Monday, April 28, 2008

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.

4 comments:

  1. I am amazed with the scratch response you're getting. I am using Mixx1.6.0 beta3 with and M-audio fast track pro and my setup sounds glitchy. Please tell more detail on your sound chipset, drivers and settings.

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  2. This was using the onboard soundcard on my MacBook (Intel HD Audio), 2.2 Ghz Intel Core 2 Duo, and something like 1 gig of ram.

    The important bits are:
    1) Fast CPU (Intel Core 2 Duo)
    2) Low latency (6 ms in Mixxx) - If you have your latency cranked up higher than 10 ms, the scratching won't sound nearly as good.

    If you have a good soundcard and/or a fast CPU, then you should be able to get these kinds of latencies, but it depends on your hardware.

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  3. 6ms of latency with an onboard chipset is pretty good. With my Fast Track Pro I am not able to get the ASIO drivers to work with Mixxx. I get errors stating "sample rate not supported". I use the windows direct sound drivers instead and the best latency I can run is 25ms. My laptop is a:

    HP TX1000 Series Tablet
    Windows XP
    AMD Turion dual core 2.0GHz
    2GB RAM

    I would like to get my latency under 10ms using a external audio interface. Do you anyone getting this kind of performance with an external audio interface?

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  4. you wrote: "The turntable is plugged directly into my laptop using the turntable's line-out and my laptop's onboard soundcard."

    how do you do it? lol... may i ask if u could giv some kind of video tutorial or something to actually connect the turntable to the laptop? lol

    n is it possible to connect two decks, and not only one?

    many thanks!

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