Finally after ~12 total hours (literally) of blood, sweat, tears, and everything short of an entire OS reformat, I found the problem. The N4 became known to my laptop as “N4 (Speakers)” (and was listed as such in the Windows sound device manager).
I still don’t know how it happened but in the configuration menu for the “N4 (Speakers)” device the balance (whether sound is going to left or right speaker) was set to 0% left and 0% right (I don’t know who thought it was a good idea to set up the balance up like that anyway, with one slider for percent left and one for percent right instead of a single slider that slides from left to right so you at least get some sound somewhere). In any case, I set them both to 100% and it’s back to working just like normal. It wasn’t a Traktor issue at all.
Hopefully there’s some decent troubleshooting tips in there for anybody having any similar problems.
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