For all of you who want better waveforms – we hear that! Mixxx 1.11 will have colored and much clearer / filtered waveforms.
Wow thats quite cool (and that isnt meant to sound condescending)
Is this just another colour or will it be a frequency coloured transient like Traktor/Serato.
Im just installing Mixxx on my other MBP. 
Yup – different colors for different frequency ranges. We’re also going to filter it so you can see the beats much better. Work is already in progress and in sort of alpha-stage. It wasn’t ready for 1.10 but it’s sure to be in 1.11.
Can you expand on that. How will you filter it.
Obviously if its at alpha stage theres not much you can say, im just interested.
Hows the work going on the transient cus its a whole different way of showing the wave form cus it can be much weaker or less easy to make out than just the envelope or beats & highs.
You guys gonna grab the same algorithm for the keylock that ableton and Traktor uses? If so then it will rock. quite impressed really with the overall program. It’s far better than LE versions of software out there. But seeing as this is still beta Im probably gonna have my pants blown off with a full version.
Hopefully you guys can fix the issue with recording on vista. Ill try it on my laptop.
btw, awesome program to use with my Hercules MP3e2 controller.
Whoa, this ended up being really long. tl;dr – we’re working on it. Stay tuned.
Well, it’s kind of an open question. What is the most useful way to represent the waveforms to you guys?
The naive step that produces a huge improvement over what we have now is just simply filtering the waveform into 3 components (low, mid, high) and drawing each in a separate color. That gives you something that looks like this:
Hm, actually that looks like just 2-components. But you get the idea. That screenshot was from back in March by the guy who is working on this.
The next step is coloring the audio based on its spectral properties. The general way you do this is by measuring the dominant frequency components within certain time steps (usually small) and then mapping that to some color space. Serato generally maps red hues to bass and green hues to mid and blue to high and applies a gradient across those fixed points in the color space.
Another reason Mixxx’s waveforms look crappy right now is that they do not represent the spectral density (or “audio energy”) of the sound – they only represent the audio amplitude in the time domain. This is why it looks “jaggy”. Tracks that have been compressed are generally maxed out as much as possible amplitude wise so Mixxx’s waveforms are also pretty unusable in that case too.
@Karlos, I’m not sure what you mean by “transient”. Googling seems to suggest this is NI marketing speak for beat extraction and beat tracking . We have a couple of active efforts around beat extraction right now. The backend work is in place even in 1.10. In either 1.11 or 1.12 we will be looking at swapping out our BPM detector with a beat extraction/tracking algorithm. Part of this waveform rewrite will pave the way for this by allowing us to annotate the waveform with features extracted from the audio (beats, per-measure key, instrument onsets, etc.). We are also looking at reverse engineering Traktor binary blobs so we can use the audio features extracted by Traktor for your tracks.
Code-wise, roughly anything is possible. What do you guys find the most useful waveform representation is?
Also, while I have your attention, does anybody here find overlapping waveforms (VDJ-style) useful? We are planning to support them but not put them in any default skins at the moment. I think having them separate (parallel or split) is easier to see, but you guys may disagree.
I believe both Traktor and Ableton use the Elastique Pro algorithm: zplane Plugins - great audio plugins
Sadly, it’s proprietary, so we can’t use it. We currently use the SoundTouch algorithm for keylock. We’re aware of the quality issues it has and we’re working on improving it .
cool beans
I’ve noticed that the “Title” column disappears when browsing via iTunes.
Could just be me though.
Lol yeah pretty much (although i think serato use ‘transient’, might be wrong). My involvement with N.I. means N.I. speak comes naturally to me.
And yeah, the waveform you show above is the more simplified version that i meant as Beats and Highs. To be honest i like that representation, its clear and practical.
Now this one is gonna raise a hell of a debate… Strap in.
Coming from a Traktor point of view as i do, i dislike overlapping waveforms. I even have issues with parallel waveforms but that because im used to the Phase Meter… but people are going to tell you to completely ignore me on this 
But, yes i agree separate waveforms are much easier to work with. I think the VDJ way is bad, very bad.
You then have the debate about vertical waveforms which at some point someone is going to tell you that you HAVE to have or they will never use Mixxx. Some people are totally wedded to them, usually if they have come from Itch or SSL.
Yup. I wouldnt expect Zplane because then you have costs that need recouping… right?
Oops. I swear I’m not trolling.
Ah right – we plan on supporting vertical waveforms as well.
Right – it costs money but also since we are open-source, to use Zplane’s algorithm it has to be open-source also. Otherwise there would be part of Mixxx that isn’t open-source, and that’s against the rules of the GPL which is the license we release Mixxx under. So, even if we had the money, we couldn’t use Zplane.
To be honest you will get a lot of kudos for that.
Ah yeah, of course. Good point, well made.
i’d definitely like to see vertical wave forms in mixxx. when i first used vdj with my hercules mk2 (before i switched to traktor) i seem to remember liking the waveforms it had and intially hated the ones in traktor. i guess they were overlapping?
i love traktor pro, but that’s for it’s mapping capabilities, cues+loops and effects, certainly not for it’s mostly fixed layout. i still find it odd that u can’t combine the two waveforms in any way - just seems odd to me them being so disjoint.
I’m going to check it out n my macbook now. I’m interested to see all the skins. If there’s one thing I have grown to love about traktor 2 is the skin or whatever you want to call it is extremely clean, streamlined, and professional looking. It is very modern minimal looking with no excess 2001 winamp style graphics.
When I installed it briefly at work today it definitely looked good but still seems a little VDJish to me (I think it might be the techy font on the default skin that is doing it). I would love to see someone make a really streamlined skin for it. The One also looks like it has a really clean modern interface (the way the decks and knobs look) and I would like to see something like that for mixx.
Any chance there will be a phase meter in mixxx similar to traktor? I find that far more useful than putting waveforms side by side whether horizontal or vertical.
Mixxx rules!
I’m gonna update this in a minute!
Thanks Rryan!
I disagree here. A phase meter assumes that the beatgrids are spot on, if the beatgrid is slightly off then the phase meter is off. I found the beatgridding in mixxx isn’t very precise and fine tuneable like traktor so I would much rather have stacking waveforms and ignore the beatgrids since they are often wrong and hard to adjust to get a really good lock.
I really wish traktor had another layout option with stacking waveforms since I think it is much more useful for DVS.
Definitely agree with xonetacular about the minimal/professionalism that I see with itch and Traktor. The fonts, graphics, etc. are very easy to see and are aesthetically pleasing. If you can get Mixx up to par on that then you guys have a real good shot at being a competitor in the DJ world.
Oh and continue posting on forums/interacting with the community! That is the BEST thing you can do!