MrPopinjay's xwax Setup :)
MrPopinjay's xwax Setup :) Posted on: 10.12.2012 by Kiyoko Wellisch My setup has changed (slightly) for the first time in a year and a half so I figured I'd make one of these threads So after fiddling with software for a year or so and occasionally mucking about with friend's vinyl setups I took the plunge and bought myself two super OEM turntables and a Numark mixer in autumn 2010 along with a Audio4DJ and some timecode records. I tried various different bits of software for a few months before discovering linux and xwax, the minimal open source DVS. xwax is the shit, you should check it out. Here's a picture of it from June 2011. Oh yeah, and I use Senny HD280 Pro headphones. I love them. Big, comfortable, really clear top end and insane isolation. I actually prefer them to the popular HD25-1 IIs A few weeks later I found an Ecler Nuo 2.0 in a pawn shop and snapped it up. I absolutely adore this mixer and after using it for a while not else I've got my hands on has felt quite as good. Easily the best cheapish 2 channel mixer you can get in my opinion The Numark M2 is sitting in a box somewhere. I really need to find a use for it. It's so pretty So in the last week or so an exciting new xwax feature has started development- generic midi controller support! Purely by chance a controller I own (the LPD8) is the first controller Mark decided to play with. (probably because it costs peanuts) So there it is, sitting on the right of my setup. (Also I'm using a friend's 1210 until I can be bothered to fix my other super oem) (haha, look how worn out those labels are! I'm amazed these records still track to be honest) I'm *really* enjoying having cue points. Back before I used xwax I had access to them but I never really used them, I wasn't competent enough simply mixing vinyl to be able to wrap my head around that layer but now I'm more experienced I'm having a blast. I am going a bit over the top though ;P The LPD8 itself is alright. It's got a few stupid flaws that stop it from being a really awesome piece of kit. Firstly the pads are not nearly sensitive enough, I fixed this by adding some electrical tape to the bottom of the rubber pad. Second the stock knob caps are way too small to use, I solved this by swapping them out for the knob caps from my old Korg NanoKontrol that some dickhead broke and never owned up to. Lastly the firmware sucks. There's no midi controlled LED feedback so I can't tell if a pad has a cue point on it, the three little mode change buttons don't sent a midi note themselves and the thing keeps forgetting what preset I used last time. I can't really do anything about that. I'm looking to get a better midi controller at some point. Most likely candidate is the very awesome looking Behringer CMD DC-1, assuming it ever comes out ;P So, whatcha believe? | |
| Kiyoko Wellisch 14.01.2013 | 16:9 720p just isn't enough horizontal screen real estate. with 1080p I can have two documents fit besides each other which would greatly increase my productivity when working on a laptop. And a larger resolution doesn't mean webpages are going to put more stress on a network, you're still designing the webpages for the lowest common denominator (most web pages don't even use all the horizontal in a 16:9 720p monitor). Hell I'd be annoyed if they decided to make everything wider since I'd have to continue to have one web page taking up my entire god damn screen. And even if you did proportionally make them wider I doubt the jump from 720p to 1080p (or even to 1800p) would really require you to use vectors instead of bitmap images, it's a pretty small jump. Hell, websites don't even use as many images as they do these days, it's all clean block colours and text. The difference is going to be absolutely minuscule. Streaming 1080p is now a normal thing, making images twice as large is not an issue :P |
| Tatum Ansaldo 13.01.2013 | You must have been terrified when broadband arrived |
| Jonathan Chiuchiolo 13.01.2013 | if all the other companies follow suit it means more data moving on the interweb, so that means the web slows down/ needs an upgrade of telecommunication networks and the current generation of loptops become worthless in the eyes of consumers... Next thing you know we will have to increase the wireless bandwidth increasing the radiation on earth causing a mass extinction of the human race... or so we thought until the dead begin to reanimate.. It will be bedlam on the streets and apple will be the sparrow that farted to start the whole chain of events... Now if you excuse me I going to take my meds... |
| Tatum Ansaldo 13.01.2013 | Massively improved screen resolution isn't a bad thing just because it's inconvenient for web designers. |
| Jonathan Chiuchiolo 13.01.2013 | the matte screen just costs $60 more , also 720p on an 11inch screen has a higher pixel density that a 20 inch 1080p and when you increase the pixel density you decrease the size of everything on screen or force the use of vectors for design, just another reason why apple suck as they threw a spanner into current web design principals /rant |
| Tatum Ansaldo 13.01.2013 |
Originally Posted by MrPopinjay
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| Kiyoko Wellisch 13.01.2013 | Wow that's a powerful little machine! (ew glossy screen) Personally if I was going to sink a load of money into a laptop I'd get a Thinkpad. I'm a bit of a fanboy. I really hope the x240 has a 1080p screen, it's shocking that laptops are still ~720p, especially when you believe about the pixel density you get on phones and tablets.
Originally Posted by fullenglishpint
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| Jonathan Chiuchiolo 13.01.2013 | If you like small laptops that don't steal the show I don't believe you can look past this clevo laptop... It's a poultry 11 inches (the same form factor of a netbook) but has a real i7 third gen processor with upto 16 GB of 1833mhz RAM and a 2GB GDDR3 VRAM GT650 Video card, the best thing is it is fully customisable to suit whatever specs you need/want ... The thug is a bight sized little beast and definately worth a look if you are in the market for a new DJ laptop.. This is the Australian OEM version, but they are sold throughout the world from horize, sager, metabox etc... http://www.metabox.com.au/W110ER-features.asp |
| Tatum Ansaldo 13.01.2013 | Thanks for such a detailed reply! |
| Kiyoko Wellisch 13.01.2013 | You can run a OSX or Windows within a Virtual machine but you'd take a massive performance hit and introduce a shit load of latency, it's not idea for performance software. There's also this incredibly piece of hoodoo voodoo called WINE (which stands for WINE is not an emulator). It's a 20 year old project that amazingly translates Windows system calls into Linux ones (or OSX ones if you're using the OSX version). It's an absolutely insanely impressive project IMO, they have to reverse engineer every single bug in the Windows sysem. I used to use it to play games and sometimes I actually got better performance with WINE than natively on Windows. Still, configuring it is always an incredibly painful experience which some times just doesn't work. There's some projects like playonlinux and crossover which give you a friendly front end for WINE which is awesome but it's still not perfect and I really wouldn't want to use WINE for anything like performance software where stability is the most important factor. There's also a really new project that does the same for OSX applications but it's not anywhere near as mature and powerful. Dual booting or using native alternatives is the way to do it, though I doubt you'd be happy with the native alternatives. The performance software is all pretty sparse and we have no alternative to rekordbox... Though I believe someone should try and reverse engineer the Pioneer and Denon waveform data + cue point + loops + playlist systems so we can have one application that can format USB sticks for them both at the same time. That'd be awesome. It'd be even better if everyone adopted one open format but I doubt Pioneer and such would be up for that as it wouldn't really make any profit for the company. |
| Rebbecca Fennell 12.01.2013 | i used to have a laptop with linux ubuntu on it, i dont believe there were any virtual machines but part of the installation offers an option for partitioning and setting up a dual boot. it was nice - linux for the internet, windows for ableton and serato. |
| Tatum Ansaldo 12.01.2013 | I have a question: With linux, is it possible to run windows/osx apps in virtual machines or emulators of some sort? That is to say, could you run SSL or rekordbox if you wanted to and had the right hardware? |
| Kiyoko Wellisch 12.01.2013 | Haha, thanks synthet1c! I've decided I don't like having a 15" laptop screen in my setup (and I certainly don't like going to see a DJ perform and seeing nothing but a glowing Apple logo). Imagine that super cool picture of a spider was a 6" screen with a simplistic and compact DJ UI on it, wouldn't that be so much nicer? There's plenty of cheap ( |
| Jonathan Chiuchiolo 09.01.2013 | Happy Birthday for the other day Bro! nice setup |
| Rebbecca Fennell 08.01.2013 |
Originally Posted by tekki
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| Kiyoko Wellisch 06.01.2013 | I don't believe I've seen it though there is a chance I watched it with my uncle when I was a kid. He loves that kind of thing. Yesterday was my birthday, one of my gifts was a pair of glow in the dark Serato vinyl, woo! They were slightly warped, boo! |
| Random X 06.01.2013 | Just to be on the sure side; are you a big fan of Kurosawa's "Hidden Fortress"? |
| Rebbecca Fennell 10.12.2012 | Just sold my ecler, very pleasing eq and those fat chunky knobs - I liked how I could adjust the eq placing my finger tips on top and twisting. Get really minute adjustments really easy |
| Kiyoko Wellisch 10.12.2012 | Dude if I had a steady income my setup would be a huge sprawling mess :P
Originally Posted by fullenglishpint
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| Tatum Ansaldo 10.12.2012 | The Nuo 2.0 is an excellent mixer. Great SQ and everything feels wonderful. Shame Ecler snuffed it. I like how your setup has everything you need and nothing more... the total opposite of mine! |
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