Mixxx at CES 2008

Earlier this month, Ron Stewart from the Trinity Audio Group was showcasing their upcoming Indamixx Portable Studio at Intel's CES 2008 booth.

If the app running on this handheld looks vaguely familiar, that's because it's Mixxx!

Mixxx is part of the bundled software on the handheld, along with other popular apps like Hydrogen and Ardour. Looks like a neat device, and could be useful for digital DJs on the move. For more information, check out the official site.

Progress since Beta 1

Since the release of Mixxx 1.6.0 beta1, we've been busy busy busy getting new features and bug fixes ready for beta2. The library has undergone substantial work including new playlist support, improvements to the file scanning, and several bug fixes that were causing stability issues in beta1.

Recently, Micah Lee (one of our Google Summer of Code students), began working on our BPM code again. Among his latest additions is support for "BPM schemes", which allows you to save preset BPM ranges to improve the accuracy of the BPM detection when launched from the track editor dialog.

"BPM Schemes" is one of the new features slipped into Mixxx 1.6.0 Beta2

Also, OS X users can expect a Leopard/Intel package for Beta2. Big thanks to all the testers who've helped me test the package.

Lastly, we expect the 1.6.0 beta2 release sometime in the next two weeks. There's still a few extra features we're going to try to slip in to the next release, so stay tuned!

Hercules DJ Control MP3 in Linux

Robin, one of our newer developers, has been working hard on improving our support for the Hercules DJ Control MP3 in Linux. I did some work on this myself last year, but unfortunately certain things were broken at the kernel-level and I wasn't able to get the LEDs working. After many attempts by several people, Robin managed to make a kernel patch to solve the remaining issues.

"Yuck, a kernel patch!", you say? As Robin writes:

This is all very hacky, but hopefully it won’t be in the future. I’m going to see if I can get that patch put in the kernel proper, which will solve the most annoying part of the problem. It would also be good to get Mixxx supporting both legacy mode and the newer one at the same time.

However, we’ve heard from Hercules, and they say that some time in the first part of this year, they’re going to try to get some Linux drivers out. Hopefully they’re open source, and turn the Herc devices into MIDI devices, which would make life a whole lot easier for support.

It looks like there's light at the end of the tunnel for Hercules users. Read more on Robin's blog.

Note: I should add that the Hercules MK2 and the Hercules MP3 Control are both supported very well on Windows.

MixxxScript - A Sneaky Feature Preview

Although we're technically in the beta part of the release cycle, we've still been spending some time on features for future releases. I've been working on adding a macro/scripting style environment to Mixxx which would allow users to extend Mixxx without the work of recompiling. Here's a screenshot of the very basic test GUI in action:


The script interpreting is done using the new QtScript ECMAScript interpreter built in to Qt 4.3 and the example you can see typed in above implements a basic auto-crossfader.

The potential here is fairly unlimited. API documentation and so on will follow soon so that people using Mixxx from SVN will be able to have a play.