Bousse

Lightweight DJ booth software with trackpad support for personal use (work in progress)

Why 🤠

Because

• I didn't find a DJ software that gives me a similar experience as having only two turntables and a simple mixer.
• Album covers are very important to find tracks quickly. I want to navigate my music files the same way I look for records.
• I don't have a DJ controller on me right now. I wanted to test if a trackpad was sufficient (spoiler: it is).
• I wanted to gain experience building projects in Rust and I thought this was a very complete one (multi-threading, physics simulation, events, UI, audio, DSP, MIDI controller, ...). Fortunately I don't have to go low level as good quality libraries already exist such as winit, kira, midir, egui 🙏. Happens that everything was working as intended, so I just had to glue the parts together and simulate the turntable's behavior.

NB

This is specifically built for my needs. Some parts are hard-coded, such as the MIDI controller or the trackpad's behavior. Still, it should be easy to adapt anything thanks to the Controller interface that I tried to make as universal as possible. It can receive events from any source and dispatch it to the right object (e.g. turntable, mixer).

Features ⚙️

MVP Features

This is the features that I consider the bare-minimum to be able to mix tracks together.

• Adjustable channel volumes
• Per-channel, toggle-able cue
• Adjust cue mix between master and cue
• Adjust target pitch of playing sound
• Quick load audio files to a deck via drag & drop
• Display visual feedback such as track progression
• Start and stop a track
• Controllable "vinyl" speed via keyboard and touchpad
  • Playing backward
  • Fast pitch variation
  • Soft touch / temporary pitch shift
  • Hard touch / Cueing
  • Fast seek
• Controllable via MIDI controller

Additional Features (but still important 🤓)

• Have a debug panel
• Some parts controllable via UI
• Apply EQ filtering to channels
• Dynamic display of album / track covers
• VU / RMS real time volume meter visual feedback
• File explorer
• Recording of the master track to a file

Additional Features (Not required right now)

• Simple and elegant visualization for current track / mixer state
• Output to multiple devices

How to 👨‍💻

Only tested with Macbook air m1 (nice trackpad) and Akai MidiMix hardware.

1. Clone this repo

   git clone [this repo]

2. Build and execute

   cargo run --release

   This is important to run in --release mode as audio loading is orders of magnitude slower in debug mode.

3. Have fun 🕺💃🪩