I’m going to talk about blogging in 2 hours, better publish a blog post…
One of my friends and listeners is showing some interest in learning how to DJ on #ds106radio and asked me for a “Mixxx cheat sheet.” So of course I dusted off Joe’s Fork of the Mixxx Documentation (Good Bits Version). And eventually realized that’s not a cheat sheet.
And then I realized that there is in fact an “easy button” for getting started with Mixxx. And here it is.
As already described, get a copy of Mixxx and have it ingest your local collection of audio files.
In the left sidebar, go to the Playlists item and right-click to Create New Playlist. Give it a name. (Or accept the New Playlist default; I’m not the boss of you. But if you do this twice you’ll probably want to give it a name. Actually, naming conventions should be a whole nother post.)
Oh, look at that. Right under Create New Playlist there’s an option for Import Playlist. So if your local music player will export an M3U file, the real cheat sheet version is probably “make your playlist in the player you already know, then export it and import to Mixxx.” I have learned that Apple Music and Mixxx don’t handle diacriticals the same way, so you will need to proofread, but it might be less fiddly.
But because I literally just now figured this out, I generally go to the Tracks item in the sidebar and do some combination of browsing and searching to find the tracks I want. You can add tracks to playlists with drag-and-drop or by right-clicking to get the Add to playlist option in the popup menu.
The little headphones-and-play-button icon to the left of each track is a very helpful preview button, as you’re trying to decide which track to pick and how they fit together.
Now here’s the fun part. I love spinning my stacks of wax live, but it’s also where most of the stress and almost all the human error is introduced. For cheat sheet purposes, the next step might be to right-click your playlist and choose Add to AutoDJ Queue. (“Replace” is probably the best cheat sheet option; I’m sure you can figure out how “bottom” and “top” work.)
AutoDJ will handle the mixing for you. If you’re really into DJing, you might set intro and outro cues and really think about how tracks will fade into each other so it sounds awesome. But this is a cheat sheet, so let’s just put that on the “someday maybe” list. What I do is to set AutoDJ to play the Full Track, and set the transition time to -1 seconds. If I’m honest 0 would be fine for making sure tracks don’t overlap in ugly ways, but -1 ensures there’s always a breath between tracks.
So if your AutoDJ’d playlist sounds good, the last step would be to get the settings for Live Broadcasting from one of your friendly neighborhood DS106ers. (No, I’m not gonna post a screenshot of those here.) Then you tell people to tune in, check for the unlikely event that someone else is using the stream, and hit the On Air button in the upper right corner.
Ta da, you’re a DJ!
