Alpha guide

Everything you need, on one page

How to set MixReady up, build your first set, read what it tells you, and get the result onto your gear. Ten minutes end to end.

01Setup

Install the app Open the .dmg from your invite email and drag MixReady to Applications. It's self-signed during the alpha, so the first launch needs right-click → Open rather than a double-click. macOS will ask once.
Sign in and connect Beatport Settings → Accounts. This is what lets MixReady read your collection and push playlists back. Nothing is bought or changed on your account.
Pull your collection Settings → Refresh collection. Playlists, purchases, hearted tracks and the artists and labels you follow all come across. Takes about half a minute; run it again whenever you've bought or followed something new.
Scan your rekordbox library optional Settings → My library → Scan library. Read-only: MixReady never writes to rekordbox here and never modifies an audio file. This is what unlocks full-length playback and building from tracks you own.
Add some rotation optional, high value Save 1001tracklists pages from your browser (⌘S → "Webpage, HTML Only") into a folder and point Rotation → Ingest folder at it. Twenty or thirty sets from DJs you rate makes a visible difference to sequencing.

rekordbox analyses in the background. Freshly imported files have no BPM or key for a while, and can't be sequenced until they do. Run Scan library again once rekordbox has caught up — each scan picks up whatever finished since.

02Your first set

Go to New set and describe the night. The prompt is the only thing that's required — everything below it is optional and mostly gets filled in for you.

120min melodic house, sunset rooftop into peak time
— like Adriatique and RÜFÜS DU SOL, nothing too obvious

Length, genre and reference artists are read straight out of that sentence and shown as chips so you can correct them. The knobs worth knowing:

Knob	What it changes
Length	Target set duration. A number in the prompt (`120min`, `2hr`) wins over the slider.
Where you're playing	Sets the energy arc. A warm-up climbs; peak-time club starts high and stays.
How well-known	Underground deep cuts at one end, tracks a room will recognise at the other.
Where from	Which sources are allowed: files you own, streaming, or both. Defaults to your gear — a CDJ-and-USB rig gets owned files only.
Must-plays	Tracks you know you're playing. Pin one as opener, closer or peak and the set is built around it.

Hit Generate and wait on it — about a minute, whether you asked for 60 minutes of music or 180.

03Reading and working the set

The set page opens on Set health: one coloured block per transition, in order, plus what needs attention.

smooth Key and tempo agree. Blend it however you like.
workable Fine with a little care — usually a tempo nudge or a shorter overlap.
tricky A real clash. Rough spots to fix names it and tells you the move: which keys, which direction the BPM goes, and whether to trade bass rather than layer melodies.

Below that is the energy and BPM curve for the whole set against the plan, then the tracklist. Open any track's transition card for the full recipe — prep, drop and the bar counts.

Fixing what you don't like

Swap — ranked alternatives that still fit the key and BPM of the tracks either side.
Blacklist — a track, artist, label or genre, permanently. It's filtered out of every future build.
Set player — hear the whole set as a trailer, every transition back-to-back, before you commit.

Swapping a track is remembered. That artist gets a small penalty in later builds, so the picks drift toward your taste without you having to blacklist anyone.

Transition Lab

The sliders icon on any transition card opens that join in the lab, and while it's open it is the page. The top half draws both tracks as waveforms on the real beat grid — rekordbox's own where you own the file — with the overlap shaded, the mix-in / trade / mix-out handles marked, the plan's automation curves underneath, and a phase lane reporting how far the two have drifted by the last bar. The bottom half is a working two-deck mixer: trim, three-band EQ, filter, echo, channel faders, crossfader, riser, and beat-jump per deck. On the right, the script for the move, timed against the same clock the waveform is drawn on.

auto control lets the plan drive the mixer so you can watch the move happen. Switch to manual and the controls are yours — it seeds from wherever the automation currently is, so nothing jumps. The technique dropdown plays any move in the catalogue on these two records, including ones your gear can't do; it changes what you hear, never what the set is taught as.

Input	Does
Drag a handle	Moves the mix point, snapped to the bar. The blend re-plans around it.
`⌥` + drag	Snaps to the beat — a quarter of a bar.
`⇧` + drag	Jumps to phrase boundaries: "swap at the previous breakdown".
`p`	Play / pause.
`←` `→`	Jump the preview window by the beat-jump size, without moving the mix.
`m`	Back to the mix point.
Click the waveform	Play from there.
`‹` `›`	Step to the previous or next join without leaving the lab.

Save keeps the edit on the set as a bar offset, and a your edit chip marks the join. That offset then reaches everything downstream — the coaching steps re-time themselves, the rekordbox cue points move, and the exported mix follows. Reset puts the join back to the planned geometry.

Beginner mode and the practice sheet

The Beginner / Standard toggle in the set header is a real mode, not a help setting, and it's remembered on your account rather than in the browser — the server needs it to choose which techniques and which gear vocabulary you get. In beginner mode the expert plumbing steps back and Practice becomes a primary button.

The practice sheet turns the set into a course: every join written out as numbered prep and blend steps with a plain line under each one saying why, a progress counter ("0 of 17 joins down"), and two ways through — play order to rehearse the set end to end, or hardest first to spend your time where the tricky joins are. One at a time narrows it to a single join; Print gives you the whole thing on paper. There's a phrase trainer for counting bars, and every term the steps use has a plain-English explainer behind the Learn menu.

The reading happens in MixReady; the practising happens on the decks. Run Export → Write mix cues and the timing crosses into rekordbox as coloured cue points, so nothing has to be read mid-mix. Standard mode hides none of this — it just puts the expert plumbing back.

04Getting it onto your gear

Everything lives under Export on the set page.

Route	Use it when
Push to Beatport	You're streaming. Creates a real playlist on your account; it shows up in any LINK-capable DJ app.
Add to rekordbox	You're playing off USB. Writes the playlist into rekordbox directly.
Write mix cues	You want the in and out points already set. Cues appear on rekordbox's next launch.
rekordbox XML	The direct write can't be used, or you're importing into something else.
Push to SoundCloud	The set leans on tracks that live there.
Practice sheet	You want it on paper — the set as steps, printable.

rekordbox has to be closed for a direct write. Use Add to rekordbox & reopen it and MixReady handles the quit-and-relaunch for you.

05What happens to your data

Your audio never leaves your machine. Files are decoded and analysed locally. Only derived features — BPM, key, energy, phrase grid, mix points — are sent up, and that's kilobytes per track.
File paths stay local. The server never sees where anything lives on your disk.
rekordbox is read-only unless you explicitly choose "Add to rekordbox" or "Write mix cues". No audio file is ever modified.
Beatport and SoundCloud tokens are stored locally and used only for the reads and playlist pushes you trigger.

06Known limits

macOS only. No Windows build in the alpha.
rekordbox is the supported library. Serato and Traktor users can go via the XML export, but nothing is tuned for them yet.
House and techno are the strongest genres — that's where the taxonomy and the rotation data are deepest. It works elsewhere; it's just less sure of itself.
Per-pick explanations — the "why this track" rationale — aren't wired up yet.
Rating a played set exists as a control but doesn't feed back into what MixReady has learned from rotation yet.
Self-signed build. First launch needs right-click → Open. Proper notarisation comes at beta.

07When something breaks

It will. Send it to alpha@mixready.art — what you were doing, what you expected, what happened. A screenshot of the set page and the set's id is usually enough. Bugs from ten people in an alpha are worth more than a hundred in a beta, so don't sit on anything.