Linux Music Application

February 15, 2005 11:23 AM

Linux music-playing application with specific features needed [moencide].

So for some reason, I've been tapped to DJ my sister's wedding. I'm planning on having most of the music on a Linux-running PC as well as a plain old CD player hooked up to the mixer board.

I'm not looking to do any fancy beat-matching or mixing or anything. Just play a bunch of songs, and maybe cross fade some tracks. It would be good if I could find a Linux program that had most of the following features:

* Something like iTunes Party Shuffle (the "add songs to a live playlist and order upcoming tracks" bit, not the "random playlist" bit)
* A controllable software cross-fader. (Not something that just mixes the last 5 seconds of this track with the next 5 seconds of the upcoming track).
* A "pause the playlist when this track finishes" button, so that the CD player can be mixed in.

Google returns lots of results, but I'm looking for solid "I have tried this and can recommend it"s.

Also, since you're here AxeMe, what are some good wedding reception songs?

posted by Capn to computers & internet (5 comments total)

What kind of control do you need for the crossfader? Do you need it easily changable, depending on the track?
posted by zsazsa at 1:46 PM on February 15, 2005

Xmms does 1 and 3, and I suspect there'll be a plugin for 2, depending on how much control you want.

As for appropriate songs, I'd suggest Billy Idol's White Wedding, Radiohead's Punch up at a wedding and Ella Fitzgerald's Making Whoopee. Which explains why nobody would never ask me to play at a wedding.
posted by fvw at 3:28 PM on February 15, 2005

There are a few options out there. One of them would be XMMS, as fvw mentioned, but it may or may not do #2. Another would be AlsaPlayer. I've never actually used it, but I've looked at it in the past when browsing FreeBSD's Audio ports collection and it seemed impressive. Another would be amaroK, which is aimed more at KDE users than AlsaPlayer (which is GNOME-based).

If none of those fit the bill, and you don't see anything that strikes your fancy in the FreeBSD ports collection (most of which are actually developed originally for Linux anyhow), you can always look through freshmeat or SourceForge (which have a bit of overlap, but are still different enough to warrant looking in both places).
posted by ibidem at 4:04 PM on February 15, 2005

Debian's package search gives me the following:
xmms, as noted, does most of what you want.
mp3blaster does it all except crossfading, at first glance
dbmix can output to xmms, it appears, but is non-trivial to configure. I got this to work after a bit - it will do what you need but it's a bit of a pain. Take a look, if you have some time to learn, I would work with this.
pytone may also work, I'd take a close look at it.
for more sophisticated mixing, but an awful interface, see terminatorX or (I haven't used it) GDAM.

There are more links at linux-sound.org, of which mixxx seems the most promising.
posted by wzcx at 12:45 AM on February 16, 2005

In case anyone's searching this and was wondering how it worked out:

I ended up being short on time and was not able to set up anything super fancy. I used several instances of xmms each with a different playlist ("fast music" "slow dance" "silly music" etc) and used the "no playlist advance" setting in the options to stop a playlist when the current song ended when I wanted to switch playlists.

No crossfading or other fancy stuff, but it worked out fine.

Oh, and I patched the analog line-out from my Soundblaster Audigy Platinum right in to the mixer board and got a good clean sound.
posted by Capn at 11:39 AM on March 8, 2005