Scratching with Mixxx 1.6.0

This latest video of Mixxx 1.6.0 in action demonstrates what scratching sounds like with vinyl control. In the video, I'm scratching with a Serato record on my Stanton T.80 turntable, and using my M-Audio X-Session Pro MIDI controller as a virtual mixer. I changed Mixxx's crossfader curve setting in the preferences to "fast cut", which is what you'd set the curve control on a real mixer to when you're scratching.

The turntable is plugged directly into my laptop using the turntable's line-out and my laptop's onboard soundcard.

I recently did some work on our "vinyl emulation" code that mimics the way the pitch changes when you're using a turntable. I managed to improve the sound quality enough that scratching with Mixxx + vinyl control sounds convincingly similar to scratching with real vinyl. These improvements will be included with our next beta release.

Google Summer of Code 2008 Projects

Today, Google announced the students that have been accepted into the Summer of Code 2008 program. We received many good applications from students who were competing for one of four slots with Mixxx. Due to the volume of high quality applications, we had to make some tough decisions, but after more than a week of deliberation, we are excited to introduce our Google Summer of Code students for 2008:

• Tom Care - Implementing an improved MIDI control system
• Russel Ryan - Creating a new Waveform View
• Zach Elko - Crash Recovery
• Wesley Stessens - Internet Broadcasting

Tom Care's project aims to improve our MIDI support by, among other features, creating a MIDI learning feature that will allow new MIDI mappings to be constructed easily from within Mixxx.

Russell Ryan's project involves rewriting our waveform view in a more modular way and adding support for extra visuals such as better beat marks and timbre information.

Zach Elko will explore a graceful crash recovery mechanism for Mixxx in order to minimize any potential disruption during a performance. Zach is also going to explore some preventative measures to improve our testing, such as constructing a stress-testing robot that will allow us to find bugs faster.

Finally, Wesley Stessens will improve Mixxx's internet broadcasting code by writing an improved broadcasting engine, including an internal MP3 encoder.

Together, these projects are going to make for an exciting summer and have the potential to improve our users' experiences with Mixxx. In the meantime, we're continuing to press onwards to 1.6.0 beta3 and the final 1.6.0 release. We've been fixing bugs day and night since the last beta release, and we'll post an update when we're nearing the next one. Stay tuned!