Mixxx

Mixxx is an open-source DJ application. It is cross-platform, packed with features, deeply customizable, and offered for free through the support of the Mixxx community.

The Mixxx manual is what introduced me to harmonic mixing — the technique of layering songs in harmony. This idea immediately captivated me.

I began to understand its principles and derived a formula for finding pairs of tracks which naturally work in harmony without the need for Keylock.

I wished to use this from within Mixxx, but at the time, I was quite intimidated to contribute to such a large open-source project.

A few years later, I reached out to the Mixxx maintainers to work on harmonic mixing under Google Summer of Code, and they gladly accepted my proposal.

Thanks to the unfailing help of my mentors and the wider Mixxx community, I was able to break through the barriers of working on a project as complex as Mixxx.

I built the popularly requested Key colors feature, designed key color wheels for dichromatic color blindness, and improved on the formula which sparked this work.

A full project report is on the blog and my work has been successfully integrated.

We’ve since continued collaborating on harmonic mixing features as a community, and we’ve only just begun!