Years ago, I DJed an annual surf contest. At the time, I couldn't find any
decent, reliable DJ software, so I wrote my own in 3 weeks. The interface was
simple -- I used telnet to connect to my "djserver" program and I would issue
it text commands. Most of the work writing it involved making sure that the
sound would never, never, NEVER underflow and pop. I did that with careful
threading, careful buffering, and a realtime-priority thread keeping the sound
hardware's output buffer full. I could rip new CDs, encode MP3s, etc. on the
machine, and the sound would never be affected. (And this is with circa-1998
hardware!)
I could give it individual songs to play, and I could also add and remove
playlists. However, my handling of playlists was different than Auto DJ's...if
there were no individual songs scheduled to play, it would pick a random song
out of the totality of loaded playlists. Removing a playlist would take all
those songs out of consideration for random selection (unless some of its songs
appeared in other loaded playlists, of course). And it would try to play songs
that hadn't been played as often -- I gave it a minimum percentage of the total
songs available to consider for random selection, so that already-played songs
would only be considered if the total number of available songs dropped below
that minimum. That would tend to keep more-often-played songs out, but would
allow them in so that it wouldn't just play all the songs in the same order.
In Mixxx, it seems like this could be implemented by allowing crates to be
added to the Auto DJ queue, but as whole entities. If there are no individual
songs in the Auto DJ queue, a song will be picked at random from the loaded
crates, with the above-described de-prioritization of already-played songs.
Any thoughts on this? I intend to implement this sooner rather than later, if
I can keep finding the time and energy to work on this, since it's mostly how I
intend to use AutoDJ. I won't be DJing ultra-hip ravefests any time soon; I'll
be doing pedestrian stuff like birthday parties, happy hours, and car shows.
Steven Boswell
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