There are plenty of Dj software available on Internet. Most popular I think are Traktor and VirtualDJ. Those are no brainier to choose and don’t support Linux. Because I’m old fart and I started doing my dang long time a go with Technics vinyl-players (and still play my gigs with them). They work as they have always worked great but I though that I need new geeky Dj system with digital vinyls because many interesting release doesn’t do vinyls anymore and I don’t like CD-format. Summarizing all of that I wanted something that what is open source and I can still attach my digital vinyls to it (so it should work with Serato or Traktor vinyls).



After doing little bit homework I popped up with XWax which is an open-source Digital Vinyl System (DVS) for Linux. It works great and believe me it’s geeky. Still it left me little bit blank because I liked to use some Dj controller to load music. XWax doesn’t support Dj controller at least I didn’t get mine working. So back to square one.

Then I crossed Mixxx and it looked very promising but Mixxx version 1.10 left much to hope for. After a short while they released version 1.11 which was better but I noted that plenty of MP4 format audio files didn’t work (most of the my music is encoded with Vorbis and wrapped with Ogg that works great but if you buy something they tend to favour MP4).

Make long story short. I get involved with Mixxx and it have very nice community, fixed non-working FFmpeg plug in and fixed handfull of Linux specific stuff. After making FFmpeg plug in working I noticed I have solved most of my digital Dj problems. Mixxx works with Linux… check, openSUSE.. thank you for asking yes, is open source… GPLv2, Dj controllers.. long list, Digital vinyls.. serato and traktor and have nice working skinnable interface.. check.

Only thing is that Mixxx is using Portaudio with Linux and Portaudio doesn’t play nice with Pulseaudio but I wrote patch for Portaudio and it’s currently in ‘works for me’-stage which means late Beta. If I ever got time I’ll give it a facelift, commit it to Github and generate little bit documentation and try to again get it to official Portaudio

But if you are open source Dj and like to test state-of-art version (which is light years ahead last one) of Mixxx I’ll recommend to test Mixxx version 1.12 beta. You should understand it’s Beta software and if you find bug please report it. But if you want to stick with stable Mixxx version 1.11 there is nothing wrong with that it’s also very capable application.

In openSUSE you can download it with zypper from Packman repos.

Both comments and pings are currently closed.