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!

Mixxx in Google Summer of Code 2008!

Google has just announced the participating mentoring organizations for Google Summer of Code 2008, and Mixxx has been accepted for our second consecutive year!

The Google Summer of Code program allows students to receive a $4500 USD stipend for writing code for an open source software project over the summer. Students can apply by writing applications to the mentoring organizations (like us) via the GSoC 2008 web app. For more information about how GSoC works, please see the program FAQ.

Last summer, Mixxx had three students working on various projects. Micah Lee improved our BPM detection algorithm by replacing it with a better one and refactoring a lot of code. Pawel Bartkiewicz worked on adding LADSPA support to Mixxx, and Nathan Prado spearheaded our library improvements. While not quite every detail was finished, all three projects were a success on the whole and Mixxx is much better thanks for these students' participation through Google Summer of Code.

This year, we've got a new list of ideas up on our wiki, and we're looking forward to seeing what other projects potential students can come up with. This is going to be an interesting summer for Mixxx, as the pace of development usually picks up in the summer and our community is really starting to grow. So if you're a student who wants to get involved with Mixxx, go ahead and apply!

Mixxx at Cheap as Chips 2008

Mixxx was spotted last Sunday at the Cheap as Chips music festival in Christchurch, New Zealand. DJ Kid 90 dropped "a set of lush kiwi tunes to 10,000ish people", and was looking quite slick with his MacBook.







Kid 90 hosts an independent New Zealand electronica show on RDU, one of NZ's student radio stations. The show runs from 5 - 7pm Saturdays (NZ time), and he says he tends to play "Downbeat, Breaks and D'n'B with a little Psy thrown in for good measure".

Check out more pictures on our wiki page for the event and visit Kid 90's MySpace page.

Mixxx 1.6.0 Beta2 for Tiger

Mixxx 1.6.0 Beta2 for OS X Tiger (Intel) has just been released! After we released our Leopard package, most of the feedback we heard from Mac users was "make it work on Tiger". With this new package, Tiger users can now play around with our latest beta release too.

If you're still running Tiger, you can pick up Mixxx 1.6.0 Beta2 on our downloads page.

More Mixxx Videos

There's been some cool new Mixxx videos posted on YouTube this month. First up is Trinity's Indamixx handheld again, this time demonstrating a beatmix on the device:


For more information on the device, check out the official site.

Next up is a video from one of our developers, Jan Jockush, demonstrating all the hard work he put into the Mixman DM2 on Linux:



Looks like it's working pretty well!

Minor Website Revamp

If anyone reads our developer's mailing list, you might know I'm not a huge fan of SourceForge. We've been planning for months to move away from it, and today we've taken a big step in that direction. Our website is now located at: www.mixxx.org

We've also started using our new logo, created by Paul Bloch of OpenArtist. He's quite talented, and is working on a more thorough overhaul of the Mixxx website to be launched sometime in the upcoming months.

Among the new changes to the website are our new forums, and our new (and faster) Mixxx Wiki. We're looking forward to helping the community grow on the new forums.

Lastly, we're going to be using our Launchpad page's bug tracker from now on. It's much easier to use, and isn't cluttered with 10 megabytes worth of flash ads like the old one. :)

Enjoy!