Mixxx 1.6.0 Beta1 Released!

The Mixxx development team suggests 1.6.0 is most delicious if you get it while it's hot.

This is the first beta release of the 1.6.0 series and incorporates an enormous number of new toys, some of the highlights are:

• Vinyl control
• Skin colour schemes
• New music library
• Better BPM detection
• Better support for MIDI controllers
• ... and more

Obviously as with all beta software, expect a few problems, the following are things you may encounter:

• Various library issues, especially with regard to colour schemes and scanning/persistency
• Ubuntu users may have trouble connecting to JACK, we are working hard on this
• Vinyl control is not very extensively tested so please report your experiences

We desperately need your feedback to make 1.6.0 better, please report problems in any of the usual places, such as the bug tracker or on mixxx-devel for those who are subscribed.

We'd also like to mention that we're accepting donations to help support Mixxx's development. If you enjoy the software, use it professionally, or would just like to help us out, we'd appreciate a donation of any size.


Finally, we'd like to say thanks to all the people that make this possible, the Mixxx developer team, all our users, PortAudio and all our other friends and colleagues.

Update on Release Progress

This is just a very quick post to update everyone on the progress of the release. It looks like we'll be releasing the first 1.6.0-beta1 packages on either Sunday (23rd) or Monday (24th) depending on how much time we have. It looks like we'll have a Windows package, an Ubuntu package and of course a source package.

1.6.0 beta1 Nearly Ready

I know this has been rather a painful wait for some people who have been anticipating great things from the 1.6.0 series. So I thought I'd just post to say that we are nearly there. I can only speak for the Windows release personally but I'm now about 90% sure that this will be out by the end of December.

If you simply can't wait any longer then you might like to sign up to our mailing list. Some pre-beta binaries are starting to circulate there for those who are willing to test the latest version of Mixxx and provide feedback.

Adam

Quick Vinyl Control Video, SSE optimizations

A few nights ago I captured a video while doing a quick test mix using Mixxx's vinyl control.



Not my best transition ever, but it works. :)

I've been trying to do some tweaking to get the latency down and one of the biggest improvements came from compiling Mixxx with SSE and MMX optimizations. The tricky part with turning on these optimizations is that they'll only work on post-Pentium III CPUs. That's fine for our Windows and OS X builds, but it's a problem for our Ubuntu package because we can't assume any specific CPU architecture. One possible solution for this is to disable SSE/MMX optimizations in the package that lives in the Ubuntu repositories and host a different (SSE/MMX optimized) Ubuntu package on our website.

In the meantime, I still have lots of work to do on fixing up the library. Busy, busy!