Smart Mixing for Mac

DJ Life & Community General Discussion
1

Smart Mixing for Mac

I tried following the instructions Ean so kindly put up on the blog for doing smart mixing on a mac, but I can’t get past the Jack setup.

I have a Maya 44 USB soundcard with 4 mono ins and 4 mono outs. In order to get it to work with Traktor, I had to make it an Aggregated Device. In Traktor, I have access to all four mono ins and all 4 mono outs (two stereo ins and two stereo outs).

When I start setting up my soundcard under Jack, all I get is the 4 ins when I select the Maya44 card (the aggregated one doesn’t show up in the list, just microphone, line-in, built-in output, and Maya44).

Does anyone know what I’m doing wrong?

I miss Soundflower and Audio Hijack Pro. I used to use AHP to record from my line-in (which connected to my mixer’s record-out) because I used an external mixer, and that was the only setup I could figure out that allowed me to record the external mixer’s output.

Please assist, or at least point me to where I can get help on this subject. I would really like to use a smart mixer (I will be sacrificing my external mixer, but I’ll figure out how to bring that back into the setup somehow).

Thanks a bunch.

-DJ ATP

2

I got ignored :'(.

3

Nah, you are just impatient.

Not that many mac users are awake, probably. :wink:

4

The smartmixer could be rigged up so you dont have to mix internally - you lose some of the other features i have built in though to this rig though.

I could make another version specificly for mixing externally, it would just have less bells and whistles attached.

5

Hes been waiting a day for a reply - id be able to help if i was a mac user.

6

Still within 24 hours if you ask me. :wink:

7

Sorry (not trying to do smart comments, i’m just trying to help), i’m not really into this smart mixing stuff yet (there’s still soooo much to learn before those advanced techniques :slight_smile: ), but why can’t you just use soundflower?

I’m on a mac and i got it installed… Also tried to route 4 channels from traktor into ableton and it worked really well (no latency, those aggregated devices always put up the latency in my experience)…

8

I honestly never gave Soundflower a chance for this. I was pretty much just following Ean’s/BentoSan’s instructions. I wanted to see the concept in action before I tried to figure out how it worked and how to modify it.

I just wonder why my soundcard isn’t showing up properly in Jack. I understand mine’s far from ideal, was never meant for DJing, and has been discontinued for a long time…but at the time I purchased it, I had little money to spend on equipment, but needed a way to use Traktor with my external mixer (DJing with my mouse is too sluggish and all.

As for my impatience, I checked back and saw that this thread got pushed to the second page. It saddened me. Sarcasm is hard to express online.

@ BentoSan - How could smart mixing through Ableton work with an external mixer? Unless the mixer is MIDI-enabled (Behringer DDM4000), or the EQ knobs are ignored, I can’t see the external mixer being good for more than providing a headphone output. Come to think of it, the whole point of the smart mixer is to automatically compress the bass on the outgoing song to make way for the incoming one, right? What use is there for a hardware mixer in the first place?

@ Morbido - I think I’m going to reinstall Soundflower and try using it instead of Jack. I never had a single problem with Soundflower or the Instant Hijack feature of Audio Hijack Pro.

9

So I just reinstalled Soundflower to give it a shot, and I came across an interesting scenario:

In Traktor, for the output, I selected Soundflower. It has 16 ins and outs. I chose outputs 5, 6, 7, and 8 for Traktor.

In Live, for the output, I selected the four outputs of my soundcard. Somehow, though, I am unable to select Soundflower as my inputs. I can choose any of my hardware inputs, including my soundcard…but not Soundflower. When I choose Soundflower, it defaults to No Device.

If I select my soundcard as the outputs in Traktor, and select my headphone jack on my laptop as the output in Live, I’m able to select my soundcard’s inputs in Live. I could, theoretically, physically route stuff through my external soundcard and into Live before ejecting it out the headphone jack on my laptop…but that’s a bit psychotic.

Any ideas? Do I just need to buy a new soundcard? (Firebox?)

10

i think there must something be wrong… i’m not always routing my traktor output through ableton, but i already tried it, and it worked fine… basically i did the same as you did, assigned soundflower 1-4 as traktor outputs and assigned them as inputs directly on the tracks in ableton - it worked quite well!

and you don’t need another soundcard, doesn’t sound like a soundcard issue to me… and i wouldn’t advice you to use your idea from the last post (route it physically) - i really wouldn’t :wink:

11

Nor would i - internal routing will allow you to achieve a much lower latency and the sound quality comming out the end will be much higher too.

12

I guess for now I’m just going to leave smart mixing to the side until I figure out what’s wrong with my computer. It’s very odd that routing isn’t working the way it should, especially with an app as powerful as Jack, and a soundcard as “not bad” as the Maya44. I might blame my particular Live demo. Maybe there’s something missing.