Requesting hardware testers

[vynulldev]

Hi all!

If you have Pioneer gear, I'm asking you to spend an hour running Vynull with it and to post what happened in this thread, good or bad. Vynull's operation so far has been verified on only one rig, two CDJ-2000NXS2s and a DJM-A9 mixer, because that's all I own. Pro DJ Link behaves differently across models and firmware revisions, and matching rekordbox on the wire is not a reliable proxy for what a real deck will actually do, so reports from your hardware are the only way this project learns what it does on anything else.

Hardware to test with

• Other CDJ generations: CDJ-2000, 2000NXS, 3000, and anything older or newer
• XDJ players: XDJ-1000/1000MK2, XDJ-700, and the all-in-ones (XDJ-XZ, XDJ-RX2/RX3) in link mode
• DJM mixers other than mine, especially on-air and link behaviour
• 3 or 4 player setups, direct cable vs switch
• Both emulation modes: rekordbox (the default, Vynull appears as a laptop source) and cdj

Getting started

The latest release (v0.4.0) is the easiest starting point, or build main with make build. Run ./vynull -interface <iface> -music-dir <your music> on the same network as your gear and the players should see a "vynull" source on the LINK screen. The README covers setup and troubleshooting.

Things to try

• browsing from the deck: playlists, search, artwork, track info
• loading and playing different formats (mp3, flac, wav, aac), long tracks, big libraries
• waveforms: preview and scrolling, colours, and zoom
• hot cues, memory cues, quantize, beat jump, whether the beat counter agrees with your ears
• sync/master, mixer on-air detection, phase meter if your mixer has one
• letting a track run all the way out and loading the next one
• MY SETTINGS load from the deck

If you can, run a packet capture

A pcap taken while you test is the most useful thing you can attach to a problem report. It shows exactly what your deck sent and what Vynull answered.

Something like sudo tcpdump -i <iface> -w vynull-<deck-model>.pcap on the interface plugged into the link network (or Wireshark on that interface), ideally started before the players power on. Reproduce the problem, note roughly when it happened, stop the capture, zip it, attach it.

Privacy note: the capture contains your library's metadata (track titles, artists, playlist names) and any other traffic on that interface, so capture on the link network only, skim it before posting, and trim it if you'd rather not share your whole session.

What to report

Deck model and firmware, mixer, emulation mode, network setup, formats tried, what happened. If something broke: what you did, what the deck showed, log output, pcap if you have one. "Everything worked on X" is also just as valuable to report. No audio uploads please, BPM/format/length is enough to go on.

Thank you!

[hdelplan]

Hello,

First, thank you so much for what you do, I am super impressed, grateful and interested about this because it could help me to use my old setup rather than having it sitting in storage boxes…

I have a pair of cdj2000 Nexus and a DJM 900 Nexus. I would love to make some tests. I also have a Raspberry Pi 4.

Assuming this is sufficient to test, could you let me know the steps to go about it. Is there a specific distribution I need to use ? I will boot the Pi and check which one is installed on it. I updated it less than a year ago.

I would like to know if Vynull could be used as a performance platform on a RPi + mini screen connected to my CDJs, with my library on a OneLibrary USB stick ? I’d love to be able to read the latest audio formats and if possible have a nice waveform display on the RPi screen.

Cheers, RV

[hdelplan]

If I removed the music-dir option from the command line, my CDJ sees an empty library via ProDJ link. That seems to work :)

[hdelplan]

I managed to see my library partially on the CDJ (I see the tracks but not the playlists). I don’t know if it’s too slow or if there’s something not working but when I click a track it doesn’t load.

[hdelplan]

This is the last attempt I ran, after resolving an issue with the NFS server.

I now don’t see any error messages in the logs but the CDJ is unable to load tracks. It also returns empty lists when I’m browsing playlists or by key. I see my 2000+ tracks, it displays the artwork in the track list when it’s available but clicking on tracks doesn’t load the tracks.

Happy to share the log file if it helps

[vynulldev]

Hey @hdelplan!

Thanks for the detailed report, this is exactly the kind of data I was hoping for.

A few things I can see from them:

The "no tags found" wall on the first attempt: Vynull's tag reader doesn't support AIFF (or WAV) metadata yet, so every .aiff fell back to its filename as the title. As of the fix branch this whole scan doesn't even run for your setup anymore - when a stick carries a rekordbox export, Vynull now builds its library straight from rekordbox's own database (your log shows it loading your 2124 tracks with artists, albums, keys and artwork), so you get rekordbox's titles everywhere and a faster startup on the Pi.

The empty PLAYLIST menu was a bug: Vynull parsed the playlists out of your stick's export.pdb and then never actually served them to the deck. That's fixed on the branch and will be in the next release - your playlists should show up exactly as rekordbox wrote them.

Your report also pushed a bigger improvement: Vynull now uses the analysis that rekordbox already wrote to the USB stick (the PIONEER/USBANLZ files) instead of re-analyzing every track itself. That means rekordbox's exact beat grids and waveforms, hot and memory cues appearing on the deck (they were silently dropped before), and close to zero analysis work for your Pi. Testing all this on my own rig also flushed out two more bugs in the served-USB path: the web UI and the decks disagreeing about track numbering (a web-initiated load could land on the wrong track), and cues losing a race on first load - both fixed on the same branch, along with your stick's playlists showing up in the web UI too.

For the two remaining problems: browsing by key coming back empty and tracks not loading when you click them, I can't tell from photos. Could you send over the log file? When you re-run, add --log-level debug and --log-file vynull.log, then on the CDJ do these three things in order: open the KEY menu and click into one key, open PLAYLIST, and click one track to load it (give it ~15s). Then attach the vynull.log file itself - text beats photos, I can grep it.

I did also add another fix prompted by your photos: the next release shows the full startup log, pdb lines included, in the web UI's DIAG tab, so you can copy it straight from the browser.

Two more things worth checking on the Pi:

1. ffmpeg -version - Vynull needs ffmpeg on the PATH to decode audio for analysis; without it, loads can fail after browsing works. If it's missing: sudo apt install ffmpeg.
2. You're running --mode cdj (Vynull appears as a CDJ). Rekordbox mode gets far more testing - could you also try the same run without the --mode cdj flag? The deck then sees a "rekordbox" source in the link list instead of a player. Whether the load works in one mode and not the other is a very useful data point.

On your bigger question: RPi + mini screen as a performance platform with a OneLibrary stick. The web UI on the Pi's screen /should/ work if your distro has a GUI + browser. Waveform display during playback is limited to the players view for now. Format support depends on the deck: the 2000nexus plays MP3/AAC/WAV/AIFF natively; newer formats like FLAC would need the transcoding option --transcode.

I've pushed a branch with some fixes and drafted a PR #42 for it with credit given to you. Give it a try and let me know!

Thanks again!

[hdelplan]

Very happy that I could contribute, I’ll test the updated version asap and send the findings here. Cheers!