[plug] Linux DJ

[Brad Campbell]

Tim White wrote:
> I am looking for a Linux product to DJ with MP3s. I would prefer  a 
> bootable cd and the ability to cross fade, repeat a section, speed 
> change and queue that would automatically crossfade between songs.
> Thanks
> Tim
> p.s. I googled and dont seem to be able to find much
> 
> weirdo AT tigris DOT org (MSN Enabled) | ICQ# 255176389 | Riverton, 
> Perth, WA

Hmm... I have exactly what you are after..
Twin sound cards, full music database, completely individual players 
capable of speed control/looping/cueing/jogging.. Great for beatmixing 
and anything you can do with a pair of professional DJ CD players.
Its a purely text ncurses style interface and completely keyboard 
controlled.

I have mine built into an old Dolch luggable PC.
Unfortunately it's not really easy to set up, it's reliant on es1371 
sound cards and it uses an odd single flat file database for the music 
list (No id3 tags). Id3's are just too damn slow when you have to 
process 7-8000 songs.. Plus when I wrote this id3's were only just 
comming into any form of use and were impossible to manipulate. (This 
started life as a windows 95 program)

We did a stack of usability testing with DJ's and found that a GUI 
interface was just too damn slow and hard to use.. When beat mixing you 
need response times of sub <10ms and that was nearly impossible with a 
GUI and mouse. That is also the reason for it currently being tied to 
es1371 sound cards. There is a requirement to flush the cards buffer and 
get it loaded as quickly as possible when the cue key is hit or a loop 
is initiated for the first time, and it was (at the time) damn difficult 
to support that across the array of sound devices that linux supports. 
In fact it's still not easy as some sound cards lie about the length of 
their buffers and that throws the buffering for cue points and set 
points right out. I'm working on a re-write of the audio handling using 
alsa but time has not been my friend.

For Professional DJ use it's not as easy as chucking a couple of 
scratching programs on a PC.

It's also written in pascal with an "interesting" interface to a 
modified mpg123.

Having said that, it has seen constant 8h/day use for about 3 years and 
is incredibly reliable.

Sorry, I can't give the source code away, but I have contributed all the 
jump/loop/speed control/interface changes back to the author of mpg123. 
I also have a license from him for commercial redistribution of mpg123.

If anyone wants to have a look and see it in action, contact Jamie 
Gilkison of Gilkisons Dance Studio. He's a heavy user.
His version also has a high level interface to the intelligent lighting 
system to make it really push button DJ'ing :p)

Regards,
Brad