Yay!

As you may or may not know, I consider myself something of an amateur DJ. I am not among the class of DJs who can mix four+ vinyl records together while juggling sequencers and stacks of effects on the side, but I do enjoy mixing tracks together – especially tracks I've produced.

Recently, in a search for bigger, better DJ mixing software, I discovered Mixxx, a free, open-source DJ mixing program for Linux, OS X, and Windows. It's an amazing program, which easily bests my old software and my buggy CDJ deck combined.

So I had some sweet, sweet software, but despite all its other problems I had fallen in love with my CDJ deck's jog wheels. Also, I hated the idea of continuing to mix with the mouse. So, I purchased a Numark Total Control MIDI surface. Its design is perfect for DJs like myself, as it's portable, rugged, precise, and (best of all) standards-compliant.

But I didn't know it was standards-compliant at the time, so purchasing it was something of a risk. It wasn't until I brought it home and plugged it into my Linux box that I knew for sure it would work. (Score one for standards!) I could now open the control surface on my computer and see lots of numbers scroll by whenever I touched anything.

Although I now had a nice, high-quality control surface which worked under Linux, Mixxx still had no idea how to interface with it. I didn't think that would be an issue, as I thought it would simply be a matter of creating a new MIDI map file and ‘training’ Mixxx how to talk with the Total Control.

Before I could do that, however, I needed to know the MIDI codes used to communicate with the Total Control. There was some documentation available from Numark, but it was incomplete and not quite accurate. So, in preparation for a campaign to add Total Control support to Mixxx, I reverse-engineered the MIDI codes and published them on the Mixxx documentation wiki.

From there, I thought I would be able to simply assemble an XML MIDI mapping which would allow Mixxx to support the Numark Total Control. However, the Total Control surface has a number of features about it which make it unlike any other MIDI controller previously supported by Mixxx.

So, in the end, I had to submit about a half-dozen patches to the Mixxx codebase in order to fully support the most important features of the Total Control surface. (For example, the track selection knob, which allows users to scroll through the library and load tracks without ever using the mouse.) And, while I was at it I discovered (and fixed) a number of unrelated bugs in Mixxx, too.

I let that sit and stew for a while, mostly because I was too busy to worry about it much. But recently I received a couple of emails from people wondering what the status was, which prompted me to finally finish up the patches and the MIDI mapping. So now, as of today, Mixxx officially supports the Numark Total Control. All of my patches and MIDI mappings are in SVN, which means that they will be included in the next release. (From what I'm hearing, probably 1.6.0.)

If you're the impatient type, feel free to grab my MIDI map and give it a try. Your mileage may vary, depending on the version of Mixxx, but it shouldn't hurt anything.

Also, I want to be sure to thank all the Mixxx developers who've put their time and effort into this wonderful program. It's no doubt my favorite DJ mixing program, and that's entirely due to the achievements of these volunteer developers.

ttyl!

--Alex Markley

P.S. this has been in the works since February this year, and it's probably my biggest contribution to an open source project to-date. So I'm understandably quite excited about it.