SYNOPSIS

dbmixer

DESCRIPTION

dbmixer is an advanced mixer application to control various audio channels. It is part of the DBMix sound system and requires a running dbfsd. The user interface is devided into four parts: the channel boxes, one for each channel, on the top left, the crossfader box below, the sample editor box right of the channel boxes, and the controls box to the far right. Each of them is described in detail below.

CHANNEL BOX COMPONENTS

The list box on top assigns each channel to a particular input device. Pause and Mute buttons below are pretty self-descriptive. Cue redirects the channel to the cueing device and is only enabled if dbfsd has been started with the -c option. The buttons labelled Once and Loop act in conjunction with the sample editor (see below). They play or loop respectively a short, pre-recorded sample on the current channel. To adjust the channel's volume, move the vertical slider up and down. (The number on top of the slider is a bit misleading--100 means absolute silence while it shows 0 when the volume is at its maximum.) A horizontal slider controls the pitch of the sound output. The row of buttons below resets the speed to 100 per cent (middle button), or alters the speed by five per cent in either direction (left and right buttons). The bottom row, finally, comprises of the Pitch Sync buttons. While being pressed, they temporarily slow down (-S), pause (.]S[.), or speed up (S+) the sound. The purpose of these three buttons is to assist in beat matching: First use the pitch control to adjust two songs to the same speed, the use the sync buttons to match the beats.

CROSSFADING BOX COMPONENTS

The crossfader comprises of three parts, the fader slider itself, and the two channel selectors, one on each side of the fader. To crossfade, first select the channels to fade between in the channel selectors. Then move the fader slider to the desired position, or push one of the autofade buttons to the right. < fades to the left, /\ centres the fader, and > fades to the right. A slider labelled Autofade Spd. controls the autofade speed. It is actually located in the controls box, but belongs to the crossfader, really. The value of this slider is the fade time from end to end in seconds.

To either side of the crossfader channel selectors there are buttons that say Punch. Doing so sets the volume for the selected crossfader channel to maximum. When the button is released, the channel volume returns to its previous value. This is usefull for quickly overlaying soundbytes from one stream over another.

SAMPLE EDITOR BOX COMPONENTS

The list box on top connects the sample recorder to one of the channels. The Load and Save buttons (re-)store samples on disk. To record a sample from the selected channel, press the Record button. Press again to stop recording. Max recording time is ten seconds. The start and end sliders are used to fine tune the start and end times of the sample; values on top of the sliders the time offsets in seconds.

One can copy a sample to another channel using the Copy Sample To button and its associated list box. First select the channel from the list, then click the button.

CONTROLS BOX COMPONENTS

The green light on top turns red whenever samples are clipped in the output. This is most likely to occur during a crossfade. Next is the Mic Talkover button. It cuts all regular output channels to one third of their volume to allow microphone input to be heard. See dbin (1) to learn how to enable microphone input. Cue Split places cue output in the right cup of the headphones, and the master output in the left.

The Balance slider controls the volume ratio of left vs. right in the master output, while the Main and Cue sliders allow to adjust the soundcard volume for the master and cue devices, respectively. Autofade Spd. actually belongs to the crossfader and is described above.

KNOWN BUGS

dbmixer refuses to start if the maximum number of clients are already running. In this case, close one of your clients, start dbmixer, and then restart your last client.

AUTHOR

This manual page was written by Daniel Kobras <[email protected]>, for the Debian GNU/Linux system (but may be used by others). It is heavily based on DBMix's README file written by Robert Michael S Dean.