Oh hey, Tixl on HN! It's probably my favorite piece of FOSS creative software, and honestly blows After Effects out of the water for me (as a hobbyist who likes cooking up some vis for my DJ sets).
I'm not kidding when I say it has the potential to become the blender for 2D/3D VFX -- the node engine is super powerful, the primitive building blocks are all well thought-out and integrate with each other very nicely, the performance characteristics are amazing (all optimized for realtime!), and there's a ton of I/O for everything from mouse input to OSC/MIDI, camera control, elaborate audio reaction... and also just plain TCP/UDP/HTTP/Websockets! It's such a powerful glue piece, but also tons of fun to mess around with on its own.
The best part? You can create your own components, define your inputs/outputs, and compose them together. The even bestest part? You can dig into the predefined components/effects and see how they work, as they're very often implemented in the same way! The visual editor all drills down to C# in the end, and you can drop into the code or write some HLSL shaders if you want, all with hot reloading.
> (as a hobbyist who likes cooking up some vis for my DJ sets)
I generally get really annoyed when I hear someone say that a particular piece of open-source or free-as-in-beer software “blows After Effects out of the water”[0], but not here: I appreciate you describing your use case so people have the right expectations going in. It sounds like this is more trying to compete with offerings like Touch Designer or Resolume than AE, which feels like a space with much more opportunity for disruption (without having a huge full-time team working for years in obscurity).
[0] I want someone to do to After Effects what Blender is doing to Cinema4D and Maya (provide a competitive free alternative to people who don’t need corporate deals and support plans). Every piece of software that people usually mention falls short in huge ways. I think a lot of people get into this space not realizing how difficult it is just to have a real-time scrubbable timeline that intelligently caches intermediate steps to disk and can render at lower resolutions to save time. So many alternatives absolutely chug once you have 10 1080p tracks with mattes and different effects. And then you’ve got color space transforms and all the different HDR things and a million other features that users of After Effects often forget are features.
> I generally get really annoyed when I hear someone say that a particular piece of open-source or free-as-in-beer software “blows After Effects out of the water”[0], but not here
It bothered me because the phrase suggests a favorable comparison to After Effects, when in fact After Effects really isn't the right tool for a job that needs real-time motion graphics. It's like saying Inkscape blows VS Code out of the water, for drawing SVGs.
I want this to happen, but this past month I tried using Blender’s Video Editor (after hearing the great news about Compositor Modifiers) and boy oh boy does it chug. Apparently Compositor Modifiers only run on the CPU, so trying to apply them to a track of 1080p footage totally locked up my Ryzen 7950X and froze the UI for a few minutes while it tried to render the preview.
I’m hoping GPU Compositor Modifiers aren’t too much of a lift, but at the moment they’re not actively being worked on (and I don’t have the expertise to do it myself) so I’d guess it’s at least about a year before this feature becomes usable for anything beyond really simple compositing with super-crunchy proxies.
I think a lot of people get into this space not realizing how difficult it is just to have a real-time scrubbable timeline that intelligently caches intermediate steps to disk
As someone who's been looking to get into video creation and motion graphics as a hobby, usually people recommend davinci resolve as an alternative. Which, apart from enshittifying and not being open source, the motion graphics part seems like a bit of an afterthought.
I’ve gotten so frustrated with AE the past couple years that my New Year’s resolution is to bite the bullet and try Resolve for my next couple projects. I’m even willing to splurge for the license if it means I can stop paying Adobe every month. I’m in a place where I definitely need a lot of AE’s pro features and performance, but I’m not locked into the plugin ecosystem, so I have a bit more flexibility than some other people.
How relevant is this (and the NSA's general spying capability) in 2025?
We hear a lot about local agencies perusing the services of private companies to collect citizens' data in the US, whether that's traffic information, IoT recordings, buying information from FAANG, etc. What's the NSA's position in the current administration? (e.g. we've heard a lot of noise in the past about the FBI and CIA getting the cold shoulder internally. I wonder how this applies to the NSA.)
1) They don't necessarily need to break all encryption, just knowing who is talking to who and then delivering a tailored payload is their M.O.; The Tailored Access Operations division exists just for this.
2) They didn't build a Yottabyte-scale datacenter for no reason
3) They have the capability to compromise certificate authorities. Pinned certs aren't universal.
4) Speculation, but, Snowden's revelations probably set off an "arms race" of sorts for developing this capability. Lots more people started using Tor, VPNs, and more, so it would almost be dereliction of duty on their part if they didn't dramatically increase their capability, because the threats they are there to stop didn't disappear.
5) ML/LLM/AI has been around for a while, machine learning analysis has been mainstream for over a decade now. All that immense data a human can never wade through can be processed by ML. I would be surprised if they aren't using an LLM to answer questions and query real-time and historical internet data.
6) You know all the concerns regarding Huawei and Tiktok being backdoored by the Chinese government? That's because we're doing it ourselves already.
7) I hope you don't think TAO is less capable than well known notorious spyware companies like the NSO group? dragnet collection is used to find patterns for follow-up tailored access.
I don't understand, all they have to do is tap submarine cables, why is that infeasible now? What specific thing do you think they were collecting before that they can't now?
Metadata is extremely valuable!! lots of things can be inferred from it. In other comments I've decried companies like slack including your password reset or login codes in the email subject for example. They can take any packet and trace it back to a specific individual, even if you're on Tor, chaining VPNs,etc.. without decrypting it. They can see what destinations you're visiting. they can build a pattern of life profile you and mine that. The ad industry does much of this without access to global internet traffic captures already lol.
That's perfectly feasible. It is not feasible to do the same kind of captures as NSA was doing pre-Snowden, when most of that traffic wasn't encrypted.
> In other comments I've decried companies like slack including your password reset or login codes in the email subject for example
That's still just as encrypted as the email body itself.
Active listening is very noisy, we can be very confident they're not doing that at scale.
My whole point is that they're no longer able to do passive listening of unencrypted content and massive scale, but instead are forced to rely on much smaller scale active attacks.
You're making assumptions that are not taking into account all the other capabilities revealed in the Snowden leak and several other prior leaks. The name "Tailored Access Operations" alone should tell you something. They still have presence in all the large tech company's networks (with cooperation from them of course), and they are able to access critical servers like MTA's. The shadowbroker leaks are also another glimpse into their historical capabilities.
You're assuming that despite their budget not having changed meaningfully, no repercussions against anyone from the historical leaks, the continued renewal of the patriot act and unchanged mission of the intelligence community orgs that somehow they've wound down. That they've stopped R&D and tailored access ops.
You're also assuming that tailored access is not used to facilitate, correlate and enrich traffic decryption.
You look at things from your perspective where decrypting traffic alone is all too important. If you can see all the metadata, why would you do that? If you hoard 0 days and sophisticated implants what's the advantage? I mean half the time comms alone aren't enough, you want access to internal networks, documents that will never get transmitted over the network,etc.. smartphone telemetry data from a large group of targets. They're not interested in decrypting traffic to grandma visiting facebook, they want to know who's downloading tails, who's using signal, who's committing to interesting git repos, who the source of some journalist is, what people a politician has been messaging on whatsapp. Once targets are identified they can be implanted, or have their traffic selected for decryption.
But I think i get what you're saying, that most of the traffic they capture is encrypted. That much I agree, that has changed. But whether they can decrypt it on-demand, that is tough to speculate, whether they need to? That's what I'm disagreeing with. If their goal was that one-time traffic decryption, perhaps that has been curtailed with the prevalence of TLS and CT logging. But metadata alone is sufficient to select a target, and all the evidence suggests that even if they can't readily implant targets, they can successfully perform targeted MITM attacks, even with typical non-mTLS/non-pinned TLS setups.
>You're assuming that despite their budget not having changed meaningfully, no repercussions against anyone from the historical leaks, the continued renewal of the patriot act and unchanged mission of the intelligence community orgs that somehow they've wound down. That they've stopped R&D and tailored access ops.
That's not at all what I'm assuming. I'm stating that the environment has become much more hostile to them, reducing their capabilities because all the super low hanging fruit is gone. The part where they're able to hack almost anyone they want hasn't changed.
>You look at things from your perspective where decrypting traffic alone is all too important. If you can see all the metadata, why would you do that?
Metadata lets you select a target sure. Having full content takes as they used to allows you to easily find new targets by simply matching keywords, that particularly cool capability has practically disappeared post-Snowden.
>they want to know who's downloading tails, who's using signal, who's committing to interesting git repos, who the source of some journalist is, what people a politician has been messaging on whatsapp
I don't think this really reflects what the previously leaked files suggest their main interests to be.
>what people a politician has been messaging on whatsapp
Whereas before they'd have been able to get that information off the wire together with the message content (for all messages, in real time!). Now? They actually have to actively compromise Facebook to get that for a single user.
It's also worth noting that the previously leaked NSA documents seem to suggest that the NSA was not particularly busy breaking the law by hacking American companies.
> even if they can't readily implant targets, they can successfully perform targeted MITM attacks, even with typical non-mTLS/non-pinned TLS setups.
Because of CT, such MITM attacks will not work without creating noise that's visible to the whole world.
You've made really good points, I get what you're saying now. They can't do simple keyword searches over unencrypted traffic anymore. But even in 2010 lots of important traffic was over https, and anyone worth their salt used https for important things. I don't think even back then they were hoping for incidental intercept of unencrypted traffic. That was just icing on the cake, the main purpose as I understood was metadata mining, and not just the internet but phone calls and sms as well. As far as tailored access, there is lots of speculation there, and they're well within their rights to hack servers outside of the US. I don't think any information as to what organizations they compromised has ever been revealed, but they certainly had the capability and it is only reasonable to presume they improved upon that capability. But they can have the capability and not choose to wield it, but really doesn't sound like their M.O.
> I don't think this really reflects what the previously leaked files suggest their main interests to be.
I strongly disagree. I wish i had the time to compile evidence to back that up but plenty exists if you look it up. Matter of fact, I recall some of NSA's leadership oppose things like backdooring encryption or apps because they don't need it, and it only hurts the nation's security.
> But even in 2010 lots of important traffic was over https, and anyone worth their salt used https for important things.
In 2010 almost all messaging traffic on the internet was plaintext (or using badly broken encryption). Telephony? Hah.
These days nobody even uses regular phone calls or SMS, except US-based android users.
> That was just icing on the cake, the main purpose as I understood was metadata mining, and not just the internet but phone calls and sms as well
Metadata mining was just the fallback when they absolutely couldn't legally capture the content, or were not able to do so for logistical reasons. If you hack China Mobile and get access to all the call content, you'll still have a hard time sending that to the US. Metadata? Much easier.
These days even metadata collection has been gimped, most of the interesting metadata is encrypted. When I text someone, the NSA can see an encrypted connection from my phone to Apple. They can not feasibly see who that message goes to. They might not even be able to tell that I sent a message at all.
> I don't think any information as to what organizations they compromised has ever been revealed, but they certainly had the capability and it is only reasonable to presume they improved upon that capability
TSB leaks include tons of such information. Snowden leaks include some specific cases too, like Gemalto. Although just for the sake of accuracy I'm not sure which of these are actually TAO and which are other similar teams inside the NSA, but as I recall at least the TSB stuff seems to primarily originate from TAO.
There have also been a bunch of public and non-public incidents attributed to the Equation group (almost certainly NSA TAO) by the private sector.
I think these capabilities were already so good a decade ago that it would be hard to significantly improve upon them, you just slap in new exploits and keep doing what you're doing.
>I strongly disagree. I wish i had the time to compile evidence to back that up but plenty exists if you look it up. Matter of fact, I recall some of NSA's leadership oppose things like backdooring encryption or apps because they don't need it, and it only hurts the nation's security.
I was trying to suggest that the NSA is mostly interested in spying on foreign governments and maybe sometimes catching terrorists, not exactly "they want to know who's downloading tails, who's using signal, who the source of some journalist is".
Alright, well in the interest of a conclusion, I'll say that you made really good points, I've changed my opinion on some but not all of the topics.
> "they want to know who's downloading tails, who's using signal, who the source of some journalist is"
They don't care about random people doing those things, but if someone with a known terrorist cell association is in the US talking over signal. Or if someone is visiting extremist sites using tails, they'd want to know (and they can using metadata available today). They're not interested in home-grown terrorism or law enforcement, but all other matters of national security don't neatly fall into "foreign vs domestic" buckets. Even if it is all happening outside of the US, the servers Signal uses might be in the US for example.
Yeah, the specific capabilities and operations of intelligence agencies like the NSA are a topic I’ve spent far too much of my life obsessing about. Fortunately, mostly because I’ve been paid to do so, but I should really find better things to do with my free time than rehashing work stuff in HN comments.
I think we broadly agree on the details, and whatever differences remain are probably mostly attributable to us looking at the topic from slightly different angles. There's probably not much more we could usefully address on this topic via HN comments, so it is probably a good time to conclude :)
If the story behind the shadow brokers leaks is of interest to you, I dumped some details in a reply to a now-flagged thread. It's quite the rabbit hole if you want to dig into it, especially with the whole Hal Martin situation https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46186975
They don't break encryption, they circumvent it. They get into people's computers and access the stored data after it's been decrypted. They stockpile zero day vulnerabilities and use them against their targets in order to install persistent malware. They intercept equipment and literally implant hardware onto the PCBs that let them access the networks. They have access to hordes of government CCTVs. They have real time satellite imaging. They have cellphone tower data.
Yes but I wouldn't say their capabilities have been "greatly" degraded. It's still very much in the "push a button and have someone's entire life history up on the screen" territory.
Degraded would be "it is impossible for them to know anything about people unless they send dozens of human agents to stalk them".
I think going from "lol we can read and store all the emails sent by everybody" to "lol we can hack any specific person and then read their emails" indicates a massive loss of capability.
The first approach enabled them to find targets that were not on their radar based on message contents, they can no longer do that.
They still read emails. No doubt they're inside Google, Microsoft, Apple. They might not be inside Proton Mail, it uses PGP but keys are stored server side so I wouldn't know.
No doubt they still read texts. I think the US is still among the countries that use SMS a lot.
They no doubt have access to the data big tech's mined out of the entire world's population. That capability alone puts them into "bring everything about this guy up on the screen" territory.
>They still read emails. No doubt they're inside Google, Microsoft, Apple. They might not be inside Proton Mail, it uses PGP but keys are stored server side so I wouldn't know.
I don't doubt for a second that they can read specific emails, but to suggest that they have bulk collection capabilities within Google or Microsoft is a stretch. NSA lacks the legal authority to compel that, NSA lacks the money to bribe Google or Microsoft and NSA likely lacks the political backing to put the biggest US companies in such a compromised position.
>I think the US is still among the countries that use SMS a lot.
The NSA lacked legal authority to do this bulk collection prior to the Snowden leaks, and yet that didn't stop them from collecting. Why would I believe that their lack of legal authority today would stop them?
>NSA does not have magic tools to break modern encryption.
They don't. But they have other options.
For example, Cloudflare is an American company that has plaintext access to the traffic of many sites. Cloudflare can be compelled to secretly share anything the NSA want.
Or if they have a deal or double agent working for them, there is a possibility for "full take" just like at AT&T. Seems pretty likely to me. Allegedly there are tens of thousands of undercover employees stationed throughout the economy in the "signature reduction" program. National security programs don't respect laws when there is something considered "important" if they can get away with it.
A double agent would not get you "full take", it'd be impossible to hide the traffic. A double agent could maybe feasibly steal keys from Google, but they'd have to do that all the time because the keys are constantly rotated.
And even then, stealing keys does not give you passive decryption and active decryption would be incredibly noisy.
NSA does not have enough money to spend to be able to incentivize Google to give them full take intercepts either.
I think you are not being creative enough with how one might attempt this. For example, splice the cables leading to the datacenter, put an inconspicuous chip in the servers that intercepts the keys and feeds them via wireless signals to a collection point. Perhaps you could even do something clever like put very short range EMF into a metal co-location rack and collect the signals almost totally invisibly using a mesh network of devices built into the metal.
There's lots of fun tricks you can think of when you have national resources at your disposal.
However, you are forgetting that NSA works for Google. It works to support the promotion of American companies worldwide. They're on the same team, and Google knows that. They even have the same mission: To usefully organize the world's information!
Now that Google is openly a military contractor, it's even easier to make this click. Back in the day, you had to read things like this Julian Assuage piece to understand this: https://wikileaks.org/google-is-not-what-it-seems/
If we were to accept that the NSA works for Google, there's even less reason to believe that Google would grant NSA full take access to plaintext content.
Google has a lot to lose by doing so, and not all that much to gain. Google has also been a leading force in pushing for broader use of encryption on the internet, making the NSAs work significantly more difficult even in a hypothetical scenario where Google is happy to give them anything they want.
>Cloudflare can be compelled to secretly share anything the NSA want.
This is true given some possible interpretations, false given other possible interpretations. Cloudflare can be secretly compelled to share specific things, there's no legal mechanism to compel Cloudflare to share everything.
Were the alternatives any better? I don't recall any telecom companies committing to warrant canaries or the like. And speaking of, whatever happened to those?
> Were the alternatives any better? I don't recall any telecom companies committing to warrant canaries or the like.
Well, no. But Google does significant business in foreign countries and doesn't really want to give an excuse for foreign governments to start aggressively pursuing their own alternatives.
> And speaking of, whatever happened to those?
Cloudflare still has a warrant canary on their transparency report page, Reddit deleted theirs in 2016.
So instead of collecting at AT&T Room 631 you now collect at Google Room Whatever.
The NSA has spent no small amount of time in the last decade obviously interfering with NIST and public encryption standards. The obvious reason is they _want_ to have the magic tools to break some modern encryption.
>So instead of collecting at AT&T Room 631 you now collect at Google Room Whatever.
Even if true, significantly degraded. Probably not true though, NSA has been very leaky and such a story would be kind of devastating for Google. NSA lacks the legal capability to force Google to do so, the money to bribe Google to do so and also almost certainly lacks the political backing to put one of the biggest US companies in such a position.
I don't doubt for a second that NSA could hack Google (or just bribe employees with appropriate access) and break into specific Gmail accounts if they wanted to. Bulk collection would be far more difficult to implement.
>The NSA has spent no small amount of time in the last decade obviously interfering with NIST and public encryption standards. The obvious reason is they _want_ to have the magic tools to break some modern encryption.
They do try, they just haven't been very successful at it.
Google, along with all other major service providers, has a legal portal so law enforcement can process warrant orders. I think all you have to do is hack that portal or process.
Sure, and you could also just submit fake warrants as many criminals have successfully done.
Neither of these approaches would enable bulk collection.
I'm sure the NSA can read essentially any specific emails they're interested in, they just can't do so at anywhere near the scale they used to pre-Snowden.
Not only that, these days almost all chats have moved to E2EE platforms. Reading that traffic in a stealthy manner requires compromising endpoints, bulk collection simply isn't possible.
It’s not Google room whatever, it’s Cloudflare room whatever. That’s why you don’t hear much about undermining encryption standards anymore, who needs that when you have SSL termination for 40% of the internet?
So what? They can't do that at scale without making a ton of noise.
That's a very boring capability compared to what they were able to do pre-Snowden. That's also not a new capability, they were able to do that pre-Snowden too.
You can't decrypt anything with letsencrypt root certs, you can issue your own certificates but it would be impossible to use those at any significant scale.
It's also worth considering that CT makes it extremely noisy to use such certificates to attack web browsers.
I'd bet they could absolutely proxy large parts of people and make use of these certs. I wonder how much are CT logs scrutinized, would these "rogue" certs be found easily because we can't find traces of them being generated by letsencrypt ? Browsers checks CRLs but are they checking CT logs to be ensure the cert they're checking was logged ?
They couldn't do that at scale without being detected, no. There are various people actively looking for this, and the existing tooling makes it easy to detect.
>Browsers checks CRLs but are they checking CT logs to be ensure the cert they're checking was logged ?
Yes, all modern browsers require certificates to be in the CT logs in order for them to be accepted.
This is naive to the point where it is indistinguishable from disinformation.
Aside from a tiny minority of people applying their own encryption (with offline confirmed public keys) at end points with securely stored air gapped private keys, this information is available to the US government, it’s the god damn job of the NSA.
The NSA can hack pretty much anybody, yes. The NSA can no longer collect everything as they were doing pre-Snowden.
The crucial difference is that it is no longer nearly as easy for the NSA to identify new targets as it used to be, because they don't have full take access to the vast amounts of content they used to.
Could you be more specific? It's really hard to have an useful conversation based on a comment like this, but really easy to have one based on a comment which links to specific cases and perhaps even explains how the obvious parallel construction appears.
It's hard to find solid coverage of this because obviously the methods are often hidden and rarely leak out to the press at large. The press also gets confused and thinks that defending our constitutional rights will lead to criminals being acquitted.
If you spend a lot of time watching and studying these cases and how they evolve throughout the courts it becomes obvious that this is likely occurring more than most people realize.
I don't think the Mangione case is a particularly good example, you wouldn't use a 911 call by a random McDonald's manager to disguise parallel construction.
The caller is easy to identify, how could the government ever trust this person to not reveal their parallel construction? If they were planted by the government, that'd be extremely difficult to hide. The government also likely wouldn't be able to compensate them in any meaningful way for telling such a lie.
The Kohlberger case also does not suggest parallel construction, the DOJ policy isn't binding and the DOJ can in fact legally violate that whenever they want.
> Palantir is firmly cemented into military-industrial infrastructure, and business is booming, but Karp is not letting up. He has said he wants Palantir to be as dominant and indispensable as IBM was in the 1960s, when it was the world’s largest computing company and shaped the way government and private companies did business.
I was thinking even before this line that he gives off the impression of really admiring IBM, especially their German stint from 1933 to 1945.
I finally took the plunge and upgraded from Ubuntu 22.04 to 24.04 on my work laptop. With that come all the gnome package updates and such.
I reboot, load up my session, and a little while after need to grab a couple files from a zip archive. I double-click it in Nautilus, nothing happens. I give it a couple more clicks before I suspect something broke, right click it, and see "Extract" as... the default cursor action...?
I go back up and see five fresh copies of the folder that was inside the zip. I delete them all, go back to the file itself, right click, open with > file-roller. I try and drag'n'drop the couple files I need: doesn't work, for some reason. Great, they've broken drag and drop, too.
> is drag and drop extraction from Nautilus (or other file managers) really that important?
Why, yes it is! It's even worse if you go and _break_ drag'n'drop support on X11! I'm not even using Wayland!
But, oh well, looks like file-roller is unmaintained and outside of core Gnome scope now. Nautilus' zip capabilities are enough, they say! Why would a user want to inspect the contents of a zip archive before wanting to extract it, or god forbid select specific files, after all? Definitely not worth keeping as a core OS/DE feature.
And the PR on file-roller that fixes this on wayland with... a custom fuse virtual filesystem?! has been untouched for the past 2 years, never to be merged.
Otaku/doujin culture, and the creative industry that rose around it in Japan, is as good as it gets when it comes to finding good ideas and propping them up. Basically anyone who can draw can release their own manga/webnovel/illustrations on pixiv, twitter, and others, get a couple volumes out with this or that publishing house, see where it goes and whether the public catches on. Self-publishing plays a huge part in this, whether it's doujinshi (self-made [often derivative] books sold at conventions like Comiket, Comitia, or online, with a substantial proportion of r-18 [but not only] content), doujin music albums, indie games and visual novels, etc.
Funding for anime adaptations is plentiful, and fan support helps bridge the confidence gap where production committees (consortiums of multiple publishing/IP companies pooling the money to distribute the risk) won't go for more indie / experimental works. Profit is recouped on developing the brand and merch, while leaving plenty of room for directors and studios to establish their own auteur identity. Studios are getting leaner and more focused these days, splitting off into smaller entities kicked off with a project or two with more margin for talent to shine.
It's not all perfect, though. Freelance work and lack of mentoring has really put a dent into the supply of new animators, who lack job security and often swing between studios left and right, but there are industry efforts to fix this and preserve knowledge, with the oldest pioneer animators now starting to hit their 60's and 70's.
Please explain how “funding is plentiful” for the industry - as an American Musician and artist, I am truly curious how money is available to creatives in Japan in this sector. Thank you!
It's plentiful in PPP terms I suppose. Japanese wages are very low, they wouldn't be able to fund even one of those ugly Netflix adult comedies where it's made in Flash and called Big Balls or something.
Question to anyone with experience in this domain: I have CSAM spam problems on a forum I host, with bots putting link shortener URLs embedded in images rather than the post body. Traditional OCR software deals poorly with them due to font modifications and intentional text edge modifications, and I'm obviously not gonna use a SaaS/closed source model to upload a bunch of may-be-may-not-be-CSAM pictures, so looking for a way to do this locally, with cheapish inference if possible (I don't mind spending a minute of compute to get the result out for one image, but need to do it on the CPU).
Is there any small model that would do this effectively, with pure text extraction (without going for any kind of formatting or whatnot)?
Been using it for the past few years, nothing bad to say about it, lovely piece of software. Vendor lock-in is very present in this field, with different brands of controllers supported by a myriad of proprietary DJ applications all more interested in onboarding you to their music subscription services rather than implement useful features or support open protocols.
Meanwhile, Mixxx allows you to write your own adapter scripts for any controller you have (as long as it outputs MIDI), and there's a built-in library featuring scripts for the most common commercial controllers and MIDI devices out there.
In Rekordbox's case Pioneer have restricted the jogwheel mapping to Pioneer hardware only. So, you pretty much need Pioneer hardware to use Rekordbox. And seeing as Pioneer decks are almost industry standard in clubs and you need Rekordbox to organise your playlists, they have the DJ hardware market sewn up. Which is very frustrating because Rekordbox has to be the most resource intensive (& therefore inefficient) DJ software available.
It’s amazing just how badly Technics dropped the ball.
At one point they were the industry standard but they shot themselves in the foot with their reluctance to release a CD turntable until after Pioneer had already got themselves into nearly every club.
Though I can’t say I’m surprised. I never thought 1210s was a particularly good vinyl turntable either.
So many issues with Rekordbox and their vendor lock-in. I can't even reliably export songs on a flash drive and have it showing up in their CDJ. It's honestly time to take the Pioneer giant down.
Even if there's not a mapping Mixxx has a "MIDI Learning Wizard" (I forget what they call it) where, assuming it speaks MIDI, you can plug it up, choose an action, and then move the control for that action and it will figure out how to wire it up. For simple configurations that don't require scripting (ie. no setting LEDs on the controller or what not) you can get a fully functional setup for a controller Mixxx has no knowledge of without writing any JavaScript or XML at all!
Might be wise to make it more apparent that you need to close the right sidebar before you can do anything on-screen -- I tried clicking on the "Get Started" buttons, found them to be unresponsive / non-interactive, tried clicking on stuff on the side, and closed the page at first, thinking it wasn't tested on Firefox.
I'm not kidding when I say it has the potential to become the blender for 2D/3D VFX -- the node engine is super powerful, the primitive building blocks are all well thought-out and integrate with each other very nicely, the performance characteristics are amazing (all optimized for realtime!), and there's a ton of I/O for everything from mouse input to OSC/MIDI, camera control, elaborate audio reaction... and also just plain TCP/UDP/HTTP/Websockets! It's such a powerful glue piece, but also tons of fun to mess around with on its own.
The best part? You can create your own components, define your inputs/outputs, and compose them together. The even bestest part? You can dig into the predefined components/effects and see how they work, as they're very often implemented in the same way! The visual editor all drills down to C# in the end, and you can drop into the code or write some HLSL shaders if you want, all with hot reloading.
Just give it a try, you won't regret it :)