Open-source DJing. Free, no subscriptions, no forced updates, nobody changing the rules. (To be clear, we said “open source” – not “open format”, which of course is a type of DJing, not a way to DJ). If it’s new to you, “open source” refers to a type of software built, maintained and improved for free by enthusiasts. We were interested to revisit whether it’s possible for laptop DJs to play this way in 2025, and so we decided to set up a fully open-source DJ system to find out.
What’s the problem here?
But why, though? Modern DJ hardware and software companies offer impressive features, after all. Why not stick with commercial software and hardware? Well, some feel the choices on offer to DJs come with a cost that goes beyond money. Commercial solutions, they say, lock you into their ecosystem, tie you to subscription models, and create a cycle of constant upgrades that can feel increasingly removed from what DJing is really about.
One way of looking at DJing is that it should feel like playing guitar, drums, or piano – something pure and timeless that doesn’t fundamentally change. It should be a creative outlet that lets you express yourself without worrying about whether your software subscription is current, whether your hardware is compatible with the latest update, or whether you’ll need to buy new gear to access features you’ve already paid for.
For DJs who share this philosophy, open-source software has obvious attractions. When you combine community-developed software that’s available to everyone for free, with running it on an open-source computer that isn’t tied to Windows or Mac, you get something potentially revolutionary: A DJ system that’s not only free (once you own the computer and something to control the software with), but that from that point on is completely on your terms.
Never want to update? You never have to – no one’s making you. Don’t want to pay monthly fees? Open source means you won’t be paying anything beyond your initial hardware investment. Happy to DJ with tools you’re comfortable with and bypass all the marketing pressure to buy the newest gear or subscribe to the latest software updates? That’s exactly what open source DJing offers.
Let’s explore how to build this kind of system. We’re going to use Mixxx, the leading (only, really) open-source DJ platform, so let’s meet it.
What is Mixxx?
Mixxx has existed for many years and gives you all the basic things you need to DJ with. It’s similar in scope to VirtualDJ, Traktor, Rekordbox, Serato, and djay Pro. With a bit of work, this free open-source platform can be put into service as your central DJ software, meaning you don’t need to use any of those other platforms, pay their subscriptions, or update to their latest features in order to DJ.
Like a lot of open source software, Mixxx is rougher around the edges than the polished products you may be used to, and you’re going to have to have patience to get up and running with it. (Although frankly, if you’ve struggled with some of the idiosyncrasies of those commercial platforms, you’ll know they’re not perfect themselves.) But what Mixxx loses in simplicity and straightforward usability, it gains in its philosophy of being free to users, developed by users, and driven by a real community of DJs looking for another way. for some DJs, that’s worth an awful lot.
What does Mixxx run on?
Here’s where it gets interesting. Mixxx is available on Windows (still the most popular platform for hobby DJs) and Mac (the most popular professional platform), but it’s also available to run on Linux – which itself is an open-source operating system.
It’s beyond the scope of this article to dive deeply into Linux, but we’re actually going to use it for our example to show you how you can fully escape commercial software both at the operating system level and at the DJ software level. There are hoops to jump through, and I’m not for a second saying you should ditch whatever you’re using now and switch your whole life over to Linux. But if you have an old laptop lying around that’s not doing anything, this can be a great experiment – putting Linux onto that old laptop, installing Mixxx, and treating it as a DJ-only machine.
While there will be hoops to jump through (and it helps if you’ve got at least a bit of technical background when it comes to computing), you’re going to end up with a dedicated DJ system, on your terms – something a lot of DJs dream of.
Setting Up Your Open-Source DJ System
Installing Linux on an old laptop is possibly easier than you think, and also, know that this is an entirely optional part of this process. You can just install Mixxx alongside your other DJ software on your existing laptop running Mac or Windows. But for those who want to go the full open source route, here’s how it works.
Installing Linux
First, you need to choose your flavour of Linux. There are lots of different varieties out there, but for our purposes we’re going to use Ubuntu, which is probably the most popular version. In short, you go to the Ubuntu website and follow the instructions for how to install it.
The process involves downloading the operating system and moving it in a special way onto a USB drive (you can’t just copy it – you have to “flash” it using software such as balenaEtcher – its’ easy). Then you plug that USB drive into the laptop you want to use. By booting the laptop and pressing a certain key – which changes depending on your laptop, but with Windows laptops it’s normally F12, F2, or Delete – you’ll enter the computer setup,or “BIOS” menu. From there you can select the Ubuntu USB as what you’d like to boot the computer from.It’s all explained in the installation guide linked to above.
The end result is you have an existing laptop running a completely open source operating system, ready for the next step. We used a Dell XPS 9315 laptop for our experiemnt, and we couldn’t get the webcam to work (no drivers exist for Linux and this one), but the rest – WiFi, keyboard, sound etc – all work fine. yYou’ll want to disable any auto-updating, as this is something you’ll want do do on your terms from now on.
Installing Mixxx
Getting Mixxx software (at the time of writing, it’s on v2.5) onto your system is straightforward. On Windows and Mac, you simply download and install like any other application. On Linux, things work a little differently – you’ll spend a bit more time in what’s called a “terminal window”, where you give text instructions to the computer by typing in text.
While if you want to learn about Linux you’ll be learning a lot about this, you don’t really need to know much about this for now – just find any of the dozens of blogs, guides and forum posts on installing Mixxx on Linux (here’s one for Ubuntu 24.04, the current version at the time of writing this), which will walk you through the process step by step.
Once you’ve installed and launched the app, it will look very much like any other DJ software. You can start to play with Mixxx using just your mouse and keyboard to DJ with the laptop alone. I suggest you familiarize yourself with the software at this point before moving on to trying to get hardware to work with it.
Connecting DJ hardware
One of the interesting things about Mixxx for hobbyists is that as long as the DJ device connected to it sends Midi or Hid signals to the computer (which nearly all do), it’s possible to do what’s called “mapping” – where you tell the DJ software which functions you’d like the various knobs, buttons, and pads on the DJ controller to control.
Mixxx officially supports a fair range of controllers out of the box, but when you add in the mappings added by users, there are loads and loads to choose from. And even if there aren’t mappings available for your particular controller, it can be a good project to try and map any Midi device you want to work with it. It really isn’t very hard, and back in the old days of DJ controllers and software we had to do this as a matter of course because everything was so rudimentary.
Don’t expect proper like-for-like control, especially with more complicated units that have screens and so on, because you just won’t get it – you need to temper your expectations here. But with simple controllers, it’s fine and gives you a basis on which to work. Think about such a project as this as something that you tinker with over time rather than getting perfect results straight away, and you won’t go far wrong. also, by the way, for DVS it’s also a great choice, as Mixxx can use any timecode vinyl.
So in order to write this piece, we decided to use the DJ controller that we recommend to most DJs starting out, namely the Pioneer DJ DDJ-FLX4. Straight out of the box, this works with Rekordbox software and Serato DJ Lite, and if you pay subscriptions or an outright purchase (in the case of Serato), you can unlock some powerful features. But in our case, instead of all that, we’re just going to get it working with Mixxx.
Step 1: Connect the Controller – First, plug it in with any USB cable that fits both the FLX4 and your laptop. Once connected, launch the Mixxx software and configure it to work with the controller.
Step 2: Access Mixxx Preferences – The user preferences in Mixxx are initially quite hard to find, but if you press Ctrl (or Command on Mac) and P for preferences, a huge panel will appear containing them all.
Step 3: Set Up the Controller Mapping – You’ll see a controller has been recognized, and by clicking on it you can access the controller setup page. On the right-hand side is a dropdown called “Load Mapping,” where you’ll see mappings for scores of controllers. Select the DDJ-FLX4 mapping and click Apply – the mapping should snap into place.
Step 4: Configure Audio Output – Move up to where it says “Sound Hardware.” The important settings are on the bottom half of that window where there is a tab called “Output”. Use the left-hand column of dropdowns to select Main Output and Headphones Output to the DDJ-FLX4, which should appear as an option because the computer will have recognized your controller’s sound card
Set Channels 1 and 2 to Main Output and Channels 3 and 4 to Headphones Output. This tells the software to send the master outputs to the RCA outputs on the back of your controller and the headphones output to the headphone socket on the front.
Step 5: Test Your Setup – Click the word “Mixer” at the very top right of your screen to show you the actual DJ mixer on your screen. Now you can move the crossfader from left to right, faders up and down, and play with EQs, filters, and so on to check that mapping is working – you should see everything moving on the screen when you do this.
Adding music to Mixxx
If you’ve set up on a different computer to normal (which will probably be the case if you’ve installed Ubuntu Linux), you’ll probably have no music on it, so you need to get some across. Using a USB drive, you can cut and paste as many tunes as you like – drag them into the Music folder or a DJ Music folder, whatever you like, somewhere on the hard drive of your computer.
Either way, we need to get it into the Mixxx software. One of the easiest ways to get started is just to expand the menu tree against the word “Computer” on the left-hand side and navigate to where your music is using the Files feature, which works exactly the same as Mac Finder or Windows Explorer.
Analysing your music
Analysing your music is a little different in Mixxx to other software because you can’t right-click a track or select all the tracks and right-click in the main library window to analyse for BPM, key, waveforms, beat grids, and so on. Instead, on the left-hand side you’ll see the word “Analyze”.
Clicking on there will take you to a window that looks like the same window you were in before, but this time at the top are two buttons: “Select All” and “Analyze”. Click on Select All, click on Analyze, and it gets on with it.
Now we have an analysed set of tunes, we can experiment with inside Mixxx, a DJ controller to control the software, and our headphones and speakers set up just as if we were using a commercial package. And you’re ready to start experimenting!
Conclusion
The idea of this article is not to give you an exhaustive guide on how to do this, but rather to show you that it’s possible and give you an idea of the effort you’ll need. I am quite technically minded, but I’m certainly no computer expert. It took me a couple of hours to figure out how to install Ubuntu Linux on a spare laptop, then a couple of hours more to understand the basics and install Mixxx. ChatGPT is definitely your friend here.
So in theory, within an afternoon you could be running a completely open source, free DJ platform where you’re in control, you’re not paying anyone anything for it, and you’re ready to start learning what the software can do.
Do let us know your thoughts on how you get on, and if you’re interested in watching over my shoulder as we do this and learning in a lot more detail the ins and outs of how this works, then there is a deep-dive mini course about this that I’ve added to our Digital DJ Lab training, which is part of our Access All Areas Lifetime Membership package.
