Meet the team behind DJ.Studio
This is most of the group of people who worked on DJ.Studio, photographed on an Amsterdam canal during a team meeting. In the picture: Harold, Dennis, Fred, Willem, Sjirk, Dennis, Andre, RJ, Albert, Martijn, Siebrand, Fleur, Caleb, Arne and Liz. Lukas, Robin, Danny and Florian could not make it that evening, so they are missing from the photo.
Most of this team worked together at AppMachine long before DJ.Studio existed. That is the reason a group this size can ship a release almost every week: the people building the audio engine, the timeline and the exporter have been writing software side by side for more than twelve years.
Building a DAW for DJs
After buying back his own software company in 2021, Siebrand Dijkstra finally had the opportunity to put together two of his passions:
Building Software & Mixing Electronic Dance Music
"I have been passionate about electronic music for more than 25 years and I have been creating DJ mixes for the last 15 years. In that period I used an old legacy application called MixMeister. Unfortunately the application is only running in Windows and it got deprecated 10 years ago. So it was time for me to build it myself with my team."
Read more how Siebrand and his experienced team of developers build DJ.Studio in 1 year in this interview.
And read about the other project AppMachine he has worked on or one of his other side projects ParrotKey.
I Feel Love since 1977
"Next to my professional career as an entrepreneur,
I’m also an electronic dance music lover.
My love for dance music started with Donna Summer and Giorgio Moroder.
I want to make DJ mixes but I’m not a DJ…"
A new way to mix on a timeline
DJs today work with the same paradigm as in 1977: two decks, two volume faders and three EQ knobs. The hardware moved from vinyl to digital, but the layout never changed, and nearly every DJ application on the market still emulates it.
"I find this crazy given all the technical evolution of the last 50 years. Technology has come so far, we have AIs that can control the lights and heating in our house, but DJs only got more knobs and more effects."
That gap is what DJ.Studio was built to fill. It is not a replacement for rekordbox, Serato or Traktor, and it does not compete with Ableton. It sits in between: a timeline based tool for planning, building, refining and exporting a mix.
From a browser experiment to a DAW for DJs
The idea became possible because of an experiment. During COVID, one of the developers on Siebrand's team built a synthesizer that ran entirely in a web browser, using the GPU for the heavy lifting. If you can synthesise music in a browser, the reasoning went, you can mix music in one too.
From prototype to desktop app
In 2021 Siebrand moved a group of developers from his previous company, AppMachine, onto the idea. The first stretch went into tempo and key detection and the mixing engine itself. By 2022 there was a working foundation, shared privately for feedback. The team then grew and started building integrations with rekordbox, Serato, Apple Music, YouTube and Beatport, so people could mix with music they already owned or streamed. DJ.Studio became a desktop app for Windows and Mac that can do Stem separation, scratching and other cool effects. This helps Bedroom DJs, Mobile and Wedding DJs, performing DJs and radioshow makers reach their goals on their laptop in this DAW for DJs.
Contact information
The DJ.Studio core team is based in the north of the Netherlands in Fryslan Valley, Leeuwarden.
DJ.Studio B.V.
Sophialaan 44
8911 AE Leeuwarden
General questions: help@dj.studio
Support questions: support@dj.studio
+31 58 700 97 22
KvK 87694468