Mixxx DJ Software - Owen Williams on Open Source DJ Software - The Lorenzo's Music Podcast (Transcript)
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Tom Ray: Hi and welcome to another Lorenzo’s Music Podcast. I’m Tom. On this show we talk with Creative Commons musicians, open source musicians, musicians that are based in the Fediverse, musicians in general, but we also talk to people who make products for those musicians, open source products, products, that help kind of support the indie musician. And I kind of have both here today. So I would like you to introduce yourself and tell the people who you are and what it is you do.
Owen Williams: Yeah, my name is Owen Williams. I think at least my primary role, that I’m coming from today is a developer and core, you know, contributor to the MIXXX Open Source DJ project, which is a thing I’ve been working on for many years. but then, you know, I’m not just ah, a programmer, I’m also a user of the software. this is a piece of software I’ve been using for many years to do all my DJing. and I play out regularly, to audiences. So I get to use the thing that I work on to make people dance, which is sort of the primary, primary goal of it.
Tom Ray: Yeah, and it’s, it’s a project that I’ve known about for a while. I’ve dabbled with. Every so often, I’m not knowledgeable enough, nor is my background really in DJing. It’s something that I’ve always wanted to learn, but just whenever I start to do it, the fact that I can’t learn it instantly, I’m like, all right, heck with this. And then I come back to it like six months later and go, okay, I’m going to learn this. But first I want to ask, why is it mix? Why does the name have three X’s?
Owen Williams: Yeah, I think just to differentiate it from just being a generic word with one X.
Tom Ray: that makes sense.
Owen Williams: Yeah. I mean one interesting thing is I joined the project in 2009 but it’s been active since 2002 and depending on how you count, maybe even earlier. So by the time I joined it was already mixed with three X’s and I’ve never known it so be anything else.
Tom Ray: Right.
Owen Williams: So, you know, that’s something that was, was chosen by the original programmer, who started the whole project. So. Yeah.
Tom Ray: And is that person still involved?
Owen Williams: No, and he wasn’t involved when I joined. So. Okay. he’s every so often we send him an email or something but he’s been, yeah, he’s, he’s sort of lost, lost touch with the project as far as we can tell.
Tom Ray: Okay, now, my first introduction to it and I’m, I’m speculating, I’m thinking this is how I remember it happening and I may have made it up in my own head. But I want to say it was because Chuck D mentioned it or something like that. Like, I want to say it was something he said in. So there was that time period when Creative, Commons put out a compilation album of people that put out music like, like famous artists that put out music under Creative Commons. And one of them was Public Enemy. And I want to say that he mentioned MIXXX And I was like, what’s this thing? And I looked it up and it wasn’t even part of the. I use Ubuntu Linux and it wasn’t even part of the repos yet. I actually had to download it and install it. Now it’s part of the repos and you can install it directly. So I want to say that’s how I first learned about it.
Owen Williams: I mean that would be a great endorsement. I actually am not aware of that. yeah, it’s is a thing that sort of rides under the radar for a lot of people and definitely in the professional DJ world. So that would be. Yeah, if big, if true.
Tom Ray: Yeah, I know I was trying to look it up beforehand, but I was like, I don’t know, I couldn’t find it. I might be making it up in my own head. I might be confusing it with just the article about the Creative Commons release thing that I was talking about because I think I discovered all of like open source tools and software and Creative Commons and all that around the same time period. It was very early on. But you said you got involved in 2009, so how did you get involved? How did you actually enter into the project?
Owen Williams: Yeah, so DJing was a thing I was interested in. and you know, since, since college. It was, you know, a thing I was aware of as a performance art. And it was just extremely expensive to get into. You had to buy turntables, you had to buy a mixer, you had to buy lots of records. digital DJing had not been invented at the time I was first aware of it. And I, you know, did not have enough money to just drop a lot on turntables for a thing that I wasn’t even sure I would like or be good at. And I didn’t really have a community to like reach out to or somebody with a set of decks or whatever to just try it. so I kind of dabbled on and off with, you know, being interested in the music. And then at the same time, you know, I was also a big open source person, so I had, you know, Linux on my machine. And just as things like it was final scratch at first, and then Serato later on came around. This was software that was Mac and Windows only. so I couldn’t really try it out, because I was sort of, you know, anti proprietary software at that point. and to that. And I remember finding MIXXX a couple times, and I had tried it a couple times, it had been not usable for me. and 2009 was the first time that I downloaded. It was like, okay, this is. This place, back tracks, this does, you know, the speed changes and the eqs, and like, we can actually give this a shot. and then very quickly ran into some issues with it. and you know, as a, as a software developer was like, okay, I can, I can jump in and help on this project. So.
Tom Ray: Oh, all right.
Owen Williams: Yeah. So the first thing I jumped in with was, I had a hard time remembering which tracks I had played. And so I wanted a column in the library that just had a little check mark that says, you played this track. That was my first feature. so it was a pretty easy one to do. And at that point the project was willing to accept pretty much any contribution. and it was from there that was off to the races.
Tom Ray: So were you using digital, I guess I don’t know what they’re called. What are the kind where it’s literally, a console that connects to their turntables. They look like turntables, but you don’t put records on them. They just connect to the software. were you using those? Were you using both real turntables and digital control turntables at the time?
Owen Williams: Right. So I started with literally a $50 midi keyboard that I got off ebay. So, like black and white keys. And I was just like, okay, this key means go faster, this key means go slower. It had some knobs at the top that I was like, okay, I can make those. The eqs. Just to be like, does this. Is this anything? Is this something I can do? Yeah, and yeah, after that, I quickly got a little dinky, portable controller, which I still have. and kind of it did the thing where after 10 years, the rubber starts to get tacky and gross, so it’s like it doesn’t work anymore. But, and then at that time, the DJing as a, as a practice was going through this transition to Digital by way of vinyl control, which is this thing where you have records that don’t have music on them, they have a timecode and you connect that time code to a computer and that’s what controls the MP3s on your, on your laptop.
Tom Ray: Wow, that sounds like a lot more work than just having an actual controller that’s on there.
Owen Williams: Yeah, I think a lot of it, DJ is very much about the visual performance and you know, I suppose. Yeah, yeah, the joke about people twisting knobs when they’re not doing anything. Because it’s. Especially now it’s somebody who’s on a big stage and you’re being looked at. And so the, the visual of a person using records was DJing and somebody using a laptop or or one of these sort of USB controllers was not as exciting to people. So that was like, it was like. And also every club had turntables. And the idea is you wanted to just come into your club with your laptop, set it down and go. And there you could do that with the sort of vinyl system. So that was, I guess.
Tom Ray: Yeah, well that was the, that was kind of the joke in the, what was it, the late 2010s when, people like, I want to say girl talk or other, other sort of mashup mp3 DJs, everybody kind of joked that it, you know, they’re on stage looking at their email, checking their email.
Owen Williams: Yeah, yeah. And I think, yeah, now it’s a little more acceptable now. And now you have things like live coding where people are like, oh, yes, I’m going to project the email that I’m checking on the screen. So you watch as I edit a text file and music comes out like that’s, that’s now much more acceptable. But definitely in DJing, it was like, no, I need, I, I know, I know how to spin records and I don’t want to do something else.
Tom Ray: No, that does make sense. And it’s kind of like with just like with electronic and synth artists, they have all the knobs that they’re turning. Whereas, yes, you can buy the mouse, make the envelope go up and down, but turning the knob and being able to go back and forth, different thing entirely. I suppose that makes total sense. And also on a slight side tangent, I was thinking about the checking your email on stage. I did see a hip hop group one time perform on stage. And what I loved about it is they were, they had backing tracks that were on a laptop. And what they did, it was just them standing there on Each side of a chair with a microphone and front and center in front of them was just a laptop that was playing the backing tracks. And I thought that was brilliant. I thought that was great.
Owen Williams: Yeah, yeah. I mean, yeah, Own it. Yeah, exactly. I think. I think people are much more open now to, like, different. Different models.
Tom Ray: Exactly.
Owen Williams: Yeah.
Tom Ray: And so early on, that was. The fascinating thing about MIXXX was that was during a time when downloading and creating instead of. And that’s the way it’s set up too, is it’s set up as cases, as, like, you know, the cases. Crates. Thank you. I know I was using the wrong word. it’s set up as crates and it would automatically scan your digital library, which now it’s kind of tough because people don’t really download music anymore. So is there more of a shift to making it work with vinyl again, or is it still based on digital? Like, what are some of the. I guess I’m asking you to take a strong jump forward. Let’s talk about the MIXXX of today. So what is MIXXX doing today?
Owen Williams: Yeah, MIXXX of today, is. Yeah, it’s doing really well. it’s. Yeah, so it’s still focused around, ah, library of downloaded music. and we support tons of different controllers. we’ve even started, adding support for controllers with little screens on them. So we know how to. We have figured out how to drive the screens.
Tom Ray: Oh, yeah, tell me about that.
Owen Williams: Yeah, yeah. So, I mean, so a lot of. There was a period in between where there was a lot of, like, proprietary USB protocols. And some manufacturers will send us controllers and, you know, say, here’s the manual, go ahead and create a mapping for it. And MIXXX and others of them will be like, no, you have to have a special handshake and a special protocol that’s proprietary because we don’t want it to only work with our software. people have kind of given up on that because the software is sort of whatever. It’s really about spending the thousand dollars on the controller. That’s where they’re making their money. So they don’t really care if the protocols. And so now you hook it up to a USB and you can just see what it’s doing. You push a button and this bit changes that sort of thing. And then these screens are just another packet type. It’s just another set of data and you’re just drawing pixels on the little screen and you just have to figure out what format they’re in and send the right ones.
Tom Ray: That is one of the things I’VE seen about when people ask about MIXXX and if you do a search for it, a lot of it is will this work with Mix? And it’s usually a resounding yes. Like you guys are like the VLC of DJ software. Like yes, everything will work with this. So tell me about maintaining it. You said people will send you stuff. how do you guys go through testing this? How do you set something like that up?
Owen Williams: Yeah, and you know, for everything we do support, there’s always a set that we don’t support and people are like oh no. And you know we rely on our community to help contribute. so occasionally yes, we do get manufacturers sending things or we can help our contributors purchase controllers. as long as they promise to like keep the things up to date. But I would say basically we have sort of a, it’s not an explicit tier system but it’s ah, a setup where there’s controllers that we know are extremely popular. The core contributors have them and we want to make sure it works the best. So like the one behind me is the Traktor S4 MK3 which is their sort of latest all tricked out four deck, controller. And that’s when I help keep mapped and keep working really well. So those are like the officially supported core contributors are working on them. We have sort of a second tier of, you know, people have submitted a mapping, we’ve checked it out, we’re pretty sure they work good. You know, if there’s bugs reported by the community we can work with them to get them resolved and updated. And we also, you know, include those with MIXXX and try to make sure they’re working as best we can. But you know, we can’t afford to buy every controller for every developer so we do the best we can. And then there’s sort of a long tail of weirder controllers, more unusual ones where the community just trades mapping mappings around. They’re in the forums, some of says, yeah, I’ve figured out how to do this one. and we have a standard of sort of code quality to actually include it and some of these sort of don’t meet that quality yet. and you know, some, somebody who’s able to hack something together that works is maybe not also able, you know, we try to help them but sometimes they’re not able to get it to the point where we feel comfortable including it because then we’re responsible for keeping it up to date. So it’s a huge effort. You know, there’s many dozens of people involved from the contribut, down to the community. and we all sort of working together because everybody wants these things to work well and just have plug it in, you can start playing.
Tom Ray: And it makes sense too. Like you said, you have the tool right behind you. So you maintain and usually focus on that because that’s what you use, that’s what you know and you know what you wanted to do. So there must be other people who also have their forte as to what they do as well, right?
Owen Williams: Exactly. Yeah. And so some people will be really heavy into effects so they pay more attention to how the effects knobs are working together. Oh yeah, I’m less, I’m more about like making sure that I can set up loops really easily and manipulate those effects is sort of like, you know, am I turning up delay or reverb? And that’s about it. Yeah.
Tom Ray: Okay.
Owen Williams: There is the personality of every contributor embedded into the software. You can tell what we care about individually by what we work on the most. Mm,
Tom Ray: And the other thing too. And you just made me realize like these are the parts where I get stuck when I use it. And it’s also just because I get impatient. But the so with the, when I load it up I usually just base it straight off of I’m going to work in the interface and I’m just using whatever I have music wise on my laptop. Yeah, we, at one point in time when me and my drummer were starting a new project, we had written all this stuff and we had backing tracks that we recorded. I just wanted to loop those and be able to switch them. So my first jump was to use MIXXX for that. Because there’s a way that you can mark it, set up the loop and have the digital timestamp, map out like, okay, this is the beat so we know it’s at this tempo. And I can set up. Okay, now loop back to that part. Keep doing that. And I was trying to figure out one how to actually I could not for the life of me get it to loop exactly. I didn’t know. so I guess that would be my first question. This is just me personally asking a question because you’re here. I would set up a loop and it was never right. I could never get it to loop properly. Or maybe I was setting up the timestamp wrong. So let’s say you have a song and you want to do a eight bar or. No, sorry, not eight bar, eight beat loop.
Owen Williams: Sure.
Tom Ray: On a track that you have sampled. How would you in the simplest way possible explain going about doing that.
Owen Williams: So, what, what I’m doing is I do, when I, when I download a bunch of tracks, I, do a lot of pre processing. We have a beat detector that’s really good and usually nails it on the first time. Especially if it’s a gridded dance track. It’ll just line up. Sometimes it’s a half a beat off, which is a bug we know about. It’s actually very hard to do beat detection. but if it’s wrong at all, I’ll adjust that. I make sure that the grid is good. I’ll scrub through the whole thing and I’ll make sure, zoom in and make sure that it’s right before the onsets and that throughout the track it’s in the right place. this is a great way to discover that your track had a live drummer and you just have to sort of do the best you can, which
Tom Ray: is probably what my problem was.
Owen Williams: Yeah.
Tom Ray: Okay.
Owen Williams: Once that’s done, there, there is the make me an eight beat loop button. and then there’s also, there’s a little, it looks like a little magnet. That’s the quantize button. And that means when I do an operation, lock it to a beat. So if your beat grid is good and you have quantize on, you know, if I’m DJing, I can just push the 8 beat loop button and it’s perfect. It does not drift whatsoever. this includes, Because you’ve only got 44,000 samples a second, it may not actually be an even sample for a loop. We actually have sub sample accuracy for everything. so it won’t drift in time.
Tom Ray: Okay, all right, so. And yeah, already, like when you got into the second sentence of you explaining to me, I’m like, all right, that’s already more than I would have done or did do. Yeah, I do. It’s true though. I mean, I should, I shouldn’t just go, all right, I’m going to pick a track and now work. Damn it. You know, it should be. It should. I should do some more research on how I’m going to set this up or like I said, have more knowledge rather than just jump in and go, I’ll get this right away because I’m a genius.
Owen Williams: So, yeah, I mean, it’s one of these things where, you know, there’s. We try, we try to do as much pre detection as possible.
Tom Ray: Right.
Owen Williams: and, and you know, I read forums for, for other, you know, DJ software and they also talk about how, Things are not quite right the first time. Right. Famously, I think Grimes had a DJ set where it was a giant disaster because the base was detected at 70 instead of 1 instead of 140 or whatever. And so the tracks were playing double speed. And she blamed the person who had set up the tracks for herself. and it’s like, yeah, you have to go through and make sure that that stuff is right.
Tom Ray: Right.
Owen Williams: some people mix by ear, and they’re just ignoring the beat, the beat grid the whole time. Because I’m listening to it. It sounds good. I, can adjust as needed. yeah, yeah, definitely. The use case you’re talking about, which is like using MIXXX as a supporting playback machine for, for live music, is one of those things that lots of people do, and we would love to support. And we don’t have a lot of contributors doing that stuff.
Tom Ray: Okay. We’ve jumped onto that several times because we tried to get a looper pedal. And let me tell you, that’s even more of a nightmare to do unless you know what you’re doing. We tried that for. I think we wasted a good three months trying to get that process to work. and with that, it’s like, there’s too much, with a looper pedal. It’s like, well, now you’re doing it yourself ahead of time, creating the loop, and then sometimes you put too much nuance into it because you’re doing it live. And then it’s like, okay, now we got to listen to that nuance you put on it repeat over and over again, and it screws us up. Yeah, no. So we tried to do that. And also it was because at the time we tried to use it, it was because there were only two members. We couldn’t play all the instruments. So we did need that backing track. But I do love going back to do it to it. I do love messing with it. I do wish that I could go, oh, I want to DJ for a little bit, but for some reason I just never follow through. I do like to use it for scratching noises. I will say that I’ll create my own scratch noise samples that I can use in something else and then put it in my daw.
Owen Williams: So, yeah, one of my, if the first contribution I made was a little checkbox, one of my early contributions was rewriting the, the time stretching engine that creates those scratching noises. Because it wasn’t sounding right. And so I went to, I, like, recorded some stuff and put it to an audio file. And then, you know, Into Audacity or whatever and then looked at the waveform and it was like full of like spikes and jumps and discontinuities. And I was like, there’s bugs in here. And so I went through and fixed the whole thing. So now no matter what speeds, what changes you do, it’s a per. It’s a perfectly smooth waveform. So it sounds really crisp. wow. Basically any speed.
Tom Ray: That’s amazing. Yeah, because it’s one of the things where it seems like, oh, it’s just doing that because that’s what I’m doing to the wav file and it’s like. Of course it’s not. Yeah, that’s not how things work.
Owen Williams: Like getting it so that when you. That point where the, you reverse that, that little point. It’s very easy to get a big spike when, when it’s going back and forth because you might end up with the samples jumping around. And so there’s little, there’s little tiny, dissolve, you know, cross fades just at those points to make sure that there’s no hiccup. Because boy, I, you know, I’ve played on a number of big systems. Any, any sort of spikes in the waveform get very loud, very quickly.
Tom Ray: Oh, wow, that’s. No, that’s awesome that you had a hand in. One of the things that I still do go to it for. We do, we do a remix album every so often of songs that we’ve released and I like to have that in there because I like to make it sound like I actually remixed it rather than just chopping it up on. On a daw.
Owen Williams: Sure. Yeah.
Tom Ray: And that adds in thought authenticity. Even though it’s very unauthentic.
Owen Williams: You’re still making it.
Tom Ray: Exactly. There you go. Thank you, that was very nice of you. now you also mentioned effects before too. So are you saying that these effects, are they built into it? Are they VSTs using the output and creat the output effects or is it both? Like. Tell me about the effects involved that you’ve been working.
Owen Williams: Yeah, we have a bunch of built in effects, various open source things and then we also support some of the plugins. MIXXX is cross platform, works on Windows, Mac and Linux. And so we support a bunch of different plugin formats. I can’t name them all at the moment. yeah, we don’t support. I don’t think we support the thing where it like pops up a little user interface for the effect. You know those that type.
Tom Ray: Oh yeah, okay.
Owen Williams: And it’s like it’s got some crazy UI because for some reason audio people decided that everything should look like it was 1998. Still. I mean, I love that stuff, but we can’t, we can’t do that. But we can expose basic knobs and things.
Tom Ray: I will, I will give background on that. I think it’s because a lot of it to make this stuff look good used. what is it?
Tom Ray: Oh great. Now I’m going to forget the library, but it’s that. It’s that library that GIMP used to use. And they’ve upgraded it but it was all based on version two and everybody’s moved up to version four. But it’s such a huge time suck to switch it over to the newest version that they just kept it that way. What they do is they even. What I heard from Ubuntu is that they even. A lot of them will package it with the software because it’s not supported on the actual operating system anymore.
Owen Williams: Got it.
Tom Ray: Yeah, yeah, yeah, I’ve wondered that too. So, okay, you were talking about the effects. Sorry about that.
Owen Williams: Yeah, so. So yeah, there’s And again, I. This is something I don’t use as much, but I know we have at least a couple dozen just sort of built in effects and then m. Yeah, most effects, like for instance, I wouldn’t try to put it like a serum, you know, VST in there. but many of your bit crushers and distorts and saturators like that stuff can all go in and then you just. We just expose, option. We just expose certain knobs for, for the effects.
Tom Ray: Okay. And it does work with externals is what you’re saying. Or. Yeah, VST with plugins. Yeah, yeah, that’s what I meant to say.
Owen Williams: Yeah.
Tom Ray: And because of course with the. I was going to say and actual physical ones, but it’s. Yeah, anything works with the physical one you’re sending it out through. Right through that. Nevermind. So now.
Owen Williams: Yeah, so this is one thing you can do with MIXXX is so we have a mixer internally. but you can set up your audio to just output the deck outputs separately and use an external gear. So you could just have MIXXX generate two streams of audio, one for, you know, one for left and one for right. And then you patch that into your whole, you know, music, you know, your own mixer and your own effects set up and bypass the internal mixing completely. So like there’s a flexibility there too.
Tom Ray: Now, speaking of piping it out too, you guys have it set up so that it can work with different, streaming services.
Owen Williams: Yeah. So one of the, like, secret things about, MIXXX is probably its biggest use case in, like, in actual professional use as a DJ thing. It is great. I use it professionally. But let’s be real, everybody’s on Pioneer gear.
Tom Ray: Right.
Owen Williams: That’s just the way it is. but streaming radio stations make heavy use of MIXXX because it talks the isecast, protocol. and it’s very good. Apparently we are best at getting the metadata correctly when sending it over Icecast.
Tom Ray: Oh, really?
Owen Williams: the story I’d always heard is that everybody used to use Winamp27 or whatever for Icecast. And then when they discontinued that, everybody was like, well, we need something else that we don’t have to pay for. And MIXXX was, there and works great. So we have tons of radio, producers using it and they use, you know, the autoplay for, the music. And it has microphone support and ducking support and yeah, they use it to drive the radio stations.
Tom Ray: I never considered it for that. I was just talking about like, how people can do live DJ sets to that. But that is even more of like, why did that not occur to me? Yeah, because I’ve tried to use things like there’s, that one, radio streaming software that’s been around forever, that’s called butt, which stands for like broadcast using this tool.
Owen Williams: And yeah, I feel like that rings a bell. Yeah, yeah.
Tom Ray: And other ones just whatever. I’m not going to go into all of them. But yeah, and all of them did. I would have to create some sort of special Python script or I would just have to reconfigure VLC itself to do like some sort of playlist stream. But yeah, okay. And that’s using the metadata itself. Never even occurred to me. That’s genius.
Owen Williams: Yeah. And this is another thing where it’s like, I really wish we had more radio people because people have said like, oh, you know, I can’t use it for my real radio station because you don’t have, you don’t have a proper VU meter. That’s like broadcast not accurate, but, like displaying the right levels. Like, I can’t. I need to know if I’m clipping over my actual radio station, like the
Tom Ray: lufs or whatever the new unit of measure is.
Owen Williams: Yeah, yeah, yeah. And it’s like, I would. Or, you know, there’s no, no reason we couldn’t do, a whole sample bank for your, Whatever the buttons you push to make the funny sound effects or whatever, like stuff that People.
Tom Ray: The morning zoo stuff.
Owen Williams: Yeah, exactly, exactly. I think we have a skin with 64 samplers in it. So like you could hook that up.
Tom Ray: Really?
Owen Williams: A device. Yeah. so it’s like. Yeah, I’ve always dreamed of like. Oh, the, the. The like make this do radio button for MIXXX which would be like we have, you know, we already have three different skins, but like, what’s the array? Like, you don’t need the waveforms and you don’t need the, the, the, the rate slider. But like, I really do need a good VU meter and like we could do, we could support that. Yeah.
Tom Ray: And I know that, Robin. Robin, over at Ardor was the one who helped spearhead the whole LUFs setup that they have. They have a LUFs export thing. I don’t know if looking at that library helps at all or if it’s a completely different thing, but they do have the, the export now where it actually measures it by the LUFS count. That’s specific for different streaming services.
Owen Williams: Got, it. So, so yeah, what we have is we have a, Again, part of our analysis of each track is determining a replay gain value that can target a LUFS value. So the intention there is you can scan all your tracks and if you just play them at unity gain, it should be the correct loudness. so that’s what I do when I’m playing out. and then you can tweak that because sometimes it feels a little off. But yeah, so we more do that on the analysis side and then don’t really track it on the output side.
Tom Ray: Gotcha. Okay.
Owen Williams: Other than a basic clipping indicator of like, you’ve, you’ve gone too high.
Tom Ray: Okay, now there are two things that you mentioned before, one being winamp and the other being there’s a skin that has the samples in it. So much like winamp, you guys do have it set up where there are skins. Tell me about how that design works and has that been part of it since the beginning, like being able to skin the software itself? Tell me about that for sure.
Owen Williams: Yeah, definitely. And definitely that’s part of its sort of early 2000s, history is like everybody did skins for their, for their software. I think frankly, it’s really hard to maintain three different skins with different profiles. and make sure that every time we add a feature, we have to add it three times in three different user interfaces, three different graphic designs. I think it would be easier for us to not have to worry about that anymore. but it is still an enjoyable part of the software and I think it just helps people feel. Make it their own. yeah, the.
Tom Ray: Have you seen too? I mean, probably it’s been around for a while, but you know how when you have audio, files that are on the Internet archive, you have the ability to switch to a winamp player. so with what you were saying, like, you know, making it feel their own and everything, like go there and you can still listen to winamp stuff. And winamp got relaunched and it’s something completely different now.
Owen Williams: And there’s actually on, on Ubuntu, there’s Audacious is a music player and there’s a setting in there to like use winamp skins.
Tom Ray: So that’s how I, I didn’t know that.
Owen Williams: Yeah, yeah, yeah. I still get my winamp joy every so often.
Tom Ray: That’s funny.
Owen Williams: Okay.
Tom Ray: And I. Oh, go ahead. You.
Owen Williams: Yeah, I was gonna say, yeah, for the, the, the, the m. I’d say, you know, if we’re talking about where MIXXX is right now, one of the things we’re doing is we’re doing a major rewrite of the user interface because the current one is written in a very old, language, an old markup language that we essentially invented for, that was invented for the software many years ago. Oh really? And it’s getting a little creaky and old and basically the library system that MIXXX uses has a new, better system for making user interfaces. So we are very slowly writing a new interface in that language. the advantage there is that can let us create versions of MIXXX that work on iPads and Android tablets.
Tom Ray: Oh, okay.
Owen Williams: Whereas right now that is not possible. but even in that rewrite, our, I think we’re still going to have Skinning. We’re going to like the first skin is going to try to make it look as similar as possible to the existing one. Nobody likes to open version three and then suddenly have it be completely different. and they’re like screw that, I’m going to keep on version two. but then we also want to have a new one that sort of shows off the stuff that you can do, like moving around individual elements and like, you know, customizable tool icons and things like that. Where now you can really make the thing your own because all these are just little pieces that you can rearrange as you want.
Tom Ray: Is this something you’re going to be working on in. I see that you got accepted in the Google Summer of code this year. So is that something that’s part of that or what are you going to be doing in the Google Summer Summer of Code? That’s hard to say. Google Summer of Code.
Owen Williams: Yeah, I am actually not aware of exactly which projects. I am a little removed from the day to day on the ground stuff.
Tom Ray: Okay.
Owen Williams: At that level. the. So, so QML is this rewrite we’re doing. it’s a very advanced system and it’s one of these things that’s really hard for students to like jump into. so you know, I are. We’ve had former core maintainers who start in as, as Summer of code students and then become, you know, ramp up from there. But I had a friend who sort of was saying, okay, so the student has the whole summer to work on this thing. You want to pick a project that is the type of thing that a core maintainer could bang out in a, ah, weekend. That’s the right level of difficulty for like a summer project. And QML is the type of thing that’s going to take the core maintainers years to do. So it’s a really hard. And you know, we can get pieces of that and submissions and help and we definitely need more help on that. But it tends to be more focused on individual features. an example is ah, a lot of people want it so when they hit the pause button that it sounds like a vinyl break, that the track sort of slows down with a, as opposed to just a hard stop. and for reasons of the engine that’s actually kind of hard to do and people have kind of hacked it into some controller scripts. But like that would be a summer of code thing where it’s like, okay, I’m just going to worry about like trying to get this vinyl break effect to work. and that type of submission.
Tom Ray: See I’ve always been confused and this is my own ignorance and also just because I could look it up, but I never have as to what Google Summer Summer of Code is.
Owen Williams: Sure.
Tom Ray: I see people get accepted to that all the time. I’m like, does that mean money? Does that mean people involved in Google are going to help you do it? Does it mean more people, less people? Yeah, I don’t. So what is that?
Owen Williams: Yeah, so this is, this is a program we have, we have purchased. Actually I was, I was checking out the website today. It’s like it only mentions 2014. We’ve done it essentially every year. Okay, a couple decades at this point. or at least 15 years. and essentially it is Google sponsors in terms of organizational capacity, money and then a fun sort of conference at the end of it. And as an open source project, you apply to Summer of Code and you say, hey, this is our project. Here’s our proposed projects that we would like help on. we think we would like. It’s basically sponsored summer internships for students. and so you know, we say here’s what we want to do. And then Google says, yes, you’ve been picked to participate this year. You get one, two, three students, how many ever it is. and then we as the project are responsible for mentoring them, bringing them up to speed.
Tom Ray: Okay.
Owen Williams: Choosing this, choosing the students, making sure that you know that they’re going to be good contributors, finding a good project for them and then tracking their progress as they work on that project over the summer. And they get paid. Ah, by Google. And there’s sort of like two milestones. yeah.
Tom Ray: Okay. So it’s like, it is kind of like an internship program but also with the, this is something to put on the person’s CV and they get real life experience plus they get paid. Okay, good. Okay. I wasn’t sure if that’s what it was. All right.
Owen Williams: Yeah. And as a project we hope that they will stick around and keep contributing. that doesn’t always happen. often they will do their submission, we merge it in and they sort of disappear forever. But you know, but they still have submitted something which is in the code and we have, you know, we have an improvement that we didn’t have before.
Tom Ray: Right.
Owen Williams: Then every so often they end up being an all star contributor that sticks around for many years.
Tom Ray: Okay, and now to round this up, the before you talked about how some of the things that get done, things that you find out and improvements you get and suggestions is through the community. Now a lot of open source programs talk about the community. Where is this community? I never know where it is. You guys know where it is because you’re all involved. So how would people get involved in the community?
Owen Williams: Well, you should go to our website, MIXXX with 3X’s.org and click on the get involved tab.
Tom Ray: Makes sense, I suppose.
Owen Williams: Yeah. We have a bunch of different places. I’d say the main user community is on a discourse forum. So it’s like an old style PHP forum with lots of threads. and that’s sort of where all the users talk to each other. That’s where they’ll share like, hey, I put together this crazy mapping for my for this controller. they’ll ask questions. A lot of like the first tier of support of like, trying to get MIXXX up and running because, yeah, all, ah, definitely, it can be a little awkward to get it working with your sound card correctly. which is sort of the pain of having to work on three different operating systems in many different, you know, platforms. Yeah. and then for. We also, have a Zulip chat server, which is similar to Discord or Slack. and that’s where the developers hang out. and it also has a lot of users on that. and that’s sort of the place that I’m on the most, looking at what people are talking about. We will ask for testing help. So, you know, we have. None of the core developers are on Macintosh, and right now we have some bugs that we’re trying to fix and we just like, need somebody with a Mac to just like, does this work? And so we’ll put out a call there, to look for help. And, people can have discussions and then there are the sort of hidden channels for the developers to talk amongst themselves about more, sensitive topics. so those two things. And then. What was I going to say? yeah, we have social media on, Mastodon and Blue sky where we just sort of post stuff. But, that’s more. That’s more announcements.
Tom Ray: Okay. And then one last thing. What do I know? I already gave away the Summer of Code thing. But what do you have coming up? What other things are happening that you, would like to mention that MIXXX has coming up?
Owen Williams: Yeah, I’d say, you know, we’re always. We’ve been doing a lot of work with STEM support. and this is. Oh, yeah, DJing with, you know, instead of lows, mids and highs, that you’ve got drum synths and vocals. and this is a format that’s been really pushed by the proprietary, DJ platforms. but there are tracks in these formats. And so we’ve got our own efforts to try to support that, which is sort of ongoing. It’s one of these things where, very often these companies will say, like, oh, we have a new open format. And you say, okay, exactly what do you mean by open? And they’re like, you can pay us money for a license for our proprietary library. And then. Yeah, this is the other. So you were talking about, how nobody has any music on their hard drive anymore. It’s all streaming. that’s a huge thing because all these DJ platforms that support streaming.
Tom Ray: Oh, yeah.
Owen Williams: as soon as you turn that on, suddenly the record my MIXXX Button turns off.
Tom Ray: you are.
Owen Williams: You can’t. The, the licensing is such that you’re not allowed to record a MIXXX created with the things you’re streaming. they’re all proprietary. personally, as a dj, the idea of relying on a hotel WI fi Internet or a club wi fi Internet connection for the tracks that I’m going to play in front of, you know, 200 people is mortifying. So I, you know, it’s not interesting to me. But we can’t. There’s no legal way to make it work and we do not want to. We’re not going to be doing anything where we’re just like bypassing copyright. That’s like, that’s not a thing that we do.
Tom Ray: Yeah.
Owen Williams: things that we’re working on. So. Yeah. So a lot of STEM support. the big graphics rewrite I mentioned, is ongoing and then sort of a personal project that I’m helping, mentor and oversee is, updates and rewrites to the Vinyl Control setup. so this is everything old is new again. there’s been a lot of resurgence of interest in vinyl control. And this is another thing that I helped work on when I started and I wrote a lot of bad code. and people finally noticed. and we got somebody who is, some sort of mathematician who understands, the signal processing involved in how these things work and was able to dive into this old code and, and come, up with some incredible improvements. in Vinyl Control, there is a thing you want to avoid which is called sticker drift. And this is the idea that when you’re scratching back and forth, you know where the beat is. you know, hip hop DJs and vinyl and turntables DJs, they’ll put up a little circular sticker on the record, like, here’s the beat. And the idea is, okay, that it’s always there. And with the signal processing there’s a little latency, there’s a little noise, there’s a little inaccuracy. You’ll be doing that and you’ll notice that the beat is kind of traveling around the record. And what used to be where that sticker is, now the beat’s actually a little later. and this is not acceptable if you’re going to be doing scratching, you need to know that the thing is where it’s supposed to be. And so this new contributor has been, really working hard to get the math right so that that sticker stays locked in. so we really want to. That’s just sort of these side things where it’s like, hey, this is what this person’s interested in. No product manager at a company would say, you know, what we need to do is get vinyl control working really well. Like, it’s just not a thing they prioritize. The thing they prioritize is how do we sell more controllers next year.
Tom Ray: Right.
Owen Williams: But here, this is somebody who. And I. And I, you know, that’s how I got my start. So I would love for it to work better.
Tom Ray: No, I love hearing that even with all the years that we said, even before you and I knew about MIXXX itself, that it is still working to make improvements and still, update to do new things, work with new software. I think that’s super cool. And if people wanted to check out more about you yourself and MIXXX where could they do such.
Owen Williams: Yeah. So, yeah, mixxx.org, i’d say. Yeah, the discourse. website is sort of where, you know, where most people are hanging out. my. Yeah, my stuff. I do have a mixcloud. it’s. You can decide whether we could. You could decide whether to include this or not. Pretty much all of my deejaying these days are, at furry conventions and club nights.
Tom Ray: Nice.
Owen Williams: And, some sort of fetishy club nights. So, the material is not totally safe for work. and we’re all adults here.
Tom Ray: That’s fine.
Owen Williams: Okay, great. Yeah. I don’t know. I don’t know how much of a.
Tom Ray: No, this. No, this is the Internet. I’m not. I’m not censoring anything.
Owen Williams: Great, great. Yeah. So my. My sort of performance website is Huxley Dog. okay, so H, U, X, L, E, Y dot dog. That’s the website. it is, unfortunate that I picked that name before I found out that there is a more famous electronic producer named Huxley.
Tom Ray: Oh, get out of here. Really?
Owen Williams: Yeah, it’s really, you know, it’s too bad. So I always try to make sure to differentiate strongly. So I usually put parentheses for after all of my bookings so that nobody gets confused and thinks they’re hiring some guy from the uk. yeah, so far it hasn’t been a problem. Okay, Huxley. Don’t sue me. I didn’t know. Hey.
Tom Ray: As a guy who had to put an apostrophe ‘S’ on his band name to not be sued, but I blatantly ripped him off, to begin with. So Lorenzo Music was the person that I copied because I saw the name in the credits of the Bob Newhart show. Even though I knew that he was a voice of Garfield and all that we named ourselves that. He lived in, Chicago, and we had been touring in Chicago at the time, and his lawyer contacted us and was like, hey, he’d like to get a copy of your cd. And I was like, oh. We were thinking of changing the name to Lorenzo’s Music, because that’s what we really meant, and we did, and I never heard from him again. So I get it, is what I’m saying.
Owen Williams: So so far, it hasn’t been a problem. Again, I tried to make the branding extremely clear and say, like, not the more famous actual producer. Like, I don’t. I don’t want to be. Yeah. But I also, like, this is a name. This is a Fursona name. And so this is kind of like an identity thing. So it’s not just, like, an artist name I can just sort of get rid of.
Tom Ray: Right?
Owen Williams: Yeah. yeah. But, yeah, that’s. That’s where my stuff, and I post mixes all the time. Yeah.
Tom Ray: Okay. Nice. All right, well, I want to thank you so much for talking with me today. This has been fantastic.
Owen Williams: Yeah, thank you so much for having me. This has been delightful.