There’s an impressive new DJ app in town. It’s called DJ.Studio, and it promises to lower the bar for new DJs and for music fans who just want to share the music they love with friends, while at the same time provide timesaving tools for pro DJs producing mixes for radio, or anyone else who needs quality DJ mixes, fast.
Launched today into public beta, DJ.Studio runs on Mac and Windows, plus there’s even a version that runs in your web browser. You can go to the DJ.Studio website and grab it for yourself to try all of its features, for free, right now, up until it is ready for general release.
When it is, it will come in two flavours – a $9/month subscription suitable for most DJs and music fans, plus a $29/month version for pros.
Music discovery – a huge choice of music sources
DJ.Studio is based around three big areas: Music discovery, producing DJ mixes, and sharing those mixes. Let’s look at music discovery first.
The discovery feature incorporates most online music sources you could think of (Spotify, YouTube, Beatport, Traxsource and more), plus direct access to your DJ software and associated playlists (Rekordbox – including cues and phrase information – and also Serato and Mixed in Key playlists, with Traktor, Engine DJ and VirtualDJ to come).
You can browse through your streaming services within DJ.Studio, adding tracks to a “wish list”, from where you can buy them for your mix from download stores or – excitingly – locate the videos on YouTube in order to create a video mix, directly using those videos. This latter feature is possibly one of the most innovative parts of DJ.Studio – see the box lower down for more info about YouTube and what they’ve got planned.
It’s not possible to create and export mixes directly from streaming services though, for the same reason you can’t record mixes done in other DJ software form these sources (licensing restrictions).
Read this next: How To Record Your DJ Sets (Even When Using Streaming Services)
Mixing – A “DAW for DJs”
You do not mix your music in real time with DJ.Studio. Think of it as more like a DAW for DJs. Tracks appear stacked on a timeline, with automations for volume, effects and so on.
If this sounds familiar, you’re probably thinking of an app called Mixmeister, which did this kind of thing many years ago but fell by the wayside and hasn’t been actively developed for a long time (another similar app from the more recent past is Mixed In Key Mashup). It’s also similar to producing a DJ mix in Ableton Live, something many pro DJs and radio DJs do habitually nowadays.
But where DJ.Studio is different is that it can automate this for you, as much or little as you’d like. Give it a bunch of tracks and it will not only calculate a good order for them (you can tell it to respect your choice of first and last track in the mix if you like), but it will make sure everything matches, including key, BPM, and musical phrasing.
You can tell it to prioritise BPM or prioritise key, and it has a whole bunch of modes (for instance, you can specify whether it re-pitches tracks or uses a “vinyl mode”, ie the tracks’ pitches move up and down with the tempo).
Once it has created your mix for you, you can go in and alter to your heart’s content – you can change mix points, change the automations, alter the beatgrids (it allows flexible beatgridding), cut and past sections of the tracks (it respects beats and bars – think Rekordbox Edit mode), “nudge” tracks to make the mixes tighter, and much more. There are effects such as filters, loops, vinyl brake, spinback, reverb and echo, to add sheen to the results.
When you’re happy with a transition, you can lock it, and hit a “next transition” button to move on through your mix. This way you can create a DJ mix in far less time than it would take to actually play the records through – a boon for people who need to do this professionally such as radio DJs, or gym instructors wanting to put together mixes for their classes, as another use case.
Exporting – Never-before-seen options for DJ mix sharing
When it comes to exporting your mix, DJ.Studio “renders” the output, like a video editing app might, or like Ableton would with a project, to turn it into a finished MP3 or WAV. It can then upload this to Mixcloud additionally if you like, complete with timestamps, titles and artists. But it has two more aces up its sleeve:
- Uploading to YouTube – It’ll add visuals including track art, track info and a spectrum analyser, configurable on a track-by-track basis, or for the whole mix (Anyone remember MilkDrop for WinAmp?), and what’s really cool is that it will generate a tracklist for chapter markings and a playlist of tracks in the YouTube player
- Exporting to Ableton Live – It can export the whole mix as an Ableton Live project, with vertical or horizontal (two track) options. This is amazing for radio DJs who may want to build a mix in DJ.Studio and finish off in Ableton. All effect automations etc carry over
DJing With YouTube – a killer feature
One of the most innovative things here is that you can create video DJ mixes with YouTube videos and share them, without owning any of the music, and completely legally.
To start with, when you’re in “music discovery” mode, DJ.Studio can search on YouTube for videos matching the songs you want, and you can build a playlist from these videos.
When you then ask DJ.Studio to create a DJ mix using this material, it will treat the YouTube videos just like any other music source. It will figure out beatgrids, match the tracks’ keys and BPMs, find places to transition, add effects and so on. You can go in and do all the tweaks discussed above. Amazingly, it does all this using YouTube’s player.
In other words, it is not downloading the tracks or ripping them, in any way, making this all legal.
Read this next: How & Where To Share Your DJ Mixes
Here’s the really clever bit: Once you’re done, DJ.Studio will generate a link for you. Click on the link, and it’ll take you to a player in the cloud that plays back your video mix exactly as you made it, using only YouTube’s player.
Again, nothing has been downloaded from YouTube – what DJ.Studio is doing is literally performing your mix on demand, from YouTube’s service, with no local copies of anything except the information about how the mix is to be performed (ie transition points, beatgrid info, pitch, key and so on).
At this point I should let you know that at the time of writing, the final part of this (the link for sharing) isn’t quite ready, but you can play around with the rest already – and it’s mind-blowing. This alone will lower the bar for people wanting to get into DJing who are already using YouTube for all their music (my 10 and 12 year old children would relate).
Watch this feature – it’s a big one.
First Thoughts
This app goes into public beta today, but we first saw it at ADE in 2022 and had a meeting with the developer to discuss it and offer early feedback. It has certainly come on a lot since then – we’re told there is a team of 15 developers working on it, making this a wildly ambitious project.
Widening the appeal of DJing
For many traditional DJs, the idea of automating mixes may seem a bad one, or even like cheating – but for many others who frankly have nothing to prove when it comes to performing mixes and who only really enjoy doing that when there’s an audience, this kind of thing will be hugely welcomed. That old Mixmeister program was popular for a reason.
And remember, a lot of pro DJs and radio DJs already use Ableton Live to build mixes – but this is actually designed for the job, making it incredible in comparison.
Yet DJ.Studio also widens the opportunities for making mixes and sharing music, which is something as a DJ school we always approve of.
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From people taking their first steps making YouTube mixes, to hassled gym instructors who care about their soundtracks to their classes but don’t have the skills, time or inclination to learn beatmixing for themselves, there’s no reason why the ability to produce good sounding continuous music mixes has to be tied to two decks and a mixer.
Keymixing isn’t everything
This app leans heavily on Mixed In Key technology and philosophy (indeed, it has a partnership with that app), and also respects our fuzzy keymixing approach to keymixing, which we welcome of course.
But at the same time, harmonic mixing is an art as much as a science, and some of the concepts here that have been lifted directly from Mixed in Key – and that it uses to produce supposedly harmonic results – are things we’d personally turn off immediately (“Jaws Mix”, “Diagonal Mix”). We’ll need to spend some time with the app and play with the options to see if these things could be tweaked to our liking.
Plus, we think it’s also fine to disregard keymixing, especially where one of the transition tracks is only drums – but this staple mixing style that we teach and use is one that the developer has told us in the past that they regard as a bit boring.
We disagree – and again, we need time with the app to see if they’ve had a rethink on this, and would like to confirm that such transitions (where possible) can be an option/preference in the automation settings. As we always say, keymixing is a “tool, not a rule”.
What else could they add?
There’s so much here, that it remains to be seen what “sticks” with the DJ community – we suspect though that the YouTube video mixing idea – where the only thing created is metadata and the mix can be replayed without affecting anyone’s copyright (and with the artists getting paid, of course!) is going to fly – but also that many time-starved pros will love some of the advanced features too.
That said there are things we’d like to see added, so here they are:
First, if they can widen the beatgridding to intuitively deal with all music, not just electronic music (think older pop, funk, disco, indie dance – anything that you can dance to!), that’d appeal to many more DJs.
After all, the best DJs today can properly mix with any type of music. (It’s why our Mixing For Mobile & Wedding DJs course has been such a hit). This is definitely something we’d like to see them spend some time on.
Also – it’s the elephant in the room, but it’s a big one – stems! When you’re looking at a DAW for DJs, that is an entry point nowadays. I suspect the developer is going to have to find a way to add stems as an option here, so DJs can play with acapellas, instrumentals and so on while building mixes. Let’s see what happens there…
Finally, one thing we weren’t shown, but that I am sure is on their roadmap (or already there) is Midi mapping, because there’s no reason why this couldn’t be even easier to use with hardware control, rather than mouse and keyboard (that said there’s already decent keyboard shortcuts).
When we edit video here at Digital DJ Tips, we use an app called DaVinci Resolve, with a “Speed Editor”, which is a piece of hardware with one jogwheel and a load of buttons. It seriously speeds up our workflow. Wouldn’t a “Mix editor” hardware device for DJ.Studio be cool? We’d love to see that!
Finally…
As I said earlier, this is already a wildly ambitious project. It offers zero threat to working DJs (you’d never perform live with it), but it does make DJing more fun, opens up completely new possibilities for new sets of people, and will save time and add to the creativity of busy pros. Plus, it’s cool.
Give it a go – the developer has put it into public beta precisely so they can get feedback and bring the product to maturity – so this is your chance to play, for free, and let them know what you like, don’t like, and would want to see added. It’s a really exciting start, and definitely puts the final nail in the coffin of Mixmeister!
Click here to go the the DJ.Studio website and try this beta.
Phil Morse
