Load songs directly from Audio CD

[pekinin]

Hi, is possible to open with mixxx AudioCd songs without rip it before? (directly from CD) This is an useful feature and would be an interesting option to emulate a real CD players (like the CDJ100 and others ...)

If this is not possible and one of the Mixxx developers reads this forum and saw what could be added to the roadmap, I think it would be an interesting option.

Thanks for everything.

PS: If this option is implemented, read tittles the CD Text or from CDDB are an option that would be much appreciate. Greetings!

[Gidskid]

why would you want this feature? surely its lighter on your computer to just play from the hard drive. I thought the beauty of mixxx was you could play mp3's. If you just want to play cd's why not just get a denon or a pioneer?

[pekinin]

For various reasons:

- Price
- Versatility
- High Quality audio
- An Audio-CD is a 'standard' to share music in radio stations or pubs...
- Adding two CDROMs to a computer increase the price in 60$
- Use the same 'infrastructure' (mixer, cables...) for MP3, OGGs etc... and for Audio-CD

I see very interesting the option of read Audio CD, and use mixxx like a real DJ CD player (If some mixing effects are not available with audio CD... least one normal playback with pitch)

PD: Imagine you work in a pub and a customer brings you a CD to put his favourite song... or a local radio station with low budget to buy very expensive hardware...

[Gidskid]

It sounds like you want 2 cd players, a mixer and a laptop mate. I still don't understand why you want a computer to control a cd, for a start your pc would struggle running a lot of CPU power for a long time?

[pi r squared]

For various reasons:

- Price

Price is irrelevant. It costs nothing to rip a CD onto your hard drive.

- Versatility

You will need to elaborate.

- High Quality audio

An MP3 ripped at 320Kb/s is practically indistinguishable from a CD even when listened to through top-of-the-range equipment. If we're talking radio stations, where the audio is compressed for the FM band, or pubs, whose sound systems are rarely the highest of quality, you would not notice the difference at all. Plus, surely in a radio station, the "safety" of having the audio pre-ripped, compared to playing it "live" with risk of skipping, is surely worth a bit extra time?

- Use the same 'infrastructure' (mixer, cables...) for MP3, OGGs etc... and for Audio-CD

To be honest, this is the only good reason I can see.

If you want to play a lot of CDs then as others have pointed out, a real DJ CD player is the better alternative. CD-ROM drives are not designed to be as robust as DJ CD players and all the opening and closing of the drawer, spinning up and spinning down every four minutes, etc. will take its toll sooner rather than later. Further, you probably won't see the same precision from software CD players and certainly not the same "instancy" as you would from a proper CD player.

The best solution would be to have a ripping program running alongside Mixxx, and simply rip the audio off the CD and play it through Mixxx as normal.

[pekinin]

For various reasons:

- Price

Price is irrelevant. It costs nothing to rip a CD onto your hard drive.

The price concept is for the cost of a DJ CD player, not for digital audio (like MP3, OGG...)

- Versatility

You will need to elaborate.

The ability to play all in one machine or if someone can come with CDs

- High Quality audio

An MP3 ripped at 320Kb/s is practically indistinguishable from a CD even when listened to through top-of-the-range equipment. If we're talking radio stations, where the audio is compressed for the FM band, or pubs, whose sound systems are rarely the highest of quality, you would not notice the difference at all. Plus, surely in a radio station, the "safety" of having the audio pre-ripped, compared to playing it "live" with risk of skipping, is surely worth a bit extra time?

The MP3 quality is bad even at 320 Kbps. It cut the frequency of audio at 15-16kHz. By the way OGG at q=10 have a transparent quality and FLAC also.

- Use the same 'infrastructure' (mixer, cables...) for MP3, OGGs etc... and for Audio-CD

To be honest, this is the only good reason I can see.

If you want to play a lot of CDs then as others have pointed out, a real DJ CD player is the better alternative. CD-ROM drives are not designed to be as robust as DJ CD players and all the opening and closing of the drawer, spinning up and spinning down every four minutes, etc. will take its toll sooner rather than later. Further, you probably won't see the same precision from software CD players and certainly not the same "instancy" as you would from a proper CD player.

A CDROM is perfectly valid to read audio CDs, and hardware is now powerful enough to read errors and other problems

The best solution would be to have a ripping program running alongside Mixxx, and simply rip the audio off the CD and play it through Mixxx as normal.

Anyway, if you do not see play AudioCD useful, but not discussed more. From my point of view is useful, but... people only see the negative points...

[pi r squared]

The MP3 quality is bad even at 320 Kbps. It cut the frequency of audio at 15-16kHz. By the way OGG at q=10 have a transparent quality and FLAC also.

Rip in OGG, then, at q=10 if that's your issue. But it's ridiculous to say the quality is "bad" at 320Kb/s, especially when your two "outlets" (pub, radio) will batter the sound quality further anyway.

A CDROM is perfectly valid to read audio CDs, and hardware is now powerful enough to read errors and other problems

Didn't say it was invalid; said CD-ROM drives are not designed to be opened and closed, spinning up and spinning down constantly for a four or five hour session. A CD-ROM drive will give up the ghost long, long before a DJ CD player does.

Anyway, if you do not see play AudioCD useful, but not discussed more. From my point of view is useful, but... people only see the negative points...

I've said what is positive, but I can't see why you don't want to accept my suggestion of ripping to HD (in OGG format if you so wish) and playing in Mixxx via that method.

[Sitwon]

I would think it would be difficult to scratch from a CD without ripping it first. A CD drive just can't seek back and forth quickly enough for that. I assume that CDJ equipment must rip the CD into RAM and scratch the ripped audio data. If you're not gonna scratch, why not just connect to an external mixer and use a real CD player?

Ripping a track or even a whole CD doesn't take very long at all... so I would question NOT ripping it.

[adam_d]

Yeah, although this would be nice, the killer issue here is latency. Mixxx can do playback as fast as your system can handle, down to 2ms or so. There's no way a pc cd drive can spin up and seek in that kind of time so essentially you have to rip the thing first. While Mixxx could handle this internally it's never going to be as good as any of the dedicated apps. iTunes can be configured to rip to high quality mp3 automatically when you insert a cd into the drive, which makes the whole process very automatic.

And there's no frequency cut built into the mp3 format, it's encoder dependant, if you think your current encoder is making a bad choice then many of the command line ones allow you to configure the cut yourself.

[skizz]

I think everyone's missing the obvious point...

As far as I can tell, the ultimate goal is for mixxx to be a ready-for-primetime alternative to closed-source djing applications. If that's the case, then we'd have to make sure it's ready for all djing applications.

Sure, if you're a bedroom, studio, club, etc. DJ, then you'd obviously have all your music ripped to your hard drive ahead of play time. But, if you're a mobile dj, it's within the realm of possibility that your customer--or his/her dear aunt millie--might walk up to you with an audio cd to play.

If you have time to rip it on a second machine before you have to play it later in the gig, you'd do that... but if aunt millie wants to sign a song on that cd right then, and your client would be ticked off if you aren't able to help millie out--you can see why being about to play a track directly from a cd is useful... (we're not talking about scratching the music on the CD, but at the very least being able to play the track).

Also, this is a common feature of the other applications that the mixxx developers might be benchmarking their application against.

So, in the original poster's defense, this is a highly useful feature.



Skizz