If you were a DJ twenty years ago you’d spend half your life lugging back-breaking record boxes from gig to gig, city to city, country to country if you were lucky enough to be an A-lister. You’d spend the other half your life digging frantically through your collection trying to work out just how many 12 inches you could fit in your box, and which killer tracks you’d have to leave behind.

Thankfully, in these digital days, deciding which tunes make the weekend grade is a thing of the dim and distant past. Singles weigh nothing (unless we’re counting carbon footprint) and performance systems like Traktor, Rekordbox, Serato, Beatport and more allow you to access hundreds, thousands, even millions of tracks to play out whenever you want.

But what happens if you suddenly need to switch systems? Or your laptop dies out on the road, and you’ve only got your phone? Or you bought the wrong device with you and all the tracks you need are stored on a different one? Or you managed to download the tracks you need to a new device, but now your bloody cuepoints are missing? Or you’re just utterly hacked off with having loads of different playlists on loads of different systems and you’ve given up trying to remember which one has which edit of that one track you know is going to make your entire set blow?

Well fear not, Collabhouse massive. They say necessity is the mother of invention, and that’s exactly what happened five years ago to Marcus Green, the brains behind the increasingly popular MIXO DJ software. Unable to transfer his carefully curated Beatport library from his laptop to his phone, he set about coding a software solution.

Tapping into the global DJ community for support and feedback and working with an army of engineers and tech gurus, Marcus has honed MIXO into a genuinely useful tool for DJs. Whether you’re starting out in your bedroom building your library from scratch, or you’re a superstar artist with a collection spanning years and years of dance music, using MIXO DJ as your central hub could save you hours and hours of effort (and frustration!).

We caught up with Marcus to learn a little bit more about MIXO DJ, what it does, and how it could benefit Collabhouse users…

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Hi Marcus, thanks for joining us today. First up, in ten words or less, can you tell us what MIXO does?

MIXO is your whole DJ Library in the Cloud

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Who did you specifically design MIXO for?

We’ve designed MIXO for DJs of all shapes and sizes, all the way from new hobby DJs to Touring and Club DJs. We have tools in MIXO that are going to make your life easier whatever stage of the DJ journey you’re in.

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What problem did you encounter that sparked off MIXO as a solution?

So I learnt do DJ about five years ago and while setting up for a big birthday party I asked my DJ mentor how I could get all this awesome music I’d purchased from Beatport onto my phone so we could play the tracks on a Bluetooth speaker before we had the sound rig up and running.

Obviously he said that wasn’t really possible as iTunes was on the way out, and using the players in something like Dropbox or Google Drive were not a great solution as they didn’t support playlists, and often wouldn’t play all file formats. They certainly didn’t have cuepoints, beatgrids, album artwork, and all your track meta data!

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How long has it taken you to develop the software, and are we looking at a final solution or is it still very much a work in progress?

So after that party I started coding and putting together an awesome team to develop MIXO into the multi-platform app is it today. It’s been about four years of constant development with lots of high hats and low bass along the way… but we’re really pleased with where we’ve got to now. I don’t think any software is a final solution, especially cloud software, so we’re going to keep building features that make life easier, and save time, for our users.

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Walk us through the different aspects of MIXO…

Initially when you start MIXO you’ll want to import your music library from the performance DJ Software that you’re using now such as Serato, Rekordbox, Traktor, Engine, Virtual DJ, Djay Pro, or others.

MIXO will import all your playlists, cuepoints, beatgrids, album artwork and track metadata, so you’ll have an exact replica of your library. Then you can hook up your own Google Drive, Dropbox or OneDrive and MIXO will upload your whole library to your own cloud storage. You’ll have complete control and ownership of all your own tracks.

Then we sync your playlists, cuepoints and beatgrids over the cloud so you can access your whole library on your phone and all your other computers. Then you can make changes to your library on-the-go and have everything sync real-time across all your devices.

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Why are the cuepoint and beatgrid options so important to the app’s users?

Typically when DJs purchase and download tracks they will spend a considerable amount of time preparing their tracks by adding cuepoints and making sure that the beatgrids are accurate. Many DJs will also tidy up the metadata, genre, or album artwork.

We want to help protect, store, and backup this data, and give DJs the ability to move all this critical info between different performance DJ software. It’s also really handy to be able to edit all this info your phone when you’re not sitting at your laptop!

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Do you have to have your entire library on your MIXO app, or is it more flexible than that?

On your primary device we’ll import all the tracks that are in your DJ software, but we won’t move any tracks around on your hard drive. On your iPhone, Android, tablets, and other computers you can choose to replicate your entire library, or download just on a per-playlist basis.

So for example you could have a studio desktop with your entire library and then a gigging laptop with just 50% of the playlist tracks downloaded. Then on your phone you could stream all the tracks over data, or you could download just a handful of playlists for listening offline. You have complete control over how much storage space is used by tracks on your devices.

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The app works across a lot of different DJ software – are there any programs it doesn’t work with, or that are coming further down the line?

Working with 12 brands of performance DJ software, on Mac, Windows, Linux, iOS & Android, with three cloud storage providers, and MP3, WAV, AIFF, FLAC, AAC, ALAC, OGG, M4P, MP4, AVI, MOV, OGV support, has been a challenge! However over time and with the help of some amazing users we’ve got the ecosystem working smoothly.

There are a few gaps we’re filling in and we’d like to add support for some more of the much smaller DJ software out there.

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Development is obviously key to MIXO, and it’s something you’re openly sharing with users on the website. Why is that?

MIXO is a user-led business and sharing our journey has always been at the core of our ethos. We love working with users to solve problems related to their specific use-cases and clever ideas. While we need to keep our focus on the overall product roadmap, working with so many engaged users around the world really brings us a sense that we’re making a difference to the DJ library workflow for many people.

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What do the MIXO community get out of it?

One of the amazing things about DJs is their huge willingness to help each other learn, develop & grow. Sure there are some endless, unsolvable arguments about vinyl vs digital and people’s views on the sync button, but overall we’ve found that DJs are a friendly bunch and often want to simply help each other figure out how to use technology to improve their workflow, save time, and ultimately deliver amazing sets that bring joy to dancefloors across the world!

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Are there further features planned for 2025 and beyond that will expand on what MIXO does now?

We’ve got lots of exciting features planned for next year and can’t wait to get cracking! The first project will be releasing our new website, support forum, live chat and roadmap tools which are all going to be much more closely integrated with the MIXO app and will support our wonderful community even more. We’re also working on lots of new tools in MIXO to help make organising your music library even easier…

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