Tuesday, January 15, 2008

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.

4 comments:

  1. Brook - Yes, but we can't spill the beans yet. There will hopefully be significant improvements to our Control MP3 support in the reasonably near future.

    My ballpark guess is that this will happen within the next month (with a new Mixxx release), but it depends on factors outside our control, so it's only a guess.

    ReplyDelete
  2. Drivers and control panel are now available on Hercules website! :)

    ReplyDelete
  3. Drivers download: http://ts.hercules.com/download/pub/webupdate/DJCSeries/Hercules_DJSeries_Linux.tgz

    ReplyDelete