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Comment by tangental | Hacker News Reader

Not for producing as such but there's also Mixxx DJ software where you can write your own controls and effects in Javascript.

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Have you used it? How does it compare to commercial DJ software? Iyho

I used it semi-professionally (I was a paid DJ, but not as my primary source of income) for a couple years. It's solid. 2.0 brings it very comfortably into competition with the best proprietary software, IMHO. That's when it got timecoded vinyl support, good pitch shifting, and better beat-matching.

Pros are probably still mostly using Serato or Traktor, but I don't think it's necessary. I used Traktor for a while but like Mixxx better. It's very good software. It had a lot of shortcomings in the 1.x releases, including stability issues, but I would definitely trust it for pro work today.

Great input. Thx. I've done a lot of proper DJing in my past. At this point it would mostly be for fun. Ideally get a lounge / chill gig just playing good choons for mood with no concern for a dancefloor.

DJing is fun as hell but isn't a great job. I mostly did it for free for charities and stuff that I support, but that ended up getting people requesting I do it for real and the money was actually pretty good (I mean, $600 to spin records for a few hours is great, in my book, though moving a few hundred pounds of speakers and lights in and out was less fun).

I never minded setting up. It was breaking shit down at 2am or later, plus a drive home, that always drove me nuts.

But i always loved, and still do, finding good tunes and then curating a vibe and a night. That's a great feeling. Free drinks help as well ;)

Compared to digital vinyl with Serato, I found Mixx to be laggy (and more importantly, lacking of a dedicated next/previous track keys) with a low-end Pioneer DDJ SB. Track controls are replaced with a "hot cue" function, which makes beatmatching without cuepoints unnecessarily cumbersome. Don't recall if the UI had a dedicated next/prev track button but remapping the control scheme meant diving into some javascript datastructure that I wasn't in the right mindset to do at the time. Really wanted to like Mixxx but I could not see how I could perform with it

I've been using Mixxx for years, but I've never tried Serato. I'm curious, since I can't imagine what the point of "next/previous" keys would be - what do you do with them? Next/previous relative to what, exactly?

I use the 'prev' key to fast-rewind to the beginning of a track, for really quick needle drops on a downbeat. I don't use a lot of cue points and usually find it easier to start my mixing into the feed from the first downbeat.

Workflow is: drop from beginning, play+tweak til roughly beatmatched, rewind to beginning and needle drop on first beat again, then begin fading into the mix

Ah, gotcha - I had been imagining you meant prev/next with respect to a playlist.

I think you can do that in Mixxx using the "cue" button. While playing, tapping "cue" will rewind to the beginning of the track and pause; pressing "cue" and holding it down will preview from the beginning. While previewing, you can press "play" before releasing "cue" in order to continue playing; otherwise, releasing "cue" will rewind to the beginning and pause.

So, you'd use a similar workflow: play from the beginning of the track and tweak until beatmatched, then press and hold "cue" to rewind to the beginning and start playing from the first beat. If it works, press "play", release "cue", and bring up the fader; if it didn't work, just release "cue" to rewind, then try again.

I tried to get that working with cue but the modailty of it would mess me up. I suspect with practice it'd be easier. Wish the 'set cue' and 'play cue' buttons were different though

Thanks though! I still like Mixx, no hate here. I just need to spend some more time with it

Yes I use it regularly. It has more or less the same features as the commercial software. Where it falls down is with the quality of the audio effects which are nowhere near as good as the ones you find on Serato or Traktor, but they're getting better all the time. On the other hand, you can customize almost every aspect of Mixxx. I have an unconventional controller setup so created my own skin (XML and CSS) and MIDI controls (Javascript) and that has really helped my 'creativity'.

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