 Hey, it's Anfa. In this video, I want to show you Mix, an open source DJing program. I haven't been using Mix for quite a few years now, but I have played a few gigs in my life, so by no means I would call myself a DJ, not in the slightest. So please don't judge me on that front, okay? I want to show you the program because I think it's really interesting and basically it's a fully featured DJing environment that you can use to perform gigs. I assume you have already installed Mix, so I'm going to just run it. And this is like the first run, okay. So the first thing it says, it's wanting to know where is our music library. I have something, oh, that's that. There's some music we can work with. Okay, so that's the basic user interface. It has analyzed the library we have or read the metadata. There is no real metadata, so like, yeah. Okay, so this is the user interface. We have, by default, we have two decks. So we can just drag two tracks and we can play them. Now I need to first connect the outputs of Mix to my recording rig. So let me just do that. Mix outputs. Okay, okay, they go straight to the... All right, that should be good. So now I should be able to just play a track. Here it is. I can see that it automatically analyzed the beats per minute, the tempos of these tracks. And now we can also play the second track and crossfade between them. Now that's by no means a good mix or anything, but that's just a rudimentary tool. Okay, you have this crossfader and you can see we have two waveforms, which are stacked on top of each other and we have the beats displayed. So that should help us visually beat match the two tracks. You can also perform scratching either with this vinyl widget here, using your mouse, or by dragging on this waveform. And actually, I think that's one of the best ways to create believable scratching performances if you don't have an actual vinyl record player and you don't want to actually go down and make it for real, is by using Mix and just performing them with your mouse and recording the audio output. Okay, so we can play tracks. Now, what if we wanted to analyze maybe a bit more of these tracks? Oh, analyze. Oh, okay, let's analyze all. Select all and analyze. Okay, it's analyzing the tracks. So we should be able to find tracks that are in similar tempo. Oh, it even tries to analyze the key of the song. Wow, that's interesting. The user interface has changed a lot since I last used this program and that's for the better. Like, when I used it, it had like a few skins which were somewhere cool, somewhere less, but right now you can click this sprocket icon and you can like reconfigure the skin on the fly. You can have four decks if you want to play four instead of two. You can disable this parallel waveform view and just have them here. So I think that's a neat thing. You can disable the cover art displays. I don't have assigned cover arts for these tracks. They are working in progress, so nothing is displayed here. You can also show, oh, where is that? Oh, here are the stars. Okay, yeah, you can have the star rating and you can rate them. And there's also other things like you can have hot cues, eight hot cues or by default this one. Now, there's a very complicated keyboard mapping setup that you can learn and if you hover your mouse over anything you can see a shortcut. There's hotkeys for the crossfader up and down. I believe there's also, what is that? Oh, okay. So we can use H and G to move the fader manually. Let's see how that actually performs. I'm not sure if it performs some interpolation in the background so that this motion isn't as jagged under the hood as it is on the screen like, you know, and clicking this moving in quite big steps but maybe it's interpolating it a bit. I don't know, but it's possible to drive the entire program with just a regular PC keyboard if you learn the hotkeys. But I think that one of the best things about this program is that you can map the controls to a MIDI keyboard. And I have prepared all the rig to record my MIDI controller and we're gonna map some controls and try to perform something. Okay, let me get this prepared. Okay, so as you can see, I have a MIDI controller here. It's an Akai MPK Mini, Mark I. I don't have the Mark II. I know it's much better, but it wasn't a thing when I bought this. Okay, so first thing, let's map the crossfader. Now, what can you do? You can go to Options, Preferences, and here we have the screen. Maybe let's move this out of the way. And in here, we have a sound hardware, jack audio connection kit. Okay, what we can do is, okay, the outputs master by default system. So this is where your mix is sent. Headphones is your cue playback. This is very important. And when you actually want to play any DJ gig, you need a separate audio output to cue the tracks and listen to what you're gonna play without the audience hearing it. I'm not gonna be doing that. I'm not a real DJ, but when I actually played a DJ set, I did that. I had a separate audio interface just for playback and you can set it up here. Now there's a lot of other things you can do. You can like send every deck to its separate output. So you can either do post-processing with some other application later, like Carla or something, or record them in order or whatever. Now there is also input and you can have like vinyl control devices or you can have actual vinyl records with timecode encoded and you can spin them and scratch them and mix can pick that up and actually drive the virtual turntables with that. You can also have microphone inputs up to four mics. I'm gonna select my system mic and the input is channel one, which is this microphone right here. There's some other things. Oh, it shows our system latency nice. Whoa, I dragged it and it's changed. Okay. Wow, there's a lot of things added to it. There's library settings. This is where our music lives and there's controllers. Now I have two controllers connected to my heart, to my system right now. I'm gonna be using MPK mini. Let's enable it and now I'm gonna go enter the learning wizard. Your setting must be applied before starting the learning wizard applied settings. Yes, apply the settings. And now it shows us the MIDI controller learning wizard. How it works is we click on a control. It's selected crossfader. Now I want the crossfader to be on this little knob here. So I move the knob until the progress bar fills up and now it has learned. You can see that when I move my knob, the crossfader moves with it. There are some options. These are advanced options. So I'm not gonna be dealing with that. We are very simple right here. Let's learn another thing. Okay, so what I wanna do next is map these pads to stop and play individual decks. So maybe we could have like deck one could be these four and deck two could be these four. So maybe play and pause would be this deck. Let's try and do that. So, okay. Now this pad starts and stops playback of deck one. Let's learn the same one for deck two. I think something's not right. Oh no, it's learned fine. Okay, so now we can control two decks, the playback with these two pads, which is fantastic. Now you would want to maybe do some other things like tempo nudge to different pads so you can like speed up and slow down the track a little bit to align them together. Like there's a ton of things you could do. Maybe we could map the pre-game. Yeah, okay, where's the gain? This is gain, pre-fader gain for this track. Okay, so let's do it like that. Okay, so this is track one. Now we can affect the gain. Okay, let's map this one for deck two, sorry, no, track deck. And now we can adjust the gain of these two decks using these knobs, which gives us nice visual feedback so we can just eyeball if the levels are right. Actually, this is weird because I think the left track is much louder. Sorry, you can see how quickly I was able to configure this midi interface which isn't specifically designed for working with DJ performances, but I was able to use these pads and these knobs very quickly to control my DJing setup and mix the DJing software, and that's really nice. Now mix has a lot of features. I'm just gonna be done with this for now. Maybe let's just gloss over the other functions. There's so output mappings and scripts. You can script entire behaviors for the controllers so we could probably have the lights, flash, the, oh, I'm just playing it now. We could maybe have the pads flash because if you send a midi note to the pads, it they light up so we could possibly program a script to make the maximum out of that midi controller for mix to give us visual feedback. There's vinyl control. We don't have that interface as the skin. It's the visual skin. Okay, it's the user interface skin. Okay, there's a bunch of skins. I'm not gonna mess with them. If you install mix, feel free to check them out. This is the language full screen mode. Full screen mode is a good thing. Prevents screen saver from running. That's a good idea. You don't want screen saver too to start when you are playing a gig. Waveforms, this is settings for these things here, how they are being rendered, how they are being processed. I think the defaults are excellent because they show you both volume and frequency information. The color is determined by the frequency spectrum of the signal in the current place so that shows you the tone, I guess, and the Waveform, of course, shows you the volume. You can also change the frame rate. I guess 60 frames per second is the smoothest we can go. And also we can use surf to our rendering and hardware rendering, which is good. Dex, okay. Okay, there are so many settings here. You can really tune this to your needs. There's also the settings of the EQ, so you can, oh, there's also a master EQ, okay. So you can correct for the sound system playback just by, and you don't need any plugins. I'll reset equalizers on track load. That's a very useful thing. This is the, okay. I think I would like to mix with that or maybe not, effects. What is that? Oh, we can control LV2 effects. Wow, that's cool. Before, I would use external software like Karla to, this is Karla, to add special effects to my mixing, like control them via me, DCC, but now we could probably use these knobs to control these effects too. Oh, nice. Wow, this has really made a lot of progress. You can also, you can also like set up a live streaming through ice cast or shout cast, and you can also record your mixes right away and add metadata, okay, and TRB detection. I would ramp it up to like 90 to 190, actually 180. Yeah, that would be the range I would want to do. Okay, it even analyzes the keys, that's nice. Oh, and it can normalize to negative 18L UFS. Well, that's a very good level. Wow, multi-plug decoder. Wait, so it can play track, it can play trackers modules, it can play, whoa, very good. Whoa, that is awesome. You can straight away play your mod S3M or XM files with this. Wow, that's so cool. Oh man, okay. All right, so that's all. Thanks for watching. I hope you've learned something. If you have any questions, please leave them in the comment section below. Check out Mix, it's free and open source software. It runs on, I don't know what it runs on. Definitely runs on Linux and Windows. Not sure about Mac though. It's a wonderful piece of DJing software. And yeah, also big thanks to all the people who are supporting me financially. And if you, dear viewer, would like to join them and help keep this show going, please go to patreon.com slash ANFA or liberapay.com slash ANFA. I'll go and mix some music.