Time Tracker helps you to measure time spend on a DAW project.

Add it as a last effect on main bus track and forget till you need to check how long you are working. Tracking can be auto or manually paused. You can assign a MIDI event to a pause button. You can of course add as many instances on any track you want.  


Features

Project start date and time

Session start date and time

Two formats of time

By default time is shown in hours : minutes : seconds, but you can change it to weeks : days : hours : minutes : seconds

Manual pause (mouse or MIDI)

Time tracking can be paused and resume any time, using pause / resume button. This button acts like any other control in your effect or instruments plugins, so it can be attached to MIDI events using your DAWs features.

Silence detecting

Automatic pause on silence and resume when there is a sound on a track. Activity and time for this feature can be configured in auto tracking settings : Status of silence tracking is visualized in plugin header. Red part of circle shows how many minutes has passed when last sound was detected. Green speaker icon means that silence tracking and time tracking is active. Red speaker indicates that time tracking was automatically paused. Orange speaker icon is shown when manual pause was pressed. Gray colour means that detecting is not active.

Auto resume after manual pause

When silence detecting is active and user clicks pause button manually, there is a possibility to turn on or off auto resume. This feature prevents waking up tracker just after manual pause, when the sound is still sustained. On the other hand it will start tracking time even if user forget to turn it manually. This can not work as expected if there is a sound present on output even when nothing plays. For example some plugin is humming always.

  Manual pause Pause after silence detected
Auto resume active Time tracking will be resumed when any sound would occur, but only if there was a silence detected for “minimum silence time”. But before that time, time tracking won’t be resumed even if there will be a sound. Time tracking will be resumed when any sound would occur.
Auto resume deactivated If auto resume is off and user click manual pause, then time tracking will be resumed only when user clicks “play” button manually. Time tracking will be resumed when any sound would occur.

Scalable GUI

You can use bottom right corner to zoom plugin window.

Time correcting

Do you have a copy of a project and you need to reset time statistics? Or maybe you have added Time Tracker to already work in progress project? No problem! You can correct time in the setting window .

  • Add to total time – You can add or subtract specific amount of time from total project time (Helpful for already started projects)
  • Overwrite all – You can overwrite total and session time with a specific time (For resetting time to zero or correcting time after cloning to other track or group of tracks)
  • Reset total to current session – You can set total time to current session time value with a two clicks (No “hand” calculations needed)

Despite the option is called “Add” you can also subtract time. All changes to the time would be visible in a downloadable log file.

Log file

You can export sessions log using save button . There are three types of log available.

  1. Group by day – this log contains information about time spend on a project grouped by day. It is a csv file and looks like this (time is saved in hours:minutes:seconds format):
    Date, session time, project time
    10 Jul 2019, 1:24:34, 1:24:36
  2. Group by session -this one is very similar to the previous, but data is grouped by session. So if you open your project more then once some day, all those session would be logged individually. This is log also has csv format and looks like this (time is saved in hours:minutes:seconds format):
    Session end timestamp, session time, project time
    10 Jul 2019 7:23:38am, 1:1:16, 1:1:16
    10 Jul 2019 7:26:17am, 0:2:21, 1:3:37
  3. Full log – this is an XML file containing all informations collected by Time Tracker:
    1. session tracking start / stop
    2. time corrections.
<projectLog>
   <sessionLog>
      <startedLog timeStamp="5 Jul 2019 5:52:12pm" actualSessionTime="0:0:0:0:0" actualProjectTime="0:0:0:0:0"/>
      <addToProjectTimeLog timeStamp="5 Jul 2019 5:52:18pm" oldProjectTime="0:0:0:0:5" modValue="0:0:1:0:0" actualProjectTime="0:0:1:0:5"/>
      <sessionSavedLog timeStamp="5 Jul 2019 5:52:29pm" actualSessionTime="0:0:0:0:17" actualProjectTime="0:0:1:0:17"/>
   </sessionLog>
...

Colours, colours, colours

If your DAW allows that, Time Tracker adopts colours to track colour. Steinberg Cubase allows it for sure.

Bugs, comments, feature requests?

Check out my contact page.


Short story

This tool was proposed by a friend. I were excited, because the idea was simple and I like writing tools for others. It sounded like work for a few days, but it took much longer. Mainly because I do not have much experience in GUI design. I hope somebody will find Time Tracker useful. 😀

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