brunchboy/beat-link-trigger

Watch and react to Pioneer CDJs

whoman321

@whoman321

Hey bud! Hope all is well. Have you had a chance to test it out on the Raspberry Pi? No rush at all.. I'm sure you've got plenty on your plate already. Just checking in.

James Elliott

@brunchboy

You’ll be the first to know when I do, @whoman321! Unfortunately, last week was too busy, between work and the competetiveness my coworkers encourage in solving Advent of Code problems. I hope to have time to take out and set up the Pi this weekend, though, probably Sunday afternoon.

James Elliott

@brunchboy

Well, @whoman321, I finally had time to hook everything up, and I can confirm that Raspbian has the same probelmatic behavior as you have reported. I will try to dig a little bit deeper, but right now I am being stymied as I can’t seem to establish an nREPL connection from my development machine to the Beat Link Trigger process running on the Pi, which will make experimentation far more tedious. I’ll start installing some development tools on the Pi.

But what seems to be the case is that MIDI interface management works fundamentally different in Linux JVMs that macOS and Windows JVMs. So if you can help try to find a way around this, that will definitely speed things up. However, we would have to be very careful not to change the way it currently works on macOS and Windows, because I have many people using it for touring shows, festivals, and clubs today, and can’t risk breaking them. So for now the answer is going to be telling people not to try to use the built-in trigger MIDI features on Linux, and perhaps deprecating that OS family entirely.

James Elliott

@brunchboy

Well, I have Leiningen and the BLT source installed on the Pi, and am trying to bring it up in a REPL for more testing. I have some ideas about things to try. But Leiningen has been timing out because the Pi is not nearly as fast as my development machine (go figure! :wink:). I think I just figured out how to work around that.

James Elliott

@brunchboy

Ok, it has been very frustrating and slow getting anything testable, but I have already learned something very interesting and promising. The problem may be a lot easier to work around than I feared, because it seems to be simply that in Linux, midi-clj can’t find a device you are asking for when you supply the name that it gave for that device!

James Elliott

@brunchboy

Woo hoo, I think I have an answer @whoman321! It turns out all this time I’ve been calling the midi-clj functions wrong, because they behave in a way that is not idiomatic Clojure (they are pretty old, they were written when Clojure was new and best practices weren’t widely known). They treat input strings as if they were regular expressions, and so the brackets in Linux device names are making them not match. The more idiomatic (and developer-friendly) way for the functions to work would be to accept both plain strings and regular expressions as the target being searched for (regular expressions have nice, concise literal syntax in Clojure so they are easy to type), and then it could work either way. I may open a PR with midi-clj about this, although the only backwards-compatible way to do it would be to offer a new function that works this way and deprecates the old one. (While I’m at it, I might suggest they get rid of the midi- prefix on all their function names, that is also not idiomatic, the best practice is just to name the functions for what they do, and let people use namespace aliases to make it clear where they come from.) But that is a project for another day; for now I just need to fix the places that Beat Link Trigger is calling these functions to properly escape any regular expression special characters, and we should be able to get MIDI output selection working in Linux!

James Elliott

@brunchboy

I have verified that my proposed fix works on Raspbian, and have pushed it to GitHub. When you get a chance, could you download the latest preview jar at https://github.com/Deep-Symmetry/beat-link-trigger/releases/tag/v0.6.3-SNAPSHOT and see if it works for you too?

If this works, it’s definitely time to publish a new official release of BLT. I should have a while ago, there is some good stuff in 0.6.3.

whoman321

@whoman321

Yup it works! Thanks so much my man!

Eric Lindvall

@eric

does anyone know of an integration with BLT that runs Hue lights to the beat?

James Elliott

@brunchboy

I’ve not heard of anyone doing that, but if they have a reasonable API, it should be pretty easy. I’d encourage you to try, and I’d be happy to share your code in the user guide!

James Elliott

@brunchboy

@eric do you know if the Hue can be controlled with a local connection, or if there always has to be a round-trip to some cloud service? In the latter case, latency issues may make it not suitable for show synchronization. I wish I had one to try experimenting with. If anyone wants to loan me one I would tinker! :smile:

James Elliott

@brunchboy

Yes, it looks like there is a local LAN API we can use, so it would just be a matter of configuring information about your bridge and lights in the trigger or global setup functions, and then sending HTTPS requests in response to beats or whatever you like to control the lights. I am curious what they are using for their SSL certificate, since the bridge server isn’t going to have a valid public domain name, there may be some of the usual pain around configuring trust for a self-signed certificate. https://developers.meethue.com/develop/get-started-2/

Eric Lindvall

@eric

thanks

every time I open Beat Link Trigger I have to re-enable the abelton link integration. is there a way to make that happen automatically on start?

Eric Lindvall

@eric

I don't understand where I put the Came Online Expression

ah, here it is in the Triggers menu. sorry about that

Eric Lindvall

@eric

looks like I got it to work

James Elliott

@brunchboy

Great!

James Elliott

@brunchboy

I’m glad you were able to get what you wanted working, @eric. Did that include communicating with Hue bulbs yet?

James Elliott

@brunchboy

All right, I think it’s time to cut a release of Beat Link Trigger with all the little features and fixes that have accumulated over the last few months, before I dive into exploring supporting six CDJs for the newer hardware.

Maddix

@nmaddix

Someone just commented about https://www.prodjlink.com/ on a reddit post where I mentioned BLT. At a glance it looks like it just extracts the timecode and doesn't have any show functionality. Ever tried it?

James Elliott

@brunchboy

Someone on this chat might have. I personally have to be careful not to look at commercial offerings in this space, because they generally have very restrictive end-user license agreements which could interfere with my ability to continue to research, develop, and offer the completely free and open-source implementations that power BLT. Also, some of the companies in this area have been extremely unfriendly, litigious, and unpleasant in the past (I’m not saying this is one of them, I don’t know what that company is called any more or even if it still exists, I just try to stay far away so I can keep doing my thing).

James Elliott

@brunchboy

Sigh… not cutting the release tonight. I fixed one bug about reporting the wrong trigger number when there is an exception in an expression at load time for triggers other than Trigger 1, but then discovered that the search function is not working properly in the embedded user guide, which makes it really hard to use when not connected to the internet. I am looking for help on the Antora users channel, but don’t want to finish the release until that is sorted out.

James Elliott

@brunchboy

Hurrah! :tada: I got the search working in the embedded user guide again with the help of the author of that integration. And then I spent all of today rediscovering how very many of my own libraries go into Beat Link Trigger, and cutting the releases of all of them neeed to build each other so I can release Beat Link Trigger 0.6.3. But that is in process right now. I also updated the version of Ableton Link that gets embedded to 3.0.3.

James Elliott

@brunchboy

And it is finally released, just in time to be an end-of-year gift. :gift:

Kevinnns

@Kevinnns

That's awesome James! I've finally started trying to use BLT for what it's supposed to, so the new way of scrolling and zooming in the wave forms in the show interface are very welcome :)

Also; The Cue Libraries are a great way to easely re-use stuff, love that! That's what I get for never really diving into the Show stuff.

James Elliott

@brunchboy

That’s lovely to hear, Kevin!

sergioherculano

@sergioherculano

Hi Colleagues, I am aware the difficult to get data from Rekordbox but I know that can be difficult but is not impossible :) this is the picture of my setup. My goal is to achieve a better integration of my DJ Setup with Resolume and My Light Software/Console via MIDI / OSC Messages to resolume and MIDI Time Code to Vista Chroma-Q, today I am able to do that but in total manual way and I would like to have it in sync or controlled via CUES in sync with the music I am playing. Is there any other findings how this can be possible ? If not from which point do you recommend me to start if I decide to develop something in this direction ?

James Elliott

@brunchboy

If you are talking about rekordbox in performance mode, no, there is no reason to believe that will ever even be theoretically possible. It simply does not participate in a network with other devices or software in that way.

If you want to do that sort of thing, use rekordbox in export mode, with controllers that participate in a DJ Link network.

James Elliott

@brunchboy

The IP communication between rekordbox and that controller is interesting, though. If you have been able to find out anything usable in it, that would be very interesting. Are you familiar with our detailed analysis of the IP protocols that make up Pro DJ Link?

Kevinnns

@Kevinnns

@brunchboy I was looking at that as well and thinking: What would happen if you were able to spawn BLT on a Virtual IP/Nic in that same network?

But then I remembered: Rekordbox takes all

That binds to *

James Elliott

@brunchboy

And we have no idea at this point what the content of that communication is; it may be, for example, just pixels for the display or something. Someone would need to do all the analysis we did of the DJ link traffic to see if anything useful can be found, and if there is any way to join in. Since it is probably a purely point-to-point pairwise interaction, I personally doubt anything usable will be found, but I would be delighted if someone proves me wrong and spawns a sister ecosystem of projects to work in that world.

They would probably require promiscuous traffic capture, because of the pairwise nature of that communication, which would make them more complex and risky, of course.

sergioherculano

@sergioherculano

I checked some documents of Pro DJ Link that you made, to capture this communication of this controller I used WireShark, is this the best approach ? Which are the recommendations ? I would be very happy to collect all information and share here.

First think I noticed was this USBLAN that I did not heard about before, it seems that the DDJ-RZX behaves as a Network device, them I installed WireShark to inspect the communication of the controller and Macbook services and I noticed that the commuication happen in ports 50000 50001 similar what I saw in the Pro DJ Link documents found in Github.

If you give me some information I am willing to provide more data about it in the way we can analyze it.

Sérgio

sergioherculano

@sergioherculano

I just did a short capture while I am mixing in RZX with Rekordbox in Performance mode, it was made in Wireshark with Promiscuos mode on, besides that I also took the files and ports that are being used by Rekordbox and Rekordbox Agent Apps in the Macbook. The results are stored in Google Drive, I saw that there are several messages with Display Information to be send to RZX but there other thata I can't understand so far. https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1nt38rxClVHUBn88EPbFN37QnHrFiGD4V?usp=sharing

James Elliott

@brunchboy

That sounds like the right approach. I don’t have any real recommendations other than, study the captures, see if you can figure out meanings and patterns, then test and explain and share them. That’s how we got as far as we did today. I probably won’t be able to help myself, because it’s frustrating to try to analyze things without actual access to the hardware, but the world will definitely appreciate any discoveries you can make. All the information I have to give is already published, and it sounds like you have seen it.

sergioherculano

@sergioherculano

@brunchboy Thanks for the input, I will check gain the packet detail information you prepared, anyway looking what I got from RZX so far it seems to be different values what means it will be a big work to analyze and have some results.

What I could recognize is that in the side of RZX they are using 6 Ports (49434, 49435, 49436, 49437, 49438 and 49439) and in the side of Rekordbox (49123, 49124, 49125, 49126, 49127, and 49128) the first RZX port communicate with the first of Rekordbox and son on.

Other thing is that the packets starts with 2 different patters:
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1KpHGKSU7a-ttrNpDyXU1_Laod1iK7voL/view?usp=sharing

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1KxhKckbVFf6cbUtflcYqJGuaARgQE-lK/view?usp=sharing

What is similar what you figured out in Pro DJ Link.

Let see what I can find :)

Sérgio

James Elliott

@brunchboy

That’s exciting! Best of luck, and if you have any theories that need help thinking about, or feel stuck about something, people here might be able to bounce ideas around.

sergioherculano

@sergioherculano

First and very simple to conclude, the first part represents the direction of communication flow:

192.168.110.1 -> 192.168.110.254: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1KpHGKSU7a-ttrNpDyXU1_Laod1iK7voL/view?usp=sharing

192.168.110.254 -> 192.168.110.1 : https://drive.google.com/file/d/1KxhKckbVFf6cbUtflcYqJGuaARgQE-lK/view?usp=sharing

The IP Address 192.168.110.254 is the USBLAN IP of RZX Controller. Now I am asking myself what hell is this IP 192.168.110.1 (can be Rekordbox or Something else).

Sérgio

Army

@Army-dev

hey, i didnt know anything about networking. but i'm already working on a project, which reads out the information from rekordbox into osc/midi signals. https://www.reddit.com/r/vjing/comments/jl92r3/i_dont_have_money_for_showkontrol_so_i_programmed/

sergioherculano

@sergioherculano

Hi @Army-dev , great work how did you implemented that ? I am interested . Thanks

Kevinnns

@Kevinnns

@Army-dev that looks damn awesome!

James Elliott

@brunchboy

Interesting @Army-dev, you are examining the memory of the running rekordbox program to do this? Does that work cross platform? How does it cope with new releases? And where is the source code? A very intriguing approach!

Army

@Army-dev

Interesting @Army-dev, you are examining the memory of the running rekordbox program to do this? Does that work cross platform? How does it cope with new releases? And where is the source code? A very intriguing approach!

Development is still in progress, it basically reading out the information from the memory, it works like a "game cheat", and i think it will works on cross platforms too??? i never touchd a computer with MacOS in my life :D. I gonna make it open source. if there is a new update to rekordbox i have to find the values again i think, but i didnt tryed this yet because i have a cracked rekordbox lol. (or just dont update until i relase the config file for it) I need time/motivation to finish this project to make a stable relase :) i'll update you guys

Where communities thrive

People

Repo info

Activity