While shopping for music this summer, i began to realize more how slippery the music industry is with song releases. When shopping, I always try to filter by release date, with the attempt to ensure that i’m looking at the newest music. Well, the odds are stacked against me (or anyone who shops similarly).
Here are some of the issues I ran into:
- Traxsource does not allow customers to filter by true release date, but rather their own internal release date. This was shared by their support staff via direct correspondence.
- Music is often sold today with a far-future release date.
- Music is often released, and re-released many times over in efforts to get ROI on those tracks. Each of these re-released tracks have a new ID assigned to them.
- Traxsource has a feature that prevents you from re-purchasing a song, but it only detects the prior song (internal integer) ID, and does not look at the title, mix and author(s) as part of the song’s identifying qualities.
So… the bottom-most item is what I decided to recently focus on with a tool.
My general workflow:
The last step when purchasing music is to manually go through my cart and manually type out title & artist in Engine to find a match. I noticed that sometimes I would have purchased a song earlier but Traxsource allows me to put it in the cart. Upon further inspection, I noticed that the art was different as was the internal Traxsource record ID.
During the summer, I started to look into tracks in my cart and started to see when they had been originally released. The track that really ■■■■■■ me off was “A Dancing” by Discoslap.
The following screenshot was made August 10, 2025, and you can see that the top-most record has a release date of “2025-08-01”.
Today (October 5, 2025), while putting the finishing touches on my dupe-detection tool, I decided to use Traxsource’s search and entered “A Dancing Discoslap”, and to my surprise, the 2025-08-01 record is gone.
Moreover, when selecting the Tracks tab, I learn that this one song was first released in 2019!
This seems to be the nature of how digital music is sold on these platforms. While I’m all for artists making the music they deserve, as a DJ who works hard to curate their music, I absolutely hate double-paying for songs, especially when these platforms allow labels to re-re-re-re-re-re-re-re-re-re-re-re-re-re-re-re-release songs.
Here’s where a (relatively) simple tool can help.
The Proof of concept:
My idea was to figure out a way to query my Traxsource Cart to detect duplicates based on some rather simple logic:
- Find matches in the database where
Song Title (Remix)+Artist(s)exist & print them out.
The code is relatively simple and the process to use it is not difficult also.
- From your browser, save the cart as an HTML file
- Run the tool using terminal and point it to your cart HTML file and your music database:
./traxsource-dupetec.js --html /tmp/Traxsource.html --db /tmp/m.db
From there, it will spit out which songs it thinks are duplicates and then potential savings.
This info can be used to verify by listening to the music on traxsource & engine for confirmation before removing them from your cart.
The future of a tool like this
- Could be adapted for use on other digital stores like Beatport. This is something that I already plan on doing.
- Could be embedded into a UI that uses an embedded browser / iframe to read the store cart data without having to save it (requires an app to be built).
- Other DJ software can be used where databases are easily read by a library like sqlite3
Hope this helps a fellow techie who wants to save a little bit of headache when it comes to expanding your music library and not repurchasing stuff.
Happy to answer any questions.
of concept