Tracter is introduced as a dataflow framework particularly useful for speech recognition. It is designed to work on-line in real-time as well as off-line, and is the feature extraction means for the Juicer transducer based decoder. This paper places Tracter in context amongst the dataflow literature and other commercial and open source packages. Some design aspects and capabilities are discussed. Finally, a fairly large processing graph incorporating voice activity detection and feature extraction is presented as an example of Tracter's capabilites.