By Albert Santoni, Mixxx Project
Google Summer of Code 2008 has been a great opportunity to bring fresh new talent into the Mixxx development team. For those not familiar with Mixxx, it's software that allows DJs to create live beatmixes. This year, Mixxx was supported by four students, each with a new project to help improve some aspect of Mixxx. As this was our second Summer of Code, we helped plan our students' projects better this year, which led to our students producing more maintainable code with clear paths for integration into our trunk.
Zach Elko worked on session saving and crash recovery. Session saving allows a DJ to save various aspects of Mixxx's state (such as the knob positions) for easy recall later. Early on in his project, Zach realized that a good starting point for a crash recovery system would be to allow Mixxx sessions to be saved and restored. His project's focus was shifted towards creating a rock solid session saving system, and Zach has made significant inroads toward this goal.
Russell Ryan rewrote Mixxx's waveform viewer widget. The waveform viewer widget renders a song's waveform in realtime and scrolls through it as playback proceeds. It also allows a user to seek through a song by dragging the widget. Russell's new waveform widget provides improved performance, better modularity, and is much more extensible than our previous widget. The new waveform viewer was merged into trunk in late July and was featured in our recent 1.6.0 final release.
Tom Care worked on improving Mixxx's support for hardware MIDI controllers, which are popular with DJs. MIDI controllers are hardware control devices that mimic the look and feel of real DJ mixers, and can make mixing much easier. Tom's work has yielded an easy MIDI binding interface so DJs can use any MIDI device with Mixxx, as well as overall improvements to the structure and modularity of our MIDI code.
And finally, Wesley Stessens continued his project to add Shoutcasting capabilities, which he began earlier in the year. Shoutcast support allows DJs to broadcast their mixes live through internet radio stations. Unfortunately, due to personal circumstances Wesley had to leave GSoC at the midterm. We're hopeful that he will rejoin our development team in the future.
By the end of August, the three remaining projects were in good shape. The two projects which haven't yet been merged into trunk have time-lines for being merged, and we're pleased with the outcome of these projects. We'd like to thank Google for their gracious support through Summer of Code this year. It's been a fantastic experience for us, and we're happy that we were able to introduce some students to open source development.
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