On 31 December, my mission was to make people dance from 22:00 to 03:00 in the morning. Fortunately, I could rely on Mixxx, a fantastic and powerful DJing software available for free for all platforms (Linux, Mac OS X and Windows).
Mixxx performed admirably during the five hours.
On Linux, Mixxx supports MP3 out of the box but as I had quite a lot of AAC (i.e. M4A) files, I had to compile it from source. Here are the commands I used on my Ubuntu Linux 12.04 LTS box:
sudo aptitude install scons qt3-dev-tools libqt4-dev g++ bzr libportmidi-dev libsndfile1-dev libtag1-dev libmad0-dev libid3tag0-dev libmp4v2-dev libfaad-dev portaudio19-dev
scons -j2 faad=1 shoutcast=0 tuned=1
sudo scons prefix=/usr/local install
The first line is to install all the required dependencies, the second is to compile Mixxx with AAC support (faad=1) and specifically for the processor I was using (tuned=1). The third line is to install it in /usr/local
Have fun DJing with Mixxx :-)
Its Great! To see the emergence (or escalation!) of Open Source Applications! Yet there need to be testers and adherents much much more in the coming future….. BTW did have a listen to your audio albums… keep it up! there too there are lots of open source audio apps…. hope to hear new experiences from you on this part of music….(creation!)
Have you used any MIDI controller together with Mixxx? It’s been years I haven’t revisited this software.
@Jean-Paul I still use my trusty Logic Express running on an iMac to compose music. I’ll check whether something similar exists on Linux but, to be frank, I have some doubts.
@Dilraj I didn’t have time to set up a MIDI controller. I’ll do that next time I use it and I’ll let you know.
If you do get some free time you can check my compositions too and we could maybe exchange some composing ideas someday…
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZXZ9FRrCEeQ
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7oQFiyDfJjw
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v0wWCzDj1sw
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fLdMO0lPPk0
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vTJpvWrGUC0
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8ZGnz0atH70
a few among… Hope you do like,…
I’m going to listen to your compositions tomorrow. Thanks for sharing.
did you mix using command line???
that would have been cool!!!1
Nah. I don’t even know if that’s possible :-)
A small note on how I managed to get mixxx to work on Fedora 19 (with full support for MP3 and M4A (AAC) audio files):
(1) From the Mixxx wiki (http://mixxx.org/wiki/doku.php/compiling_on_linux)
yum groupinstall “Development Tools”
yum install scons git alsa-lib-devel qt4-devel libGL-devel libGLU-devel \
libid3tag-devel libmad-devel libsndfile-devel libvorbis-devel \
portaudio-devel libshout-devel python-devel portmidi-devel qt-webkit-devel taglib-devel flac-devel \
protobuf-devel vamp-plugin-sdk-devel
(2) Install mp4v2-2.0 from source (https://code.google.com/p/mp4v2/)
+ Add /usr/local/lib in /etc/ld.so.conf
+ ldconfig
(3) Install mixxx from source (http://mixxx.org/)
scons -j2 faad=1 shoutcast=0 tuned=1
sudo scons prefix=/usr/local install
Hey Avinash, can you share which commands you used for step 2. I’m attempting to build MIxxx with M4A on Fedora 20. I’ve got the mp4v2 tar, done the usual:
./configure
make
sudo make install
and then,
sudo ldconfig? (I’m not sure how to add /usr/local/lib/ to /etc/ld.so.conf)
Thanks, and hello from Down Under
Hi Jeremy,
Just edit /etc/ld.so.conf as root (using vi or gedit) and add “/usr/local/lib” (without the quotes) as the first line in the file.
Then do a ldconfig (to make sure Linux knows about the libraries in /usr/local/lib) and everything should be fine.
Do not hesitate to come back to me if you are having issues.
Have fun!
An update for Fedora 21:
libmp4v2-devel can now be installed instead of compiling libmp4v2 from source. This means that all dependencies can be met with available RPMs from the standard repositories.
For some reason, though, scons doesn’t detect the libmp4v2 library and therefore fails to compile mixxx. I had to tweak build/features.py to skip checking for that library. When this is done, compilation and installation work and, as far as I can tell, during execution, mixxx works perfectly well with m4a files (and mp3 files as well of course).