mixxx-2.0-full shot-4-deck
Reviews

QUICK LOOK: Mixxx 2.0 free DJ software

mixxx-2.0-full shot-4-deck

The digital DJ software industry is a brutal, cutthroat game at the top, something made even more evident by what’s happened with Pioneer DJ and their release of rekordbox as more than just music management software, undercutting their former BFFs, Serato. But it’s easy to forget that there’s lots going on outside of the holy trinity of Traktor, Serato and rekordbox: the likes of VDJ seem to be cleaning up in certain corners of the DJ market, and there’s constant innovation from the smaller developers like Algoriddim and Mixvibes.

That’s not what we are going to talk about here. They’re all paid software. They’re all created by paid coders and designers, using the usual means of money exchanged for goods and services. What about people doing this in their spare time? For free? And creating an application that has all the top-tier features you’d expect from modern DJ software? Would it be any good?

There is such a program, and it now has lots of shiny new features, and a brand new version. Mixxx 2.0 has been in testing for a long time (initially as 1.9 beta) and then as a rebranded as a full new release. How does it stack up against the competition? I take a quick first look at some of the features and give my thoughts.

What’s new?

Since this is essentially the 1.9 beta, you get all the juicy goodies like four decks, effects racks, loads of improvements, tweaks and UI refinements. On top of all the stuff that was in the beta, there are a load more mappings for various hardware, including a full map for the Native Instruments Traktor Kontrol S4 mk2. It’s a significant enough milestone that the team felt it deserved its own version release.

Comparing to the competition

It’s easy to feel like stacking Mixxx up against the likes of Traktor or Serato is a bit unfair, seeing as how they’re radically different approaches to software development, but really, that’s what their competition is going to be. Sure, Mixvibes Cross, VDJ8 and their ilk might seem like a more realistic group, but they’re all fighting a war against the buy-in of the front runners.

The biggest thing that many of the paid software have is something of an ecosystem that gives users a cohesive experience. That’s the biggest hurdle teams like Mixxx (and any other pure DJ software developers) have. But… Mixxx is free! Both economically and philosophically, and that is a big plus.

My impressions

Firing up Mixxx 2.0, I managed to get DVS up and running with minimal issues. Setting up the inputs and outputs on the audio interface is fairly intuitive, but one niggle I have is that you HAVE to hit the APPLY button before hitting OK otherwise your changes aren’t saved. It’s a small niggle, but a frustrating one.

The software works with many of the timecode records floating around at the moment, with a noticeably exception of the Traktor Mk2 records, but I don’t think anyone outside of Native Instruments has them working. The list includes the Mixvibes timecode vinyl as well. I tested with both Traktor Mk1 and Serato NoiseMap records and the latter seem to be more responsive. I felt way more stable using the Serato records to mix.

Audio effects were a fairly recent addition to Mixxx, after a very long wait. The team decided to go with the philosophy “less is more” and put out five different effects: Flanger, BitCrusher, Filter, Reverb, and Echo. I’m not a huge fan of effects, and know all too well how easy it is to overuse them, particularly as many of the effects you can find have such narrow use-cases that they’re just wasted. I had a go with all the five different effects and found they sounded decent and were simple to use, mimicking what you’d expect to find in other software. One feature that I noticed (and like) is that you can assign each of the four effects to any audio channel, but also the master output.

Just like pretty much all the current software offerings (apart from the new rekordbox, apparently) Mixxx doesn’t support high resolution screens, meaning much of the interface looks pretty blurry on high resolution screens like retina MacBook Pros and their ilk. I really don’t know why it’s so much trouble to get this fixed (perhaps someone more knowledgable could let us know, on record?) but if Mixxx can beat the competition to the post on this, it’d be a big help in bragging rights.

mixxx-skins-2.0

Something that’s been a problem with Mixxx ever since I can remember is the quality of the skins on offer compared to other software. While the current skins have been tweaked and improved there still needs to be work done to make the default ‘LateNight’ skin a bit more contrasting. It suffers from a similar issue to what I experienced on the Xone:43C: too much red/orange on black. It is tough to get right, though. Not least because the look of DJ software is such a divisive subject. People are always arguing about the look of Traktor vs Serato.

As I say every time it comes up in these articles, audio quality is such a subjective thing that it’s difficult to talk about in a balanced way. When writing about it, you can only go with what your ears are hearing. That said, using the same Traktor Audio 10 and ESI nEar05 studio monitors (still love these, by the way) that I’ve been using for a while, Mixxx doesn’t seem to sound as good as Traktor. It’s hard to put a finger on it, but it sounds a bit distorted, regardless of how the audio chain is set up. I also noticed Mixxx doesn’t seem to run as hot as Traktor, but it’s still within a decent parameter.

I found that beatgrids can be inaccurately analysed, but Mixxx gets the BPM mostly correct. I don’t think I’ve ever come across DJ software that gets it 100% right, though, so it’s only another minor niggle. Mixxx allows you fix the erroneous beatgrids by hand.

mixxx-2.0-full shot-browser

I do like the fact that Mixxx has Traktor library integration as well as iTunes library out of the box (so to speak). Obviously, if you’re coming from any other software, you’re out of luck, but it’s a nice little hook in for Traktor users. There’s also a neat addition to your crates: as you add music, it tells you the total play time of all the tracks within that crate. It’s not an exact science, but does give you an idea of how much music you have ready to play. Other than that, the browser is pretty basic, lacking some of the smarter features of the likes of Serato.

A lot of users will be deeply entrenched in their current software/hardware workflow, so moving over needs to be painless and intuitive, but also meet people’s needs. For example, the Traktor Kontrol X1 isn’t exactly an unusual part of people’s setups. To be fair, this isn’t an issue limited to Mixxx. It’s something that all the smaller DJ software platforms can suffer from. Atomix understand this and provide mappings for literally everything they can get their hands on.

Sure, there’s a decent list of all-in-one controllers mapped to Mixxx, but with a lot of the software features designed for DVS (and the flexibility in what timecode you can use) it makes sense to make some of the modular controllers part of the family. My advice would be for the Mixxx development team to hold up on developing new features for a month and start a full on campaign to get user MIDI map contributions for every sort of controller out there. Cover as many bases as possible and boost that library. They could call it ‘Mad MIDI Month’ or something.

When you look at all the features, the user interface, the core functionality, bar a few oddities, it’s a really impressive bit of software, arguably on par with much of the commercial offerings out there. If you’ve ended up with one of the controllers officially supported by Mixxx, or want to delve into DVS on a budget, This is a great way to start, and you may well just decide to stick around for the long haul. Back in the day, Mozilla Foundation showed that open source software could be a great piece of software with something like a browser, but Mixxx shows that even niche software can have success as open source.

Your thoughts

Do you have any software you want us to take a look at?

You can grab Mixxx 2.0 completely free from their website and get started.

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Dan Morse
Writer-reviewer
Opinionated DJWORX newsie. Loves Traktor, analogue mixers, vinyl and Android. The best Techno bedroom DJ you know.
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12 Comments

  1. This is a good backup, but the look is just awful on a MBP. Unless they get their software bundled with somebody they are going to be fighting all the way through.

    Other than aesthetics it seems to work well. I tried it out one night when it was slow, but then switched back to Traktor as my controllers are all NI.

    For somebody starting out with only a laptop then this might be the entry into the scene.

    2. This piqued my interest! But do I understand correctly that DJPlayer does only relative (not absolute) DVS control?

      I’d be interested in Mk2 decoding, but whether it justifies the effort in creating a finished decoder, given the ready availability and performance of the alternatives…

  3. “Mixxx doesn’t seem to sound as good as Traktor. It’s hard to put a
    finger on it, but it sounds a bit distorted, regardless of how the audio
    chain is set up.”

    Anyone else experienced this? Does it mean the sound is useless for the club? How bad is it? Can it be fixed in some settings?

  4. Hi, Mixxx contributor here. Thanks for the review :)

    “As I say every time it comes up in these articles, audio quality is such a subjective thing that it’s difficult to talk about in a balanced way. When writing about it, you can only go with what your ears are hearing. That said, using the same Traktor Audio 10 and ESI nEar05 studio monitors (still love these, by the way) that I’ve been using for a while, Mixxx doesn’t seem to sound as good as Traktor. It’s hard to put a finger on it, but it sounds a bit distorted, regardless of how the audio chain is set up. I also noticed Mixxx doesn’t seem to run as hot as Traktor, but it’s still within a decent parameter.”

    It’s not so subjective. If you don’t tell Mixxx to do anything to your audio, it won’t affect it at all. That said, ReplayGain is enabled by default, but you have to have your files analyzed in advance to make use of it. Mixxx will analyze files the first time you load them, but it won’t apply ReplayGain until the track is played again to avoid a jump in the gain while it’s playing. You can analyze files in batches by going to “Analyze” in the left library pane. It’s possible that Mixxx wasn’t running as hot when you tried it because your tracks weren’t analyzed for ReplayGain, but they were in Traktor. If the signal going to your sound card from the software is not as strong, the signal-to-noise ratio and thus sound quality would not be as good.

    The ReplayGain 1.0 algorithm in Mixxx 2.0 (and prior versions) is alright, but definitely not perfect. Fortunately, there will be a new ReplayGain algorithm in Mixxx 2.1 that works much better. I barely ever have to adjust the deck gains testing it. :)

    I’m guessing you were using an external mixer considering you wrote about timecode vinyl, so this might not apply to your use. Mixxx 2.0 now has 3 different choices of equalizers available that can be selected in the preferences. The default Bessel4 LV EQ will not affect the sound whatsoever when the software EQs are at unity. For those using internal mixing and software EQs though, IMO the Linkwitz-Riley EQ option sounds much better.

    “My advice would be for the Mixxx development team to hold up on developing new features for a month and start a full on campaign to get user MIDI map contributions for every sort of controller out there. Cover as many bases as possible and boost that library. They could call it ‘Mad MIDI Month’ or something.”

    The trouble is that controllers aren’t cheap. Anyone with a computer can work on new features for Mixxx, but adding support for a new controller requires access to that controller. If you want to help get a hold of more controllers or funds to acquire them, that would be awesome. ;)

    Btw, Mixxx 1.9 was released way back in February 2011. The beta for 2.0 was referred to as 1.12 before the release.

    1. I sort of respond to the concerns about my sound quality experience above, which might clear things up a bit. Yes, I was using an external mixer, but I did my best to ensure it was a clean signal from the deck to the speakers. I certainly hadn’t applied any sound sculpting intentionally.

      RE ‘mad MIDI month’: It’s just an idea I was spitballing to try to get people to contribute mappings from the community. You could run it as a bit of a contest where the core contributors help members get some less polished, but more diverse, mappings to a point they can become officially part of the Mixxx install. As a FLOSS project, I completely understand you can’t compete with the budget of Atomix to get controllers mapped, but something like this could help lower the bar and encourage contributions. At the moment, it feels like the philosophy is “if you have these controllers, Mixxx will work” when it needs to be “Mixxx will work”.

  5. Hi Dan, thank you for your review.

    “Mixxx doesn’t seem to sound as good as Traktor”

    That’s weird, since 2.0 the Mixxx sound should be bit-perfect unity. Mixxx has also a 32 bit floating point engine, which does make it pretty hard to produce destored sounds.

    Which os are you using? And which sound API?
    What are your duffer settings? Does your underfloor counter count?

    Do you know if Traktor uses a magic sound improvement DSP or something? Which file types are you using?

    1. Hi,

      I was using an Audio 10 running on the latest OS X and the issue I had was the volume on each channel was much lower than I’d expect with Traktor, meaning I had to push the gains much more ( Mixxx had the dial up 3/4+ and Traktor tends to have it at 2/3 max. At similar volumes on the mixer, I felt like it wasn’t as vibrant as the Audio 10 can do. I always caveat my comments on audio quality with the fact I’m no expert and it can be totally subjective. The other thing is that I’ve had nearly 12 years to get Traktor working the best it can get, and I only dip in and out of using Mixxx. I completely accept it might be something set up weirdly.

      1. The Loudness issue is easy to “fix”. By default, Mixxx applies the analyzed replay gain to the track, which is likely around -6 dB for modern pop songs. This gives you a the ReplayGain default loudness of -18 LUFS. You can tweak the target loudness to any louder value, but be careful not reach the clipping region for tracks with a wide dynamic range. Mixxx does not have a limiter like Traktor.

        Which EQ do you use in Mixxx and Traktor?