, if the media has a playlist with the same ID and the same number of tracks). If so, a random sampling of the tracks will be examined in both the cache and the player, and if the metadata of those tracks match exactly, the media cache will be attached to that slot.

If you no longer want one of the files to be watched for, simply click the Remove button next to it.

The icon next to the Remove button lets you see information about the metadata cache file. If the file was created by Beat Link Trigger 0.4.1 or later, the icon will be an “i” in a blue circle, and clicking it will give you information about the media from which the cache was created as well as the contents of the cache itself:

If the file was created by an older version of Beat Link Trigger, you will be warned when adding it to the auto-attach list that it is missing the media details information, which will make it harder to match with mounted media, and the icon will be an exclamation point inside a yellow triangle. Clicking that brings up the warning again, which also shows information about the contents of the cache itself.

If you want to work on trigger definitions while you don’t have access to CDJs or the media containing the tracks that you want to base them on, you can look at the contents of a metadata cache to find out the rekordbox IDs of the tracks you want your triggers to match.

To do this, choose View Metadata Cache Contents in the File menu.

This will open a file chooser dialog you can use to find the file containing the cache that you want to examine. Once you choose one, a window will open containing a row for each entry in the metadata cache, showing its rekordbox ID, title, and artist:

During pre-show and after-show situations, when there is no DJ on stage, it can be convenient to cue up and play tracks from Front of House. If you can ensure that the tracks are inserted into one of the players’ media slots before the show (or at the end of the show), you can use Beat Link Trigger to accomplish this, either by choosing Network  Load Track on Player, or using the popup menu associated with a particular media slot in the Player Status window as shown in the screen shot below:

Either method opens the interface shown below; the advantage of starting from a media slot’s popup menu is that the corresponding section of the loader interface will be automatically opened for you. If there are any computers running rekordbox on the network, they will also show up as places that you can tell players to load tracks from.

This window allows you to drill down through the menu hierarchy associated with the media mounted in any player slot, just as if you were on the player itself. The top-level elements are the mounted media libraries themselves, showing the media name and, for rekordbox media, the total number of tracks and playlists present on the media.

You can click on the + icon to expand a section, or double-click anywhere in that row of the tree. The same actions will collapse an already-expanded section (although the icon will be labeled - in that case). Selecting a row that corresponds to an individual track enables the Load button:

Clicking that button tells the player chosen in the Load on menu to load the selected track. (The button will also be disabled, with an explanation next to it, if that player is currently playing a track.)

If the chosen player is currently stopped at the Cue point, the Play if Cued button will be enabled; pressing it tells that player to start playing. If the player is currently playing, the button will be labeled Stop and Cue, and clicking it will tell the player to stop and return to the Cue point, so it will be ready to start playing again.

The easiest way to find a track, if you know its title, artist, or album name, is to use the Search interface. As soon as you click on the SEARCH section of a media entry, the search interface opens at the top of the window, and you can start typing. As you add to your search string, the results are narrowed down. Once you can see what you are looking for, you can expand and load it.

If there are more than 25 results matching your search string, only the first 25 will be loaded and shown to begin with. You can use the Load button to load more, in larger and larger batches, although your best bet is probably to use a longer and more selective search string instead:

Some users have expressed an interest in making the Player Status Window always be visible, no matter what window is active in their operating system. This can be arranged by creating a global variable entry with the key :player-status-always-on-top and the value true before showing the window. In other words, add the following form to your Global Setup Expression:

If the window was already open when you set up this entry, you can make it take effect by choosing Network  Show Player Status again.

If you always want the Player Status window to open when you launch Beat Link Trigger, add the following form to your Came Online Expression, and whenever Beat Link Trigger successfully connects to a DJ Link network, it will also try to open the Player Status Window. It does this the same way as when you choose Network  Show Player Status, so you will get all the necessary error dialogs and coaching if the environment isn’t correct to support the window:

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Distributed under the Eclipse Public License 1.0, the same as Clojure. By using this software in any fashion, you are agreeing to be bound by the terms of this license. You must not remove this notice, or any other, from this software. A copy of the license can be found in LICENSE within this project.