You wait years for someone to work out how to turn an ordinary Midi controller into a standalone unit, and then two solutions come along at once. Days after we wrote about Stembox, a small Seattle outfit called Deckshark has started shipping the Mako, a $299 box that bolts to the back of your controller, runs its own DJ software, and plays music straight off a USB stick.
The Mako docks to the back of the controller using two thumb screws and a short USB cable that stays mostly hidden once the unit is in place, so there’s no laptop, no separate screen, and nothing dangling off the back. Deckshark says the grip is tight enough that the controller can sit on a piano stand or hang off the edge of a table without the unit coming loose. There are three top-facing USB ports, two of them with safe eject buttons and LEDs to tell you when the stick can come out. If you’d rather have it off the controller, a stand is included.
So what software is it running?
The Mako runs Bite DJ, which Deckshark is upfront about being a fork of Mixxx, the long-running free and open source DJ app. That means it reads Rekordbox, Serato and Traktor libraries off a stick natively, and inherits a feature set that has had years of work behind it.
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Plenty has been done to the fork on top of that. The public code shows a touchscreen-only interface with the mouse and keyboard model stripped out, a library model built around USB drives rather than internal storage, cue points and ratings that live on the stick and travel with it, vinyl and CDJ jog modes, and mappings for the DDJ-FLX4 and DDJ-400. You can also plug in additional Midi gear such as a pad controller or FX unit while the Mako is docked, and set booth, master and headphone outputs independently.
Some of this is currently aspiration rather than reality. The marketing talks about any Midi controller, but the FLX4 and DDJ-400 are the only two the product page actually claims full compatibility with. The unit needs the 5.1V DC supply it ships with, and Deckshark says power banks aren’t supported. And “zero latency”, as the site puts it, well… it’d be a first for any DJ software: How low the latency really is is something we’d like to test.
What’s it like compared to Stembox?
To be clear, these are both products we haven’t tested yet. But from first reading, Stembox is polished, well presented and aimed at anybody who fancies leaving the laptop at home while still using a Midi controller. Deckshark? Right now, it’d be fair to say is aimed at people who like a project. The Bite DJ source is on GitHub under the GPL, and there’s apparently build-your-own route via the company’s Discord and Patreon for anyone with a 3D printer and enough Raspberry Pi knowledge to do it.
Finally, a reader got in touch after our Stembox piece to raise the question of whether Stembox is also built on Mixxx and, if so, whether selling it as a paid licence sits comfortably with the licence that software carries. We haven’t had time to look more deeply into that yet. What we can say is that Deckshark states plainly what its software is built on and publishes the code, and that’s to its credit.
- The Mako is $299, with limited edition colours at $329. The first batch sold out in a weekend and everything is currently showing as out of stock on the Deckshark store. Shipping is US only at the moment, with the company saying it’ll announce when that changes.
Phil Morse
