Mixxx: GPL DJ Software

Used mixxx to do the djing for my wedding last year. Created a collaborative music voting site for the guests, then got all the music and made a mix which worked really well, even going between genres. Had a lot of fun playing with it getting everything ready and it worked with a couple of DJ controllers bought cheaply without any issue.

I even made a little program to read the now playing track from the sqlite database which then allowed the lights to follow the music (for complex reasons I don't have time to explain).

Most importantly it worked on the night without missing a beat.

Been using it for the past few years, nothing bad to say about it, lovely piece of software. Vendor lock-in is very present in this field, with different brands of controllers supported by a myriad of proprietary DJ applications all more interested in onboarding you to their music subscription services rather than implement useful features or support open protocols.

Meanwhile, Mixxx allows you to write your own adapter scripts for any controller you have (as long as it outputs MIDI), and there's a built-in library featuring scripts for the most common commercial controllers and MIDI devices out there.

I'm really happy that 2.5 added 'beats until next marker', which together with a USB controller from Numark I have pretty much feature complete DJ setup for under $500 (including cost of laptop & controller) without having to rely on Windows, Mac, subscription licenses or feature-crippled 'lite' versions.

And it's surprising how quickly people adapt to it when they're used to other setups, within an hour a few people have gone from 'oooh, can I have a go' to showing me their own tips, tricks and different styles.

Especially combined with a youtube & soundcloud downloader running on a different workspace, I can get pretty much any track into the library within a minute or two.

Mixx is sneaky good as a TTRPG soundscape mixer. You can queue layer multiple ambiance tracks over tempo-matched music, build soundboards, and hook it all to hardware controls.

It's overkill, but a lot of similar tools either lock you into a media ecosystem, lack some power-user functionality, have a subscription, or don't work at all on Linux or macOS.

Mix is absolutely awesome. One of the most carefully organized open source projects that I've seen.

Some years ago I made a Mixxx demo video with a DYI "integrated controller". It demos Linux boot to Mixxx, touch screen, beatmatching and some modest effects:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DjHvW4OsQ2Y

Mixxx devs: if you are reading this... cheers :-)

I've been using this to make mix tapes at home (bought a vintage tape player). It has awesome cross fading capabilities, and it does volume normalization out of the box, so it's a very nice piece of software for those features alone. Playlist and library management is also solid. My only complaint is that the UI isn't very intuitive for a non-DJ, and it took me some time to figure out how to do basic stuff, but it's all there in the docs, so you can certainly figure it out.

I've been using this for the few DJ sets I do per year. Very complete software, very stable also.

Sadly I have to use RekordBox now that I want to not bring the laptop + DJ controller, but just a USB stick. And RekordBox does not run well on Linux (tried VirtualBox and Wine, both failed attempts).

Sadly there's no RecordBox clone, or "export to RekordBox USB" feature on Mixxx.

I used mixxx to DJ my brother's wedding. I think it was 2013 or 2014. The moment I got the signal to switch to a specific track for the bride's first dance with her Father, mixxx locked up my laptop. Guests were staring at me, one offered a hushed, "they're waiting!" Completely unresponsive, I had to hard reboot my locked up computer and boot back into Ubuntu. Then I opened VLC where I played the tracks for the rest of the evening. Probably not mixxx's fault, but I will never forget that moment.

I use it simply as an audio player. I like the way I can queue up songs and then let the Auto DJ play. I know other audio players can in principle do that but in Mixx it is very explicit. I also like to see key and BPM just to satisfy my curiosity.

I've had a lot of fun setting mixxx up for DJing on my steam deck, with fully scriptable (in javascript) USB hid bindings, I've been able to reverse engineer the steam deck's control schemes to be able to mix quite portably.

Also works great with my Traktor mixer. Traktor doesn't have linux support for their software, so I was glad my mixer didn't brick after the switch

Been using it since ~2006 ... it's pretty great software. Hooking it up to a cheap sub-$100 MIDI controller is amazing.

Just looked it up - I had no idea it's from 2001 - this puts it in a small group of long-active FLOSS

I very much like the website itself, built to work without Javascript, and doesn't make any external calls as far as I can tell

I want to do scratching by pushing a button on my laptop keyboard (instead of dragging the spinning record with my mouse-cursor).

Can Mixxx do this?

It's interesting to me that there's no screenshot on the front page (they're buried on other pages). Not only is there no screenshot, the main image on the front page is an image of code.

Not a complaint, just an observation. I'd expect a DJ software site to show DJs the interface as the very first thing.

As examples, all of these have an image of their UI as centerpiece

https://www.native-instruments.com/en/products/traktor/dj-so...

https://rekordbox.com/en/

https://www.ableton.com/en/live/

Been using Mixxx since 2015, I haven't liked every update they put out, but its always been solid software.

I was a DJ for a good few years, and once I discovered Mixxx I used it exclusively. High quality software, compatible with basically every controller, Linux support, and an open-source license - what more could you ask for?

Music has fallen out of my life since then, but I am glad Mixxx is going strong.

I thought this was Donald’s Knuth Mix computer at first

I DJ for partner dances and have used Mixxx after i discovered DJ software

It was cool getting to explore features like the ability to stream to radio websites that others would follow a link to, to hear the music( something done in the first few years of COVID to facilitate DJ'ed music for 'online ' dances, which were a thing for a while.

I tout it heavily and enjoy it, and it is pretty incredible that it provides all that it does for free and in a open source manner . I hope it continues to grow. I run into a few others who use Virtual DJ and hope that Mixxx eventually picks up the few things they do it does not yet do

RekordBox is a well known piece of s** and it's great to see someone try to enter the arena. Now we need a legit competitor to the DJM / CDJ's which cost, all told, >$10k for a standard, club-ready setup.

I used to use Mixxx a lot about a decade ago when I was DJing weekly in some bars and also had a weekly radio show. It was great. I'm glad to see it's still around and going strong.

I currently use DJ.Studio so I'm interested how Mixxx compares.

Genuinely curious: when people submit URLs like this to HN - rather than say a specific link to an article or blog post - without comment or actually submitting responses to the conversation, are they just posting it to say 'hey, take a look at this if you haven't heard of it'? Or am I missing something? (Possibly their descriptive text to go with the URL isn't obvious/visible to me somehow?)

I use it as my main software for my Traktor Kontrol S2.

Some Lights are buggy and the fix is not yet out.

Also Highlighting Tracks based on a fitting Key is only availible in the Alpha Branch of the software, which obivously has lots of other issues.

Besides that its an easy software which can handle all of my other feature requirements and it runs really nice.

So i would really recommend it ;)

I heard about mixxx back in 2013 from someone who managed to make his Linux lighter ( replacing the kernel or something? ). Then he compiled mixxx without all the unnecessary functions he didn't want. He managed to lower down latency response to 4ms or maybe below I remember. His DJ sets where amazing!

Hijacking this thread on a tangential - can folks share some guides on the basics of getting started mixing music? For a total noob who would like to explore this field. Obviously those using open source software (or atleast software that works on Linux) would be the most useful to me.

I used Mixxx as a teenager to feel like a DJ. Great to see it here!

What are good controllers for using together with Mixxx?

I stumbled across Mixxx many years ago when I wanted to get started with digital vinyl systems (timecode vinyl records). It was the really hot shit back then and Serato and Traktor were the market leaders.

Back then Mixxx didn't feel like a finished product, everything was not ready to actually use it in a "production" setting.

Then I found xwax [1], which uses the same timecode library as mixxx iirc. Very unspectacular UI, no mouse support, but super stable and easily as good as the commercial Serato Scratch Live. Just needed a 4i4o audio interface for around $100 and it was good to go, awesome software!

[1] https://xwax.org/

Mixxx is great! I used it with a Nano Korg Kontrol 2 when I just started learning DJing a few years ago.

Rock solid DJ software. I've used it for IRL events, streaming, radio shows. Higly recommended.

Eagerly waiting for the Ableton Link support.. seems to be just around corner (or a couple).

Love mixxx! I use it regular for DJing with an ancient ddj sb2 controller

What does GPL actually do?

How does mixx compare to rekordbox?

c++, GPL2

>GPL DJ Software

Its kind of a nuisance that, as a requirement to build Mixxx on MacOS, ones has to use foreign binaries, disable Gatekeeper, run a 'first build', and from that point on .. can treat the project as a regular CMake project. Re-enable Gatekeeper after the 'first build'.

Hmm.

What are the custom binaries for? Surely not cmake. Not having - yet - done this myself (until I can put it in a VM), I'm nevertheless kind of curious about this necessity.

Any Mixxx/MacOs devs care to describe the contents?

What does GPL stand for?