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Forum: VirtualDJ Technical Support

Topic: Lost Heaphone Function in Automix
I did a wedding last night. During dinner, I used Automix on deck 1 to play a dinner set. During that set, I tried playing a track on deck 2 with the gain down to listen in my headphones. However no audio of the track on deck 2 came through. Earlier, before the wedding started, I could use my headphones on either deck with no issues when I was manually mixing since that’s part my routine smoke testing before an event. It seems that Automix somehow disabled the use of my headphones. To get around this issue, just after dinner music was done, I quickly exited VirtualDJ & then restarted it. Then I manually loaded a track on deck 1 & started dance music, and my headphones worked fine. Today I’ve tried to recreate the issue in my basement, but I can’t get it to do this again. I am on VDJ V2026-m b8978, MacOS Sequoia on my 1 year old MacBook Pro with 36gb of ram. I am using a Pioneer DDJ REV5 controller. I would rather not have to do this again. It was awfully scary. ChatGPT gave me a few things to try, but no luck. Can anyone possibly advise on a good solution or workaround so I can prevent this issue?
 
Posted 2 days ago @ 2:45 am
Ken Greenspan wrote :
During that set, I tried playing a track on deck 2 with the gain down to listen in my headphones.

GAIN or volume ?
Gain changes apply on headphones too. So, if you turned GAIN all the way down to zero, it's absolutely normal that you could not hear any sound.
 
Thanks for the reply. I believe I’ve resolved this. Turns out this had nothing to do with Automix. The root cause is different than i originally thought. At the wedding well before it began,, I tested individual tracks for volume, and I also tested to make sure the headphones worked. Then I left the system alone for about 45 minutes. The REV5 controller went to sleep, so when I returned, I had to wake it up by touching a button or jog wheel. It then prompted me to connect VirtualDJ to the Rev5 like always. That’s actually when I lost headphone functionality via the rev5 CUE buttons. I just recreated this scenario at home and sure enough my headphones no longer work when I try to listen to them using the headphone cue buttons on the rev5. All I had to do was go back into Settings —> Audio and click “Apply” to refresh the settings. That worked perfectly. According to ChatGPT:

What’s actually happening (clear + accurate)
You leave the system idle ~30–60 minutes
macOS puts the REV5 USB audio interface to sleep
The REV5 “wakes” when you touch it
macOS re-enumerates the audio device
VirtualDJ reconnects the controller but does NOT fully reinitialize the headphone output bus
Result:
Master output works
Decks play
Headphone cue is dead
Restarting VirtualDJ fixes it → confirms this is an audio engine reset issue
This is a known class of issue on M-series Macs with modern Pioneer controllers.
 
Is there not a setting in the controller firmware to prevent it going to sleep?
 
Ken Greenspan wrote :

This is a known class of issue on M-series Macs with modern Pioneer controllers.


I'm not sure that this is true because I use automix for Dinner playlists with my DDJ-1000 and never exerienced this problem.
Then again, I've pretty much always used some control on the device to add a song to the automix list that I didn't know and needed to listen to (e.g. pressing Cue to listen to a song if I didn't know it), and not necessarily used Preview.

If the demo mode is preventing normal activity without interaction, I would suspect the firmware/driver before pointing the finger at the OS, especially as the Rev5 is powered separately, and the audio is never cut for the automix play out to master through all of this (which means USB communication is active).
 
Yes I believe there is a firmware solution using the Setting Utility. However I’m satisfied for now with just refreshing my audio connection within VDJ. It’s quick and easy and worked each time I tested this scenario today.

As for Automix, sorry for the confusion but my issue has nothing to do with Automix. The problem occurred due the controller sleeping after about 20 minutes. Thanks everyone…