how to make mix sound good

saw a handful of people not sure how to make it sound good. commented this on a different thread and now i'm just gonna paste here. i've spent a lot of time playing with it and if you listen to the kind of genres it's intended for (dance and dance adjacent), as well as put in the time to figure it out, you can definitely make it sound sick.

pasting my overview of how to make it work:

i had some time off and spent a few hours each day for five days figuring it out. it's definitely possible to make it good, but it takes some learning and some doing.

first things first: this tool is really going to work better with dance and dance adjacent music than other genres. you can definitely mix in dancey pop and hip hop and stuff, but keep in mind, DJs mostly play dance (techno, house, etc) for a reason. extremely talented DJs can pull off rock and guitar music (example: CCL, who has a set on soundcloud that features the crystal method into missy elliot into system of a down) but it's quite difficult.

second: you have to order your playlist by tempo. don't try to mix two songs that aren't within about 5 or 10bpm of each other because it usually won't work very well. to move from tempo to tempo, think big picture. example: my playlist starts at about 100bpm and ends at about 140 BPM. this transition takes 2 hours and 45 minutes, though. just slowly build up (and at the end of the playlist, build back down, if you want a soft landing) tempo throughout. the only big jump in tempo my playlist features is from 104 to 115bpm, and it only works because i identified the one moment in each song where they could mix into each other without sounding totally forced. still, i may end up throwing some songs between 104 and 115 in-between those songs to make the transition smoother.

third: songs in the same or a similar key will mix much more cleanly than songs that are further apart in key. the tags next to the sounds represent the keys; A = minor key & B = major key. so, a 10A into an 8B is going to sound better than a 10A into a 2B, usually. if you have two songs that you want near one another in the mix but they don't sound good mixed into each other, you can use what DJs call "tools," which are often sort of stripped tracks featuring more rhythm than melody (usually) as transition songs to mix between other songs that don't mix well. sometimes you need a few tools to transition from track to track, i.e., if you wanted to move from 10A to 2B, you might try 10A into 8B into 6A into 5A into 3B and finally arrive at 2B. sometimes that's not necessary; occasionally you can identify the right spot in a song where maybe the melody drops out and it's just percussion—that can be a smooth spot to mix songs with wildly different tempos.

lastly, make sure you know your tracks. figure out where the breakdown is, where melody drops out, where the energy is high and where it's low. if you don't know your tracks well, you won't be able to mix them well. and with that said, if you know your tracks, play with the mixing options. the auto mix will sometimes be placed in a decent spot in the songs, but it often doesn't have the right effects. auto is fond (in my experience) of "overlap"—but that sounds like shit unless your two tracks are the same or very close BPM and also the same or very compatible keys. so try different things and learn what they do. don't expect to mix easily after spending some serious hours on it. for a few days i wondered if i was totally wasting my life. but now i have a long "set" i would absolutely play for a dancefloor with no qualms whatsoever. so it can be done!