Xwax Is an Open-Source Digital Vinyl System (DVS) for Linux

xwax /is/ meant for end-users, but right at the beginning it only had actual live professional use in mind. I was literally DJ'ing in clubs at the time and I wanted the digital equivalent of playing vinyl records.

I was collaborating with a friend on the early versions, to see if it could be commercialised to provide a "house" system for radio studios and clubs (much like the house provides CDJs or turntables). Today that's superseded by DJs bringing their own laptops, of course.

I don't know much about Mixxx these days; that project was always much better set up to grow through a range of contributors (eg. with its scripting engine). But I think it's technical architecture is probably quite different.

Whereas, xwax was designed from day 1 with the idea it was a realtime system with very tight latencies, taking input from one audio interface and responding to it on another. That was fun on Linux (and FreeBSD!) systems of the early 2000s.

From what I’ve read on Wikipedia, mixxx apparently uses the xwax source code. As does PiDeck. It would be really interesting to know what else uses it.

It was magical and very exciting seeing these things emerge!

It's something I have seen before! Seeing xwax reduced to very small hardware is interesting. Thanks for sharing here.

Yeah; I'm imagining the record sits in a basement for 100 years, and has mildew + scratches. Each error correction block has to be (I'd guess) at least 10x wider than a scratch, assuming the codes can correct 1 bit out of 10.

CDs use Reed Solomon, configured for a 1:10000 bit error rate, but NAND storage uses LDPC, which is much more robust.

Anyway, reading such a block would likely take the record player 10's-100's of milliseconds, and xwax seems to target 1ms.

A friend of mine was doing Technics repair and customization and about 6 years back we started building a prototype of embedding a Pi with a 3.5" LCD in the body of a 1200. I build a custom Qt GUI for xwax that was controlled by a single rotary encoder with a push button. We could throw out a lot of the UI since it was only ever playing one track at a time. He eventually got called up to be Alle Farben's touring sound guy and we never picked it back up once he was back.