DJ Awesomeness

I just got back from an amazing weekend at Steel City Blues 2014 in Pittsburgh, PA. There was awesome dancing, DJs, artists, workshops, and so many cuddles and awesome connections made.

I was fortunate enough to make it to a DJ workshop taught by Daniel Repsch who is not only an awesome DJ but an amazing dancer and instructor. He motivated me to step my DJ game and adventure up.

So last night I spent several hours looking for a DJ program that I could use and be happy with for my future DJ adventures. I looked at MusicBee, AudioMulch, AIMP, MediaMonkey, Foobar2000, and Mixxx. I read reviews on forums, lifehacker, and wherever else I could find them. I was ready to drop some bank on a program, an external sound card, and even a new laptop if necessary!

With all that in mind, I want to express how excited I am for a free DJ program!

I have been using Mixxx 1.10 for a few months now, and while the experience has been "good" it was leaving me disappointed.

I'm super happy to see that they have released v1.11.0 and it has everything I was wanting and more!

Here are some of the features that make it awesome:

Cool design:

It has all the switches, bells, and whistles that you could want making it look like you have a million things going on! I like the default black option, it won't kill your eyes or kill the mood when the lights are turned down low :)

Multiple volume and balance dials, sync options, a fade control, individual volume, headphone listening switch, BPM identifier, lets you know if a song was played, read and sort the comments of your songs!

And that is just on the main screen!

There are lots of other great additions!

Auto DJ:
It was alright before, but it didn't work for social dancing ... now they added a fade delay option! So I can set a transition time before a song ends (positive numbers) or after a song has finished (negative numbers). This is one of the features I was most excited for! The songs that you have played automatically leave the "auto dj" section (don't worry they are marked as "played" and are saved in history!

Here are some other awesome tools that are much needed!

Music Crates: 
Crates are great for organizing music to DJ, avoid, or play more of!

History:
Don't worry about trying to remember what you played for a set, each time you open the program a new history item is started!

Easy Audio Output Options:
I found this to be awesome for setting my computer for multiple outputs without an external sound card!

Song Preview:
Just click a little play button and music is automatically sent to your secondary output! (make sure you have a secondary output before you click it!)

Another way to preview a loaded track is to move the fader to the other side while playing with the headphone option selected ... CAUTION ... if the fader isn't all the way over the other song will play through the speakers!

Where it falls short: (this list will grow as I figure out what doesn't work :p)

• No massive update options for comments or album or other bulk things you might want to do. 
• Comments do not save to the music file itself (they are worried about corrupting the file if they do) so if you make comments and then reload meta-data your comments can (and probably will clear out)
• I might play around with MusicBee to update comments
• I have been happily using MusicBee, this is a great program for categorizing and general listening to music.
• BPM Detection, it doesn't work super well, but I'm happy to see it when it does work.
• Window size; the available sizes are big or bigger. Not a big deal when I'm spinning, I won't be opening other programs.

/

I'm looking forward to more DJ adventures and finding out more about Mixxx and it's features. If you have any questions, great features, or major failure, please let me know!

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Updates Below!

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4/27/2014:

So as I've been tinkering with Mixxx I've had an "oh crap" moment.

Do NOT set the "Master" output as "Primary Sound Driver"

It is best to assign the device for each output rather than letting the system decide for you :) 

 I had the issue of plugging in my USB headset and the laptop identifying it as the Primary ... which means no music though the speakers! It took me a few seconds to figure out what happened, but when people are expecting music to start and you are fiddling around with the controls it makes for bad times :(

There has also been one instance of my music history not saving ... that was during one of my fights with the machine at a house party :/ so while I wasn't too upset over loosing the set list, it was still a crappy feeling.

While this isn't exactly a program limitation, it is fairly important to know!

If I do figure out what causes the history to trip out I will update it here!

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9/26/2015:

Worried about system sounds?

If you set your usb device as the primary sound device to what you aren't using to play your music (the USB Headset for me) it will force the system to play system sounds through that device :D

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11/07/2018:

More updates have come through! The interface has been redesigned and scales better. There have also been improvements made to the BPM & Key Detection feature.