Developing an automatic timetracker plugin

Hi guys,

We are looking to have a plugin created which is essentially a timetracker that automatically starts tracking time as soon as you start working on a project in your DAW.

The plugin should function with all of the major DAWs. Logic Pro, Pro Tool, Cubase etc. and should be able to send JSON data to a webserver.

But before we actually create the job-description for this, we would like to know if it’s actually possible to do this?

Best regards, Casper

That’s absolutely possible, and available for free: HOFA 4U ProjectTime

https://hofa-plugins.de/en/plugins/4u/

(with the exception of your server integration)

1 Like

The user would need to manually insert the plugin on some track, it’s not really feasible to implement a VST or similar plugin that starts working in the “background” automatically when the host is started.

What if the VST plugin is already a part of the DAW project - Would it be able to automatically start the timer as the project was opened?
Like more or less count its own active time.

Awesome! Thanks, I’ll try out the HOFA plugin. How about the integration to our servers - would that be possible?

Both is possible, the time at least one instance was created, or the time actual processing went through.

Sounds straight forward to me. The plugin can issue calls to your server sending the spent time as number in the query parameters.
(not this one obviously, I am not affiliated in any form with HOFA, so I don’t have their source code, but it is really trivial to write)

The question would be, if you need some kind of tamper security, i.e. detect if someone submits time that they didn’t actually work and such things.

Thanks for replying Daniel :slight_smile:

Would it be possible to send a HTTP requests instead of using query parameters?

And yes, the user would have to be authenticated, probably just by entering an API key that they get from our platform, or by logging in with email/password (which would also require a HTTP request). After authenticating successfully they would get a token which would be sent with every request.

Do you have any idea how long this would take to develop potentially? I know that it’s a bit vague and there are a bunch of unknowns, but just a ballpark figure would be great.

Sure, http requests is the easiest approach. JUCE supports that kind of communication out of the box.

Development times are very individual, depending on experience and how focussed one is.
I can send you an offer if you are interested. Just PM me.

Awesome, I will shoot you an PM!

I ended up sending you an email as I don’t know how to PM here :smiley:

1 Like

That’s quite easy: Just click on the name of the poster, a popup will appear with a “message” button :wink:

Got it, thanks!

There are lots of apps that track application usage time. I use Qbserve on OS X as I can generate invoices from it, and add filters to have it track based on opened project. I use this to track production projects as well as coding projects.

Hi Matkat, is this specific to music production, and is it only available for MacOS? :slight_smile:

https://qotoqot.com/qbserve/