Looking for good very basic mixing program

garageband is free

although i've never actually used it, so it might be the biggest piece of crap?

Fuck, what happened to the rest of my post? Let me try again. [TEST]

I'm looking for something under $100 that can crossfade, EQ, possible pitch bend, loop, and maybe some filters. Preferably something that can work with mp3/aac. Is this a pipe dream? Oh yeah, and Garageband takes too long to load on my computer. Thanks.

i heard people talking about Traktor

Audacity. i have no idea if its any good. it is free -so probably very basic.

Audacity is awesome. Not sure if it's for mac, though. Maybe.

its open source. i just installed it and looks pretty cool-sorry, i didn't see the Mac part.

holy shit - this is fun!

also a free program called dekstasy, my friend using it and specks highly of it
http://www.versiontracker.com/dyn/moreinfo/macosx/18531

I prefer Traktor, but it's not free, unless you support cracked software.

I think the problem with dekstasy is that it makes a copy of a song in order to play it which can take up a lot of hard drive space.

ok that was a fluke, this is hard.

I got the Traktor demo. For some reason, it gets stuck on the Ellen Allien Weiss Mix every time it starts compiling my music library. Any thoughts? [Drunken AM Tech Support Take 1]

Dekstasy:

This domain name expired on 11/21/2005 and is pending renewal or deletion.

Thanks, though.

Audacity is nice, but it doesn't crossfade :(

(also I'm on PC and having the same issues so PC stuff here too I guess maybe?) (I just need to crossfade to disk really!)

Tactile 12000

Thanks for all the advices...

Tactile 12000 is kind of neat, but mostly geared towards turntablist wannabes, and that ain't me.

Audacity requires that you install wxWidgets to compile it, but you need the Apple developer's tools to compile wxWidgets. I went through all this trying to get a version of Slsk to work on my Mac...it sucked - still haven't found a version that works.

Still waiting on an answer from Native Instruments tech support on why Traktor can't compile my music library.

go in with some friends and get ableton live!

Yeah, the Ellen Allien thing might be due to the type of mp3 file it is, occasionally programs that import mp3 files have a problem decoding them. Have you tried opening it up in another program and saving it as a wav or aiff?

(don't encode it as an mp3, it'll just re-compress it again)

I haven't quite worked out why they do this, but I've had many problems in the past opening mp3s. One night I played something I hadn't yet prepared, only for it to be read by Ableton as a data file, LOUD white noise followed along with a room full of panic ridden faces.

Traktor for very simple dj-ing and mixing, Ableton if you really want to get into it. I don't see the point in buying Ableton if all you're gonna use it for is to crossfade between a couple of tracks. Garageband or any of the free audio sequencers will probably do if you just want to cue up some wave files and fade them in and out of each other. Beatmatching can be done, but it'd be worth shelling out for Traktor or Ableton if you want to be able to do it on the fly.

Mp3s on the dancefloor though... the audiophile in me doesn't like the way this is heading. Will we soon be judging djs on the quality of their encoding? I've heard some dudes in studenty places recently playing CDs where half the material seems to be encoded at 128kbps, or less!

You nailed it. Thanks a bunch. I saved the file as WAV and it sorted it all out. Haven't had much time to get into Traktor today, but I'm looking forward to it. Traktor pretty much has all the features I want, and it's not that much money, relative to how much I've spent on music in the past and all. The only thing is, Traktor doesn't seem very, how you say, "user friendly". Maybe it's a Mac thing, but I don't see any keyboard shortcuts, and twiddling little virtual knobs with mouse is a big pain in the ass.

I'm going to go ahead and give the Ableton demo a shot because it's free anyway. Anyone checked out the Disco app for Mac? Pretty simple, but seemingly well-designed.

So I'm pretty sure I"ll go ahead and shell out the cake for Traktor. Thanks for all the advice. Any more thoughts on the subject? If not, I promise not to revive this thread until next year.

save up for one of these!

http://faderfox.de/Faderfox-Homepage_english/DJ1_english/body_dj1_english.html

You can configure any function to any key in the preferences.

save up for one of these!
Hey, I was thinking about asking about something like that. How much do those things run anyway? I'm guessing a lot. Anything more affordable out there?

I was also thinking about asking about something like this:
Gearjunkies
...but I haven't had time to determine if it's for real or if they're selling something yet.

You can configure any function to any key in the preferences.
Ha ha! I'm stupid!