Shortrack

Shortrack is a potentially fun script that permit to play track using keyboard-shortcut.

Each shortcut is associated to a track and holding down all the keys the track starts playing as long as they are held down. Every shortcuts and trucks are completely configurable, so you can use it with every kind of audio and combination of keys

Installation

On Windows you need to have python installed (maybe also the visual c++ build tools)

1. $ git clone [email protected]:Bnz-0/Shortrack.git && cd Shortrack
2. $ pip install -r requirements.txt
3. $ python3 shortrack.py
4. Raise up the volume and keep pressed "alt+shift+p" to launch a safe audio test ;)
5. To quit press "alt+0" (unless you've already modified the QUIT shortcut in hotkeys.conf file)

If something goes wrong, go to Issues

Configuration

All you need to do is modify the file "hotkeys.conf". The syntax is really simple, each line define a shortrack in this way:

[mode:]<keys>:<rel_path>

Where keys are the keys you choose to press to trigger the track and rel_path is the relative path to a .wav file

The keys must be written like this specification. Simply: keys separated by a +

Modes

The mode is an optional parameter that specifies the behavior of the track:

• default: the track is reproduced only when all the keys is held down
• c (continues): when all the keys are pressed the track starts playing and it will stops only after the same keys are pressed again
• l (loop): when the track finishes it restart from the beginning

The modes can be put in combo, for example 'cl' create a track that go without keeping the keys hold down and restart when it finishes.

Special keys

There are also special keywords which you can use as a rel_path:

• QUIT: the hotkey associated to this will kill the script's execution
• PAUSE: this will ignore any track to be played until RESUME
• RESUME: resume the standard behavior (i.e. plays again the tracks)
• PAUSE_RESUME: if you need to have both PAUSE and RESUME in the same hotkey, simply switches between PAUSE and RESUME each time the hotkey is pressed

You can take a look at the standard hotkeys.conf in this repo for a simple example

Notes:

• All file audio must be a wav file
• The hotkeys.conf must be placed in the same directory of the script
• The path to the tracka is relative to the script folder

Issues

First of all, check if you are running the script using python3. I don't know if it works also with python2 but please, stop to use it and accept his death

If something goes bad, you can find all error raised in the file shortrack.log (in the same folder of shortrack.py)

• If the installation fails, try to install the dependencies of PyAudio: https://people.csail.mit.edu/hubert/pyaudio/

• On Windows the pyaudio package have some installation problems, if pip doesn't work you can find the same package for windows here. So just download it and install it doing $ pip install .\PyAudio‑<version you have downloaded>.whl

• If you're trying to run it on macOS, probably it doesn't work because of packages. If you want to make it works also on macOS fell free to fix this and make a pull request!