Tuesday, May 27, 2008

Mixxx 1.6.0 Beta 3 Released!



The Mixxx development team is proud to announce the release of Mixxx 1.6.0 Beta 3 (download)!

It's been 3 months since our last beta release, and in that time we've been busy fixing tons of bugs and sneaking in the occasional new feature. We put major effort into solving a few stability issues people encountered with our last beta, as well as fixing many other quirks. We'd like to thank all of our users who've been reporting bugs in our bug tracker, as your reports have saved us a great deal of time.

Anyways, on with the juicy changelog since Beta 2:
  • Added BPM reading from MP3/OGG files which have it embedded in them (ID3), one of several enhancements by Martin Sakmar
  • Various accuracy improvements to the BPM detection
  • Added preliminary support for multiple inputs with vinyl control (consecutive channel pairs only - eg. 1/2 and 3/4)
  • Support for the Hercules DJ Console RMX
  • Hercules DJ Console MK2 bug fixes
  • Support for the Hercules DJ Console Mac Edition
  • Support for the Behringer BCD3000, including LEDs
  • Support for the Akai MPD24
  • Improvements to the vinyl emulation and pitch-independent time stretch sound quality
  • LADSPA effects support is rapidly improving, but is not compiled in by default yet (scons ladspa=1)
  • Finished adding recording support
  • Performance improvements while using vinyl control
  • Support for 96000 Hz samplerates with Serato vinyls
  • Build flags are now cached automatically
  • Improved flanger effect, thanks to Enry
  • Configurable cue behaviour, which now defaults to CDJ-style cueing. (Thanks to Tom Care)
  • Enabled realtime priority with ALSA, improves performance with Linux RT kernels.
  • FLAC support for Linux and OS X users (much requested)
  • Tons and tons of bug fixes.
Mixxx 1.6.0 Beta 3 is available on our downloads page.

The development of multiple-input soundcard support (with vinyl control) was made possible by Echo Digital Audio. Echo makes very nice professional soundcards, and their AudioFire line of cards are excellent FireWire solutions for DJs on-the-road and in the studio. I've been using one of their cards for development, and they work very well on Windows and OS X. Support for AudioFire cards on Linux is improving rapidly through the FFADO project as well.

We've also bundled some free tracks from Ugress and Carlo Carosi with this release. These tunes will give DJs something to mix right out-of-the-box, and we think you'll like them.

For our next release, we're going to shift focus towards polishing the remaining rough edges and fixing the remaining critical bugs we find. Whether our next release will be a fourth beta or the 1.6.0 final release remains to be decided, as it depends mainly on how many critical bugs we find and how much time we have to fix them. If you want to help us fix bugs, please join us on IRC (#mixxx on Freenode) and we'd be glad to help you get started hacking Mixxx.

11 comments:

  1. Does the Windows version still crash when importing MP3s for the first time?

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  2. I was unable to reproduce this bug, so please test the new beta and report your findings in our bug tracker:
    https://bugs.launchpad.net/mixxx/

    Thanks

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  3. I can't be bothered to register to report the bug:

    After installing this latest version and starting it, the music scan window opened and Mixxx started to scan my music library (I guess it had the path from the old version in the registry?). At one MP3 file, an error window shows up telling me that Mixxx crashed and after clicking it away, the Mixxx window disappears as well. Everytime I now try to start Mixxx again, the scan window won't show up anymore, instead the error window appears directly.

    WinXP SP2, 2GB RAM, C2D 3GHz

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  4. im using ubuntu 8.04. are the external apps for bpm detection?

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  5. Why isn't there a beta for mac power PC

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  6. To the first anonymous: Don't know about external BPM apps.

    The the second: There isn't a beta for PPC Mac because we don't have a PPC Mac anymore. If someone wants to do the build for us, then we could put it online.
    It's an insane amount of work for us to make all of these builds, and because everything takes so much time, we have to pick and choose what we put our time into. We generally try to work on stuff that will benefit the most users, so unfortunately a PPC build hasn't had priority lately.

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  7. congratulations on the new release! cant wait to try it out...i'm just curious though..i have an older bcd2000...would it work on the new release or should i just trash it?

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  8. Had to drop some $$ on this one through Sourceforge! I plan on getting the RMX next month and love the fact I get to mix in Linux! :)

    Good job, guys!

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  9. Thanks TaNK!

    anonymous: You can probably create a BCD2000 MIDI mapping fairly easily. Take a look at:
    http://www.mixxx.org/wiki/doku.php/midi_controller_mapping_file_format

    In your BCD2000 manual there should be a listing of all the MIDI events that it generates.

    If you manage to hack together a mapping, please send it to us!

    Good luck,
    Albert

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  10. Thx for FLAC-support. I have been waiting for that one.

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  11. does anyone have mixxx 1.6.0 as an executable file for Mac? I've been trying to compile it but I'm having a lot of trouble...

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