Configuration
All settings are stored in a TOML file and edited through Preferences in the control window. You do not need to edit the file manually.
| Platform | Config file location |
|---|---|
| macOS | ~/Library/Application Support/milonga/config.toml |
| Windows | %APPDATA%\milonga\config.toml |
| Linux | ~/.config/milonga/config.toml |
Milonga event
| Setting | Description |
|---|---|
| TDJ name | Shown in the DJ name banner at the bottom of the display. Updated live — no restart needed. |
| Venue | Used in the welcome message: Welcome at [Venue]. |
| Milonga name | Used alongside the DJ name: Tonight for the [Milonga name] we welcome [TDJ name]. |
Listeners
Active listener — choose Traktor or VirtualDJ from the selector in the control window. Only one listener runs at a time.
Traktor
Milonga connects to Traktor via the traktor-nowplaying broadcast. It spawns traktor-nowplaying as a subprocess and listens on the configured TCP port (default: 8000). Click Start in the control window to begin listening.
In Preferences → Listeners → Traktor, you can set the port and optionally point Milonga at your exported Traktor collection (see Giving the matcher more to work with).
VirtualDJ
When you select VirtualDJ from the listener selector, Milonga starts automatically — no Start button is needed. It watches VirtualDJ's daily history file (History/YYYY-MM-DD.m3u in the VirtualDJ data directory) using the filesystem and picks up each new track as soon as it is written.
In Preferences → Listeners → VirtualDJ you can inspect the auto-detected paths for the history directory and your database.xml (VirtualDJ's local track database, read by Milonga to enrich metadata).
Tanda cycle
The carousel strip at the top of the display shows the current position in the tanda cycle. The default sequence is:
Tango · Tango · Vals · Tango · Tango · Milonga
In Preferences → Tanda Cycle you can add genres (Tango, Vals, or Milonga), remove entries, and drag to reorder.
Cortina detection — a track is treated as a cortina (and the cycle advances) when:
- its title carries a cortina marker (
C-prefix,***, or a leading run of dashes), or - no database match is found above the minimum match score.
La Cumparsita — by tradition the milonga closes with La Cumparsita. When a matched track's title is exactly La Cumparsita, the carousel enters its closing Cumparsita state. This can be turned off in Preferences → Matching for DJs who play the tune mid-event (see below).
Matching
| Setting | Default | Description |
|---|---|---|
| Minimum match score | 68 | Fuzzy-match threshold (0–100). Tracks scoring below this are treated as cortinas. Lower values accept weaker matches; higher values are stricter. |
| Treat “La Cumparsita” as closing tanda | on | Flags a matched La Cumparsita as the closing tanda so the carousel enters its Cumparsita state. Turn off to treat it as an ordinary tango. |
| Learn from corrections | on | Loads your per-user library of learned spellings and recordings, so tracks you have confirmed before resolve instantly and the matcher improves over time. |
The matcher classifies the DJ string into typed fields (title, orchestra, singers, date, duration), corrects spelling against curated name lists, and scores candidate recordings — favouring the one matching the most fields. The whole search index is loaded into memory at startup for fast matching.
Tracks resolved via a trusted genre-prefix (tracklist-style names like 1V-Troilo - Ruiz - Flor de Lino) are also automatically saved to a personal learned_recordings.db in the Milonga application-support folder. This learned database grows over time and gives the general matcher additional recordings to draw from — useful when a recording is missing from the main database.
Database
By default, Milonga looks for recordings.db in its application support directory. In Preferences → Database you can point it at a different file.
The bundled database contains approximately 45 000 tango recordings:
| Genre | Recordings |
|---|---|
| Tango | 37 580 |
| Vals | 4 505 |
| Milonga | 3 139 |
Source: tango.info.
Language
The interface is available in English, French, and Spanish. Select System default to follow the operating system locale. A restart is required after changing the language.
Layout
The four display panes can be repositioned and resized using the Layout Editor in the control window. Coordinates are stored as fractions (0.0–1.0) of the display window, so the layout scales correctly at any resolution.
Text zoom (10–150 %, default 75 %) scales the track info panel independently of the layout.