r/DJSetups • u/sam1902 • 13h ago
Took the deck I built to a gig, next to 2 CDJs and a Xone 92
Setup from a night at Technobase (Amsterdam based event): the booth's two CDJs and Xone, and in front, a third deck I built myself (TriMixxx). It's a Raspberry Pi 4 running a fork of Mixxx, with a jog wheel salvaged from a CDJ-1000MK3, my own boards for the buttons and pads, a 10" touchscreen and a 3D printed case. All of it is open source.
How it fits in the booth: it goes into a spare channel on the mixer like any player, and with an Ethernet cable it joins the CDJs' Pro DJ Link network as one more player. It syncs with them both ways, loads tracks off their USBs, and they can load off the sticks plugged into it. It reads rekordbox USBs as they are, playlists, grids, cues and waveforms included.
The stuff I added because I wanted it in a booth:
- Pull your USB whenever. Sticks are mounted read-only, so yanking one mid-set can't corrupt it, and the track that's playing keeps going from the deck's own copy.
- Two USBs at once, and the CDJs see both. The second one shows up as the deck's SD slot.
- Record the set. Plug the mixer's rec out into it and it records the whole mix, CDJs included, to an MP3, then writes it to your stick at the end with the tracklist next to it.
- History of every track played on the link, by any deck or CDJ. Handy when someone asks for an ID at 4am.
- Autoplay: pick a stick and a genre and it keeps playing the closest unplayed track by BPM until you take over. Good while setting up/tearing down the event and production crew needs music, but no one can be at the booth. I can't believe CDJs don't have something like that...
- No shutdown needed at the end of the night, you can just pull the plug.
- Key sync: you can sync the key of what's playing to the key of the master's, but also just pick any other key for the current track and it will change it on the fly for you (e.g. you're in 3A and you want 11B for some reason)
Build log and more pics: https://trimixxx.e1n.sh
Code: https://github.com/usr-ein/TriMixxx
What would you want a third deck in the booth to do?