Category Archives: AudioAssignments

AudioAssignments, Radio Show

Mixxx Cheat Sheet

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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.

AutoDJ Settings

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!

AudioAssignments, DS106, Radio Show

when we’re gonna hear that song

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Well, the great Alan Levine left the right comment on the last post. He asked when’s the next one?

So I’m going to dust off a really old draft and find some way to hit publish on it.

I’ve been having a lot of fun DJing on DS106 Radio. (Usually Friday nights, usually 7 PM-ish Eastern US time.) It’s a free-form, live streaming station originally set up to broadcast the audio creations of the DS106 digital storytelling class/community. “Free-form” sounds pretty artistic, but what it really means is that at any given time, someone might be playing tunes, talking with friends, experimenting with different ways to capture and broadcast sound, playing a produced story, or all of the above.

OK, it really really means “we’re making it up as we go along.” One time on Twitter I said that DS106 Radio is kind of like walking down a dorm hall in college and hearing that your friend has a cool album on with the door open. This is the part I like best – the chat about music (or whatever sound or story is going on) that happens on social media while someone’s on the air.

So this is the post where I say some things about how I broadcast. I won’t represent that this is the best way, and it’s certainly not the only way, but it’s the one which works for me, for the purpose of playing music.

Step 1: Have an idea

I think this is the biggest hurdle. You have to believe that you have an idea which, at a minimum, will entertain you for as long as it takes to prepare and play it. My friends seem to like either what I play, or the fact that I’m playing it. But just in case no one tunes in, I might as well be having a good time.

Here’s the good news: anything is an idea. “I want to play this album all the way through” is a nice easy one. “These are some good songs I’ve heard recently” is a good one. Many of my playlists start that way. I have a standing Thursday night card game, and I usually have my iTunes either playing an album or on random shuffle, and whatever song makes me think “oh I haven’t heard that in a while” becomes the tent pole for the show on Friday.

My show doesn’t have a predictable genre, so a genre set is an idea. (My “idea” from Thanksgiving to New Years is “Christmas songs.”) Recent musician birthdays and deaths work well. I’ve had some fun with keywords – I did a St. Patrick’s Day set that was just a search for the word green.

(I have an open challenge from a friend to “rock around the clock” – a set full of songs which reference the time of day. This one has stumped me but I’d welcome your suggestions in the comments.)

Step 2: Get a big collection of MP3s.

Status bar from Apple Music reads "7,485 items, 20.5 days, 51.80 GB"
Mission accomplished

This is not a requirement; it’s just how I do it. I do have a cheap turntable I can use for a “vinylcast”, and I know how to get the audio from a streaming source on the air. But most of my listening is based on digital files on my hard drive, and most of my broadcasting is too.

I know it’s a little weird to talk about virtuous consumption and pirate radio at the same time, but the fact is, artists make a lot more money when we buy their works than when we stream it. So this choice is important to me.

Full disclosure: I do end up spending something between $2 and $20 per show most weeks, depending on whether I’m buying singles or springing for whole albums. (Honestly $20 is rare, but $10 isn’t.) So it’s a little unclear if this is a hobby, or a habit.

Step 3: Get a copy of Mixxx

Why Mixxx? Because it’s free. Yeah, at the end of the day, that was my whole thought process. I didn’t know if this was going to stick, and I didn’t want to spend $70 on Audio Hijack and use it once. Anything Icecast-compatible should work.

Mixxx is imposing to look at. Definitely from the “more buttons is better” school of interface design. Explaining Mixxx is also where this post has consistently ended up in the drafts folder, so maybe I just need to promise that I will do a more specific “here’s how I make Mixxx work” post so I can hit publish on this thing.

If I had one major gripe with Mixxx, it’s that I keep thinking that all those buttons and especially dials would be easier if I bought a hardware controller. (Dials are awesome in analog but really suck with a mouse.) I’ve resisted so far but…

Step 4: Make a playlist

The next step for me is to create a new playlist and start dragging songs onto it. This is technically about the same as doing it on Spotify or Apple Music or probably any other digital music player, and conceptually the same as using a double-deck boombox to make a mix tape.

Mostly, I spend a lot of time previewing the starts and ends of songs to see how they’ll go together. Probably the next thing I could do to get better would be documenting songs that could be shorter – noodley intros and outros, long chunks of applause or banter on live tracks – so I could mix around them.

I also try to keep an eye out for the maudlin section which gets into most of my playlists. Three sad songs in a row is pretty much my limit. Well, it’s not my limit, but it’s the limit of what I want to inflict on my friends and an unsuspecting public. (My friends, really, should know the sentimental fool they’re dealing with.)

Step 5: On the Air

Then, for me, I go live and play it. I like doing this in real time, dragging tracks from the playlists to the decks and deciding when to hit play. I like announcing in real time too. For me, the Friday evening show is a ritual, and I want the focus of the live event.

That said, Mixxx has an “autoDJ” feature which will run through a playlist on its own, and I’ve found it useful when I want to broadcast but also split my attention. And I’m impressed by eLearning Techie, who prerecords her entire shows, and broadcasts them free of technical or verbal flubs.

OK, that’s enough for now. I will try to have the “seriously, how do you make Mixxx work” post together in less than another 3.5 years (which is how long this one sat in draft).

Assignments, Audio, AudioAssignments, AudioAssignments36, DS106

There goes the last DJ

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I agreed to give a mini-workshop on podcasting on Wednesday, to force myself to learn more about Audacity. Creating a bumper for DS106 Radio seemed like a good way to get started, and it’s a manageable amount of work for a 20-minute demonstration.

Here’s the thing, followed by how I made it:

First, I wanted to know what I’d be saying. The old Outer Limits opening came to mind – “we control the horizontal, we control the vertical.” That speaks a little to the “own your tools” ethos of DS106.

But if “we” control it, that suggests that “you” (the listener) doesn’t. And that doesn’t sound very DS106 at all.  So I rewrote it, for a participatory audio culture, to be “Radio DS106 – You control the gain; you control the Auto-Tune.”

Then I went hunting for an audio track to mix in. A search for “sci-fi” on CCMixter turned up a track called “Space Station Melody” by a member called Gurdonark. (For a 15-second bump on a non-profit radio station, you could probably make a fair use argument for whatever you wanted to sample… but it’s also a chance for me to model searching for Creative Commons-licensed material for my faculty.)

It’s kind of funny, come to think of it… the futuristic pinging of Space Station Melody is more reminiscent of the pizzicato opening of The Twilight Zone than the dramatic strings and horns of The Outer Limits.

Anyway, I recorded into Audacity, imported the Space Station Melody MP3, and arranged the voice track to the point in the music where I wanted it to start. I brought the volume of the music down a hair while I was talking with the Envelope tool, and used the Fade Out filter to get out. (And then trimmed off the end of the music.)

I owe a link of thanks to Nicky Memita for her post on this assignment, which was quite useful as I navigated Audacity’s imposing list of filters and effects.