What's new
What changed, what got added, and what got fixed, so the beat stays tight and the setup stays simple. No jargon.
v0.6.0: Built like an appliance
v0.5.0 nailed the sync. v0.6.0 hardens the box: it restarts itself if anything crashes, shrugs off a pulled power plug, and runs a stripped-down real-time system with nothing on board it doesn't need. It also wears the new DJLink look.
- Self-healing. If the sync engine ever crashes mid-set, it's back within seconds. No reboot, no touching the box.
- Power-loss proof. The SD card is now read-only while running. Someone yanks the power at 3am? Nothing to corrupt, boots clean every time.
- The new look. The DJLink vinyl-infinity logo, glowing PLAYING and MASTER badges, and a calm dashboard that only animates when music actually plays.
- Honest drift numbers. Timing drift now also shows as a percentage of a beat, so the same accuracy reads the same at 76 BPM and 201 BPM.
- Newest real-time kernel. Upgraded to Linux 6.18 RT, the newest long-term line, built for this one job: hundreds of unused drivers stripped out, no USB stack, nothing loadable at runtime.
- Smaller and faster. The download shrank from 20 MB to ~14 MB, flashing is faster, and boot lost two more seconds of dead time.
- Verifiable to the core. The exact kernel build is stamped into the system and visible from the dashboard's API, so you can always prove what's running.
- No more restless idle screen. With decks stopped, the beat display used to flicker between beats 1 and 2. Now it sits still until you press play.
- A stray background service that kept shipping despite being unused is finally gone.
v0.5.0: Rock-solid sync and a live dashboard
v0.4.0 kept the beat but slowly drifted at slow tempos and sometimes jumped a quarter of a bar. v0.5.0 fixes that for good: zero jumps, zero drift, tight for a whole set, plus a live web dashboard so you can see the sync at a glance.
- Live dashboard. Open it in any browser to watch the BPM, beats, and bar move in real time, smooth and exactly what Ableton sees.
- Plug-and-play sync. It locks onto the master deck and ignores the rest, so a second deck can never pull your sync off-beat.
- Tuning without rebuilds. Fine-tune the sync from a simple settings file and restart. No rebuild needed.
- Sealed, safe images. Release versions ship locked down, so the dashboard is the only way in.
- Lower latency. The beat is published straight from the real-time core, shaving delay off every beat.
- Start & stop together. Ableton now starts and stops with the CDJ.
- Smaller, faster download. The SD-card image is trimmed and boots ready in under 30 seconds.
- No more quarter-bar jumps in Ableton.
- No more drift at slow BPM. The beat stays glued from 84 to 160 BPM.
- Reliable across the whole set. Timing is now solid, not best-effort.
- Boots every time. Fixed the odd rainbow-screen start-up.
v0.4.0: First real-time release
The first build to run on a real-time kernel: a dedicated core for sync and a bar that filled fully without resetting mid-bar. It worked, but had a few rough edges, all sorted in v0.5.0.
- Real-time engine with the sync pinned to its own core.
- Bars filled fully and stayed in time.
- Beat could drift at slow tempos.
- Bar occasionally jumped a quarter-beat.