Trackhunter is a Windows/Mac music discovery assistant app that lets you audition the latest music on several online stores by genre. In a nutshell, it allows you to go through a large volume of music quickly as it runs in the background, potentially saving the DJ a huge amount of time when shortlisting and buying tunes. Let’s take a look…
In use
After downloading Trackhunter from the App Store (it’s free) and launching it, you run through a Setup Wizard that lets you specify which sites you’d like it to search music on. There’s a good choice including Amazon, Beatport, Juno, Traxsource and several more.
Once that’s done, you can then choose the genres of music that you’re interested in auditioning and also pick out a format (lossy or lossless).
Lastly, you set Trackhunter to get songs from just the last day, up to a month’s worth of music that’s been uploaded to the sites that you’ve specified.
Once that’s done, you’re set to audition all the songs that have been collected for you. A playhead appears in the window letting you jump through the track manually, or you can press the Skip button or the Fast Listen box to let the software do this for you automatically.
Should you find a track to your liking, simply press the Add to Shortlist button saves that song to a list that shows where you can purchase the track at the lowest price.
Conclusion
Trackhunter is a simple piece of software that partially automates what I would normally do when I have to go through a large collection of potential purchases in a short time. Instead of manually having to skip through a track, the software does this for you in the background while you do other work, meaning you simply have to occasionally hit the “Add to Shortlist” button when you like a song.
There’s the added bonus of discovering music you hadn’t specifically shortlisted yourself while you’re at it, as you’re auditioning songs based solely on genre and recency, not on your personally expressed specific preference.
Of course, some DJs will find this all unnecessary, and something that for them may even “devalue” the whole listening and crate-digging aspect of DJing – but to each his own. Personally, I found it a quick way to sort through a pile of music that I’d been keeping an eye on at my favourite music sites, and I can definitely recommend it.
Do you think it’s truly possible to judge songs based on quick listens? Could something like this potentially change the way you select your music, or do you still listen to whole tracks before arriving at a conclusion? Let us know in the comments below!
Joey Santos
