Rebuilding the DJ software the App Store killed in 2010, in public. https://teapaw.org/t.co/8iH17vRXnN
Parkland County
Joined January 2025
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Unpopular opinion:
AI’s worst code doesn’t even come close to the absolute garbage I’ve had to clean up from humans.
Post your worst inherited code story below👇
Mobile DJs: at a party, how often does a guest ask to plug in their own phone?
That exact shift hit my first DJ software business in 2010. People started DJing their own parties off iPods.
The App Store didn't kill my first DJ business. $0.99 apps did.
12 years later the same iPhone separates stems on-device, so building on it was the obvious move, not a grudge. I enjoy the irony.
The real sting: big DJ apps have private streaming deals indies can't get.
Every time a user asks for streaming, I log it, so when I go back to those companies I'm bringing real demand. Until then it plays your own files, really well. clubdjsoftware.com
Looping with stems on would occasionally freeze the whole computer. Not the app. The computer.
Logging thread IDs line by line showed it: the audio thread seeking stems inside the callback while the UI thread changed the same mixer. Deadlock.
Fix: loop at the source.
Pros: when you play out, do you still bring your own files, or has streaming taken over your sets?
Asking for real. It shapes what I build.
Adobe wanted $1,019.88 a year for Creative Cloud. I paid them for years.
Turns out all I really did in Photoshop was paste screenshots and layer them.
Took me 20 minutes to build my own. I call it PhotoChop. Cancelled Creative Cloud.
What else are we all overpaying for?
There's a full visualizer in ClubDJ Pro and almost nobody knows.
I used to make a video DJ app, ClubDJ ProVJ, so a dead screen behind a DJ always felt wrong. It's MilkDrop via projectM, running through the same video pipeline as music videos.
Since March 10, ClubDJ Pro has picked up 12.3K first-time downloads on the App Store.
For an indie DJ app from someone who first shipped DJ software in 2004, that still feels a little unreal.
Hot cues have to be instant and clean.
Every jump fades in over ~6 ms and flushes the audio buffers, so no click and no leftover sliver of where you were.
And you can't wreck them by accident: it never silently overwrites a cue mid-set.
Bedroom DJs: do you play on a laptop, a tablet, a phone, or a controller?
ClubDJ Pro runs on iOS, Windows and Mac, and I'm curious where people actually mix.
Greg Ellis retweeted
This might sound a bit controversial, but DJs and producers, stop worrying about the law.
Nobody is trying to sue you over the remix you made in your bedroom that has 500 streams.
The reason I'm so enthusiastic about this is that it's literally how my whole career started.
I don't mean in every circumstance. Obviously there are rules you need to observe.
But whenever I post about remixing other people's tracks to make a name for yourself, the comments fill up with the same questions.
What if I get sued? What if I get a copyright strike?
Yes, those things exist. They can happen.
But nobody is trying to take a bedroom DJ to court because they put a remix on SoundCloud. It's a waste of everyone's time, and nobody is going to make any money from it.
Those rules are there in case big companies want to take someone with loads of money to court. Nobody is trying to sue you over the remix you made in your bedroom that has 500 streams.
The reason I'm so enthusiastic about this is that it's literally how my whole career started. I used to make bootleg remixes pretty much every week and put them on SoundCloud. They were all illegal. I can't even tell you how many I did.
And the worst thing that can happen? You get a little notification from SoundCloud saying the track has been blocked. That's it. Then it's gone.
That's the worst-case scenario.
So stop shitting yourself over it. There's so much to be gained, and nobody is trying to sue you. I promise you that.
jameshype.com/thoughts/nobod…
Roll FX on an iPhone, locked to the beat.
The roll is a loop snapped to the grid, 1/32 up to whole bars. While it repeats, the track keeps moving silently underneath, so when you let go you land where the song would have been. Like a real DJ roll.
Lesson from building stems: I tried training my own smaller separation model.
It came in below the open-source one I already had. So I killed it and shipped the proven one.
Your own code isn't automatically better code.
One button, and it mixes like a DJ would.
Smart Transition reads each track's structure, fires on the outro snapped to a 16-bar phrase, and lands at the end of the next intro. Within ~15% BPM it syncs, lines up bars, and swaps the bass.
It never hard-cuts.
Smart Transition is in ClubDJ Pro on iOS, Windows and Mac: clubdjsoftware.com
Opinion: the best DJ software disappears mid-set.
No click when you jump to a cue, no waiting when you reach for a knob, no dead screen behind you. If you notice the software, it's doing something wrong.
Vocals gone, live, on an iPad.
Lag, battery and quality all fight each other. On iPhone, HTDemucs runs on 6 GB+ devices via Core ML, paced so the phone doesn't cook. It separates from the playhead outward, so the stem knobs go live about a second in.