xwax, the minimal open source DVS for Linux

[MrPopinjay]

The Audio 8 DJ is plug and play. It presents itself as 4 pairs of stereo inputs and there's a nice .asoundrc here which you may fine useful. http://www.pogo.org.uk/~mark/linuxdj/

You shouldn't need to install anything. I find that statement kind of odd- did you recompile your kernel? What do you mean by it shuts down?

Yeah, xwax basically doesn't have midi. Yet.

[MrPopinjay]

xwax 1.5 beta 1 is out for testing.

http://sourceforge.net/mailarchive/m...sg_id=31689705

[Monomer]

Just compiled 1.4

Have yet to test this out, I went from Ubuntu 10.10 to 12.04, and lost the previous xwax install (1.1?)


I'm glad to see a wiki with a lot more explained, and more plugins! The install went smooth using an audio4dj, the only thing I forgot is that EVERYTHING is case-sensitive in Linux, and ~/music doesn't exist: but ~/Music indeed does. It's nice that it runs in the background in the terminal. Now all I need is some fresh Sereto records to get up and running, mine have seen better days.


MrPopinjay, you get around eh? Shout out from /r/djs!

[MrPopinjay]

Hey Monomer! I certainly do get around
Good to see another redditor here. I missed your last post, how are you finding xwax?

xwax 1.5 is out!

Highlights of this release:

* The music library is scanned in the background
* Crates can be re-scanned during a session
* Reduced CPU usage of the audio resampler

Woop woop

[PartyMcFly]

Last year I had a lot of fun with Xwax on my Atom n270-powered Debian netbook. I ran it with a Torq Conectiv with more than adequate latency and no troubles at all. Amazing what old, nearly useless hardware can do with Linux and free software. My thanks and gratitude goes to the Xwax development community for caring about such things as libre DVS software that doesn't suck. Seriously guys, it's fucking awesome.

I'm really excited to try 1.5 on the same netbook but this time in Arch. I think the background scanning is a great upgrade and I'm looking forward to the possibility of better latency!

Something really important to me in a DVS is id3 metadata, especially cover art. I love browsing my tunes by cover art and this frivolous attachment keeps me wed to Traktor. I know it might not be very "Unix" to have such things, but is there any chance of metadata or cover art support showing up sometime in the future?

Maybe I'm alone in cover art nerdery for my computerized 12's, maybe I'm not. I know a lot of people would probably put MIDI devices in the feature line first but personally I'm alright with touching the keyboard now and then.

[MrPopinjay]

Hey PartyMcFly. Always good to meet another user in the wild.

Yeah, the performance is great, especially with 1.5- Mark squeezed even more out of it somehow. I think it was in part motivated by the desire to run it on a Raspberry Pi. Try doing that with any other DVS :P

I too am really interested in track metadata in xwax, as are a lot of people. One chap did make a patch that added more columns for metadata, but it didn't make it into the main trunk. I'm not sure why this is. Currently there's quite a bit of talk of custom scan scripts and the like on the mailing list- one thing you could do is write a scan script that reads the tags you want, and then append them to the title field. I've been meaning to do this for some time, it's not the best solution though. I recommend joining the mailing list, and voicing your opinion on this issue- it's nice to see what people are interested in, and someone may have a solution for you.

Album art is trickier. Mark did play with it once, some time back. I'm not sure if we saw mockups, or an actual screenshot from a testing branch. Double Rebel's fork (sexwax), while really outdated now, displays album art. Maybe you could learn something there. Again, the mailing list may be able to help

There is actually some work being done on midi devices- if you look in the midictrl branch of the repository you can see cue points being controlled by generic midi devices, with an akai LPD8 as an example. Having midi control of non-realtime elements (i.e. the library) will require a bit of work, though the good news is that this is something that Mark does seem interested in doing.

Cheers dude!

[krinjah]

hi Guys.

I've been wanting to try getting a linux DJ rig going for a while (just cause it's fun).

Are you guys checking this thread? Is there a Linux pro who might be able to walk me through it?

For example:

Question #1. I couldn't figure out what Debian distro to download! There's so many different versions..
(and is Debian what I want to go with?)

-krinjah

[MrPopinjay]

Hey dude. Are you the same Krinjah who makes Jungle? If so, I've a few of your tunes.

I'm happy to help with anything you need.

I use Debian, and I agree that their range of installation images is far too large and confusing...

Picking a distribution of Linux is generally a matter of personal taste, mixed with a little bit of system requirements. How powerful is your computer?

[krinjah]

MrPopinjay,

thanks for the link! Sorry for the slow response. I joined up and was waiting for the mod to clear my post for a while..

Yes that's me, the same Junglist / DnB producer. Big Upz on having some tunes!!

I'm trying to set up Xwax on an Aspire One.. notice somebody above mentioning they had had good luck with it.

I'm going to a local maker space tonight, and will try an install (maybe Debian or AV linux?) recommended on the mailing list.

You're on that list too right?

krinj.