Are you tired of editing audio files to make cortinas? The Cortina Plugin for MediaMonkey lets Tango DJs turn songs into cortinas without the need for audio editing software.

In addition, you can change things like the length of a cortina, fade-in, fade-out, and volume on-the-fly to let you adapt to changing conditions at the milonga.

For example, have a one minute long cortina, but the floor is so small people are glaring at you because they cleared the floor 45 seconds ago? No problem, just change the cortina length setting to 30 seconds and everything you’ve marked as a cortina will play for only 30 seconds.

Features

Select any number of ways that cortinas are identified. It can look for the word “cortina” (not case-sensitive) in the title, genre, custom tags, or path (folder names) were the songs are stored.

Slider to select the length of the entire cortina, including fade-in and fade-out time (in seconds).

Slider to set a fade-in time (in seconds).

Slider to set a fade-out time (in seconds).

Slider to add an additional gap of silence after cortinas and songs (in seconds). Don’t be that DJ that runs the end of one song right into the next any more! Enable “Remove silence from start and end of songs” in MediaMonkey’s Output settings, then use “Gap Time” to add a consistent length of silence between all songs.

Slider to set playback volume of cortinas (in percent of normal playback volume). You don’t have to blast the dancers with loud cortinas any more! Try setting the volume of cortinas to 70% of the volume of tandas.

It is also possible to start a cortina at a different point in the song. Simply edit the “Start Time” setting in the song’s properties to start any time later than 0:00. Then set fade-in time of the Cortina plugin to one second for longer to hide any abrupt start to that cortina.

Download and Install

Click this link to download Cortina Plugin for MediaMonkey. Double click the cortina.mmip file (mmip = MediaMonkey Installation Package) to add the plugin to your MediaMonkey installation. Some MediaMonkey installations will require entering an administrator account name and password to install the plugin (to install the plug-in for all users). Restart MediaMonkey, and you will see a new item in the “Play” menu named “Cortina.” Click to start making cortinas without all the headaches.

WASPI Playback Tip

If you use ‘MediaMonkey WASAPI output’ as your Output Plug-in, you might need to disable Events for the output plug-in. This will vary depending on what sound card you are using. To disable events, do the following:

Stop any playback in progress

Click Tools => Options

Click Player => Output Plugins

Under the ‘Available Output Plugins’ select ‘MediaMonkey WASAPI output’ then click the ‘Configure’ button

Make sure the correct output device is selected from the list

Click the ‘Advanced’ button

Uncheck the ‘Event driven Exclusive mode (recommended)’ checkbox

Uncheck the ‘Event driven Shared mode (recommended)’ checkbox

Click the ‘OK’ button on all open dialog boxes

Restart your playback

View on GitHub

Found a bug? Want to request a new feature? Click this link to view the Cortina Plugin for MediaMonkey project on GitHub.