Digital vinyl - up and running!

Quick post as I'm super-excited and about to spend the evening spinning some tunes. Following my last post[1] about my need to knuckle-down and understand ALSA, pulse-audio and JACK in order to get up and running with my digital vinyl via audio interface, I had a few frustrating days there searching around online for solutions, attempting different .asoundrc config files and various other config changes in Mixxx and Cadence or qjackctl until lo and behold, finally I stumbled across the correct configuration setup just this lunchtime, and excitedly got both my turntables feeding into Mixxx with the timecoded vinyl.

In the end I opted against running any GUI programme to run JACK, instead finding a simple command to work with my audio interface (Native Instruments Audio 8 DJ):

jackd -S -R -d alsa -p 64 -n 3 -r48000 --device dj_8 -i 8 -o 8

I've popped this in a systemd unit file for easy background spin-up.

Do I understand ALSA, pulseaudio and JACK any better? Possibly not.

Does it work? Yes.

Do I ideally want to know *how this works* beneath everything? Possibly, one day... for now I'm just happy it works.

One thing I'm noticing is how heavy going this can be to run alongside other RAM-draining applications (unsurprisingly!). The notable outcome being that activity on a web browser will cause music output to slow down and lag heavily. I'm running a 16GB-RAM laptop here so I'm lucky I've got enough hardware power - but even with this the discipline when using digital vinyl will be shutting down everything but jackd and Mixxx, perhaps just a few other terminal-based applications will be fine (SSH into my gemini VPS where I often idle via weechat-curses on tilde IRC(!)).

A picture of the kit up and running:

Turntables close-up (mixer brand 'gemini' ftw)

In the time I've been writing this post, I've been spinning some tunes in the backround from an old collection of digitised Motown I got off my uncle a few years back, and it struck me clear as day why I wanted this setup in the first-place: there is no frickin' way I'll ever have enough $$$ to have all the vinyl collection I'd like, certainly not many old classics that are great to spin and mix (currently listening to Marvyn Gaye: Let's Get it On). But here, with the digital collection I've been building up and saving across hard-drives for about 20+ years, from my original teenage CD collection through countless other free downloads, I've got the means to flow around *loads* of music alongside my actual vinyl collection, which will remain important to me (some records I've just *gotta* have on vinyl for the rich analogue quality).

This is great fun.

~ flow

I don't know JACK

Tags: #hifi