Reverse Engineering

Often to get DJ hardware working with Mixxx, it is necessary to reverse engineer how it communicates with other DJ software. This page has some tips to get started with that.

Wireshark is an excellent, free, cross platform program to record and analyze computer communication data. It is most known for analyzing network traffic, but it can also be used for USB traffic. Wireshark has a USB Audio filter that can be used to analyze traffic for USB Audio and MIDI devices (MIDI is part of the USB Audio Class standard). Wireshark also has a USB HID filter.

Use usbaudio.midi.event as the filter in Wireshark to separate audio signals from MIDI. The usbaudio.sysex.reassembled.data filter shows only system exclusive (sysex) messages.

Running VMs on a Linux host

If you are using Linux, you can run other DJ software in a Windows virtual machine and record the USB traffic with Wireshark. You can run Wireshark on the Linux host or inside the virtual machine, but if you run Wireshark in Linux you don't need to bother transferring the captured traffic files out of the VM.

If you use VirtualBox, you need to install the VirtualBox guest extensions with experimental 3D acceleration to run VirtualDJ or Serato.

TODO: Is there anything in particular to configure for QEMU?