The new shape of Mixxx 3.0 – Open Source DJing

https://mixxx.org/news/2025-08-06-qml-project/

79•SamWhited•6h ago

Comments

weinzierl•6h ago

I love Mixxx, I use it daily as a music player. I know it is a virtual DJ deck, but it is also a fantastic music player.

That being said the following sentence makes me a bit concerned "The current user interface of Mixxx has served us well, but as technology evolves, so must we."

As far as I know QWidget is neither deprecated nor are there any plans for that. I think Mixxx has one of the best UI's I ever encountered, in design and execution. Please don't botch this.

teruakohatu•6h ago

I am intrigued, what makes it a good music player for non-DJs?

weinzierl•5h ago

I like the way you organize your music in crates and playlists, which are permanent structures and then you arrange everything for the occasion[1] in the AutoDJ, which is ephemeral.

I also like the BPM and key display.

[1] In my case just my current mood

herbst•6h ago

I recently looked and bought into the DJ tech today. I know mixxx, used it many times. And Rekordbox isn't perfect either. But you can't even compare. If the one is Dj Software, mixxx right now, is just a music player with DJ theme

__jonas•5h ago

I’d be interested to know what the main differences are

crtasm•4h ago

An alternate view on this is Rekordbox is software that you have to pay for, tries to upsell you to a monthly subscription, has arbitrary limitations on what hardware it will work with and by default sends data about every track you play to some 3rd party service.

Mixxx doesn't do any of that and it's absolutely powerful enough to use for DJ sets.

ahartmetz•6h ago

Yeah, I know both QWidgets and QML quite well and I also don't see a strong reason to port. Genuinely custom painting of highly detailed elements in QML is either pretty annoying (comparable to doing it in OpenGL, and then you still need to do user interaction without much help from the framework) or slow if cobbling it together from existing items or using a canvas. I've helped fix particular issues on a project that needed highly detailed custom painting in QML (think rendering text in an editor component, though it wasn't that), but in the end it failed for performance reasons. I knew of some really good developers on that project, so it wasn't plain incompetence. Edit: I think it can be done, it's just a lot of avoidable work.

Mixxx might not have that problem, not sure. The waveform view is presumably custom painted, but shouldn't be too difficult. There may or may not be others.

sugarpimpdorsey•2h ago

The one killer feature any DJ software can have - and it's a tough one - is....

Not crashing during playback.

But hey why refine and fix bugs when you can constantly iterate on new features no one asked for (sadly this applies to most open source software).

aurumque•6h ago

The fact that Mixxx works as well as it does on Linux is a testament to human ingenuity and perseverance. It is truly The People's mixing deck.

clpwn•6h ago

Shoutout to Mixxx, it's one of the examples of open source being able to match and in many ways surpass the enjoyability of their closed-source for-profit alternatives. I regularly give it as an example alongside things like Blender to show that a better, more free software world is possible outside of just developer tools.

dang•6h ago

Related. Others?

Mixxx: GPL DJ Software - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42769871 - Jan 2025 (133 comments)

Mixxx, a free and open source DJ software - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31731814 - June 2022 (14 comments)

Open source digital DJ: Integrating Airtime and Mixxx - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2580273 - May 2011 (4 comments)

paranoidxprod•4h ago

Recently got a mix board and have been learning on mixxx. If anyone has any general guides for learning to dj in mixxx I’d love to know. Honestly, I feel a little lacking in the fundamentals of digital audio so I’m probably going to focus on that before going too deep, but so far mixxx has been great! It was pretty hard for me to navigate, but that’s 100% because I have no idea what I’m doing. Curious to seeing if the update will help with discoverability.

elevaet•4h ago

Mixxx is a great piece of software, even better that it's OSS and runs linux. Exciting to see a new major release.

I've been using it lately (2.x) just mixing internally and with cue points set up in my tracks, and using the laptop keyboard for shortcuts. Works really well. For the occasional xfade etc I do have an external MIDI controller mapped to the xfade, levels, and eq but could get away without it for my style of mixing.

Been DJing off and on for 25y and producing electronic music for 30y.

nipperkinfeet•3h ago

This generally results in a bulky and oversized UI with excessive padding. The current UI is satisfactory and lightweight. Why fix something that's working well?

laserbeam•58m ago

Every single dj software is super crammed and has no empty space in it. This is true because djs cannot switch views while performing. There’s a lot of info which must be visible at all times on 1 single page. Regardless of UI framework or target device, it will continue to be like that because the target audience needs the interface to be dense.

allenbina•3h ago

I got out of DJing and into tech because of my love for dental insurance. For a while I tried to influence the direction of mixxx and was getting great feedback from other DJs but none from the developers.

This was my great introduction to why I will never be a great developer, and why open source will never be on par with paid professional software. I admire their efforts, but mixxx will always be a hobby project in my eyes.

zetanor•3h ago

What methods were you using to try and influence the direction of Mixxx?

Inviz•3h ago

I wish this had youtube video mixing support. This is something i cant find in other software.

allenbina•3h ago

this went out of style a long time ago. when you play videos out, everyone just stares at the screens.

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