Tracked - the latest in DJ tech and culture, curated from inside the booth. Our take on Teenage Engineering’s EP-136 K.O.-Sidekick, a DDJ-1000 reverse-engineered onto a Raspberry Pi 4, and Stembox’s commercial answer to the same standalone problem.
🔬 The Breakdown #
Teenage Engineering’s EP-136 K.O.-Sidekick: mixer or controller?
Teenage Engineering pitched the EP-136 as a compact mixer, but the spec sheet reads more like a controller with a DSP engine bolted in - the feature list doesn’t quite match. We pulled the public material together and worked out which side of that line it actually sits on, and what it means for wherever you’d fit it into a set.
Read the full piece on Beatform →
🎧 General DJ #
The Break-Even Gig: when your rig stops costing and starts earning DJWorx runs the numbers on the point where gear spend flips from cost to income - useful if you’re trying to work out whether the next purchase is a business decision or just gear lust. Read via DJWorx →
Also worth your time:
- Save My Gig launches a free platform to help DJs: “DJ Booth Intelligence” designed to help DJs prepare for and troubleshoot the technical problems. Read via DJ Life Mag →
- What to do with 400 fresh record pool tracks: a repeatable pipeline for turning a monthly download dump into a gig-ready, deduped and tagged library, from Lexicon. Read via Lexicon →
⚙️ Hardware #
Hercules DJControl Inpulse 200 MK3, reviewed by Crossfader - £89 and the question is whether that’s enough controller Crossfader puts the budget controller through its paces to answer the question its own price tag raises: worth buying, or just a beginner toy. Read the review →
Stembox wants to be the standalone box for controllers that don’t have one built in A French company, Stembox, is selling its own DJ software bundled with a 15.6-inch touchscreen, aimed at turning any DJ controller into something closer to a standalone unit - with a version that builds the whole system into the screen itself reportedly coming, so the laptop can stay home. It’s the commercial answer to a problem DIY builders have been solving for free with Raspberry Pi rigs - see this edition’s Software & Open Source column for a live example. Read via Digital DJ Tips →
Deckshark Mako, another way to ditch the laptop: Read via Digital DJ Tips →
Denon’s next Prime 4 gets its first maybe-leak A now-edited YouTube video, blurring out a deck in the background, has an Engine DJ community thread running 58 posts deep and speculating about a next-generation Prime 4 in time for 1 September. Forum speculation until Denon DJ says otherwise. Read the thread →
Bonus:
- What SD card should a DJ use: a quick recommendation for recording sets on an Osmo Pocket 3, from DJWorx. Read via DJWorx →
🌐 Software & Open Source #
A DDJ-1000 goes standalone on a Raspberry Pi 4, via byte-for-byte USB reverse engineering Reddit user Zealousideal_Tea6603 got a DDJ-1000 running Mixxx on a Pi 4 by capturing the controller’s USB traffic under rekordbox on Windows and Linux, then comparing the two byte for byte until they matched - plain HID for the jog screens, a kernel quirk for audio. The driver work lives in ddj1000-linux; the skin, mapping and Pi box toolkit sit in a separate repo, pioneered-by-ntamas. Both explicitly labelled work in progress. Read the thread →
A free, open-source auto-tagger for DJ libraries, and the comments stress-test it in real time Reddit user dj_kevz released Track Tidy, a free GPL-2.0 tool that retags a folder of badly-named DJ files - pulling artist, title and cover art from iTunes, Spotify and SoundCloud, with an AcoustID fingerprint fallback for files too mangled to search by name, plus WAV-to-AIFF conversion so rekordbox shows the art. The comments found the gaps fast: no Discogs or MusicBrainz support (confirmed on the list), a nod to OneTagger as the more complete alternative, and one report worth flagging directly - several hundred rekordbox and Engine DJ tracks going missing after a run, only partially fixed by the built-in restore. FLAC support landed mid-thread. See the thread on r/PioneerDJ →
Three more controller mappings land, plus a skin built for the Pi build above An American Audio Encore 2000 mapping is up, built with Mixxx’s MIDI Learning wizard and what the author describes as a little AI help on the JavaScript side - working, feedback still open. A Numark Party Mix III mapping thread has also opened. And a Pi Decks AZ Skin is in progress on the forum, sitting in exactly the standalone-Pi territory covered above.
The threads:
- American Audio Encore 2000 Mapping: Read the thread →
- Numark Party Mix III - Mixxx mapping: Read the thread →
- Pi Decks AZ Skin: Read the thread →
Mixxx’s 25th anniversary keeps rolling: an intergalactic DJ contest, artist t-shirts and a call for more hands on deck The anniversary celebrations continue with an Intergalactic DJ Contest open to anyone who uses Mixxx - bedroom DJ, working pro or anywhere between - plus a run of anniversary artist t-shirts in the shop. On the contributor side, the project is still after programmers for PR reviews and testing.
Also in the open-source column:
- 25 Years of Mixxx Intergalactic DJ Contest: Read the details →
- Mixxx 25th Anniversary Artist T-Shirts: See the shirts →
- Programmers wanted for PR reviews/testing: Read the call →
That’s Tracked for this week. #
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