DJing with Ubuntu: a broad discussion

[mathieu-mgkgroup]

Hi all.

I DJ around my university's campus, and recently my house was robbed. I've used ubuntu my entire life until I got to college and went for the nice discounts on the macs we have. So, when I had my mac (before I was robbed) I would DJ using ableton live and an apc40, because you could essentially create your own effects etc. and map them however you wanted, which I liked a lot.

Fast forward, my house is robbed and I need a new laptop.. I get a new asus g-series.. wonderful laptop. I can't stand windows and refuse to acquaint myself with windows 8 especially, so I install ubuntu 13.04 and feel right at home. Like I said, up until college I've used ubuntu since 7.04.

I want to install ableton 9, it says it works perfectly on the wine appDB but it starts throwing me errors (if you're knowledgable you can read about here)and the comments on it say that the latency is really high anyway, so I'm saying it's a no-go right now. I've figured out how I possible could DJ with a suite of jack applications in the same way I would DJ with ableton, the only issue I run into is I can't find a "clip-launcher" application (essentially a way to create a playlist on the fly and launch (play) them from a MIDI controller).

So I wanted to ask a few things and just see if we can get a discussion going:

a) I know about Mixxx and have used it in the past, my biggest complaint is it's massive lack of (preinstalled) effects. Is there any place to get more effects for it? A flanger is nice, but, I don't think I've ever really used one during a live set.

b) Is anyone around here a DJ? Have you DJ'd with linux at all? What is it like? What do you use?

c) Is it possible to trigger things via midi with jack? For clarification, take Calf for example, say I have a reverb effect, is it possible to toggle it on and off with a midi controller?

d) Can anyone point me to some documentation/tutorials for jack/midi programming? I'm not the best programmer, but I can fiddle around and see if I can get a basic program to act as a sort of clip launcher.

Thanks!

[Bucky Ball]

Thanks for letting me know about this thread. Hopefully they'll be some input soon. Good luck.

* PS: While not a solution, this is of some interest and might get some cogs whirring:

http://forum.renoise.com/index.php?/...nder-linux-os/

[mathieu-mgkgroup]

I've never even heard of renoise! Seems like an amazing piece of software! I found a short video of someone using it to perform live.. seems really simple to use!

[Bucky Ball]

I've never even heard of renoise!

Me either. Looks a breeze. My first thought was there was plenty of action coming from that hardware rack, but poster says that is all Renoise, bar a little tweaking toward the end with a hardware effect!

* And this looks like a complete rundown of getting it working with 12.04!

http://forum.renoise.com/index.php?/...s-x-to-ubuntu/

And bingo! Linux sys requirements from the Renoise site itself:

http://www.renoise.com/system-requirements

Further to that:

http://forum.renoise.com/index.php?showtopic=15213

And lastly:

http://tutorials.renoise.com/wiki/Li...#Prerequisites

I want! And at $83AUD I intend to have soon, but pointless until I have the time to play with it, which I don't have at the mo ...