Yesterday I watched a new video on Unfa’s Youtube channnel. He reviewed and demo-ed MIXXX.
Mixxx is a powerful and free (open source) DJ program which allows you perform a live set with up to 4 virtual decks and optionally stream it to a broadcasting server. Common effects like echo, flanger, reverb, bitcrusher are available, and through its LV2 plugin interface you can use many more external effects to spice up your set.
Its master sync feature ensures that the music primed in all your decks stays locked to the beat. You can control pitch and key, or loop a stretch of audio. Quantize your cues and loops so that they start right on the beat all the time. And so on – and all of that with an attractive skinnable user interface.
You can plug in a MIDI controller and map its buttons/knobs/sliders to operate the Mixxx user interface so that you do not have to use your computer’s mouse & keyboard to cue, mangle and cross-fade the audio. There’s actually a lot of presets you can load for the most well-known MIDI controllers like the Novation LaunchPad Mini.
If the JACK daemon is running you can connect Mixxx to it, but it will perform just fine with ALSA as well.
This was a piece of software which was missing from my DAW package collection. Therefore I created packages for mixxx and its dependencies and added them to the repository. The liveslak scripts have been updated as well so that the next Slackware DAW Live will include Mixxx for you to try out.
If you use slackpkg you can download an updated template here: http://www.slackware.com/~alien/tools/templates/daw.template and use “slackpkg install-template daw” to have easy access to the full list of packages.
Have fun! Eric
Hi Eric.
I used Mixxx last Christmas for live broadcast for a family internet radio station I was using.
Very useful review. BTW I was surprised by the way the presenter connected sound devices in Time 1:25 of video. What do you think about that tool (Carla)?
Thanks Eric for sharing this.
Pd. Any chance to have a Slackware dedicated to video editing/production?
Carla looks like I will add it sometime to my package set. It ties in with the Cadence Toolkit which I added last week.
Myself, I am not interested in video editing/production so there’s little chance that I will do something dedicated about this topic. KDE Plasma5 already contains Kdenlive.
So I built carla and python-pyliblo (a dependency) and will upload them into my repository…
I’ve been using MIXXX on slackware for years, took a bit of building back then -( I think circa 2014) but it is awesome and well worth it.
Speaking of multimedia stuff…is your package of ffmpeg deprecated? I’ve been building my own from your scripts because you provide codecs (even in the non-restricted one) that the main ffmpeg doesn’t (and that OBS needs.)
I will upload fresh ffmpeg-4.3.1 packages today with an AV1 decoder added.
Awesome, thanks! 🙂