During my shows, I use VirtualDJ Pro and Jingle Palette. One of the (major) things lacking in VirtualDJ is the export of artist and song title of the song playing, aka “Now Playing”. Many 3rd party audio streaming packages can read a “Now Playing” file and send the contents to the server, thus, enabling you to see what artist and song is being played. It is also a legal requirement and the song info is used for license royalties, tracking what is played and whether it is within the legal guidelines (DCMA has rules).
VirtualDJ can stream audio to a server within itself – to ONE server. But, I use a soft-mixer (VoiceMeeter Potato), Jingle Palette (for sound effects/ID’s, etc) and I stream to multiple servers at once.
Mixxx, which is a very popular FREE mixing software can stream to multiple servers. I tried this package during a show a couple of weeks ago after spending a few hours setting it up, testing and importing 33,000+ song tracks into it. I found it limiting with my Pioneer DJ controller compared to VirtualDJ. After the show, I ditched Mixxx. Sorry Mixxx fans.
VirtualDJ does have a utility called Play2Text which I used for about a year. It reads VirtualDJ’s track info and saves it to a file of your choosing. But, for me at least, it proved to be buggy – sometimes it worked, sometimes it didn’t.
With my growing knowledge of Excel and VBA, I decided to write some code and an Excel form that would do the trick. After a bit of testing, I submitted it to VirtualDJ and it was eventually approved as a app. But I needed something else, something stand alone. I grabbed Microsoft’s Visual Studio package and went to work. After some trial and error, countless Google searches, and tests, this morning I used my first-made Windows application – “Virtual DJ Now Playing v1”. It worked flawless! I decided to send it to VirtualDJ and am awaiting their approval. It may look archaic, but it does what is needed.
After this, I realized I’m on a roll! I started creating a soundboard After adding a couple of sound bytes and having successful results, I decided Jingle Palette does the trick, for now. lol If you haven’t looked at Jingle Palette, it is quite a useful program.
