Mixen

Mixen is an iOS app that lets you take your mixes with you, without imposing on you or forcing you to store or organize things in a particular way, or storing your audio anywhere but where you put it. It’s an awesome music player that does all the things music players do - like playlists and tags.

Just some of the features:

• When you air-drop or otherwise send an audio file to your phone, Mixen
  • Finds it immediately
  • Figures out if it is a new revision of a song it already knows about, and adds it to that if so
• It finds and plays your songs in place - it doesn’t copy them anywhere, or move them or alter them in any way
• You can take notes on songs - if the song is playing when you take the note, the timestamp is remembered, and you can A/B that point in the song with the next version you create, check off tasks as they are completed, and more
• Tag songs to create playlists
• Your notes, tags (playlists) and groupings of audio files into songs are shared across all of your iOS devices

Mixen integrates well the audio system in your car, or AirPlay. And Mixen always remembers where you left it - if you were paused in the middle of a song when it was shut down, you’re at that exact spot the next time you open it.

How It Works

The first time you set up Mixen, it will ask you to show it where to look for audio files. Typically that’s your Downloads folder - that’s where files you AirDrop to your device land. That is how you give Mixen permission to look for files in that folder - generally, you only need to do it once. You can set up more than one folder - if someone has shared an iCloud folder with mixes in it, add that! If you have another media player like VLC, that has it’s own media library, and you have some stuff in there, add that!

If you use iCloud, your Downloads folder is shared across all your devices. If you set up Mixen on another iOS device, just point it at the same folders and you’ll have the same songs, tags and notes on both devices, with updates between them nearly in real-time.

Scanning

The first time you set it up, if you have a bunch of audio files, scanning can take a while (a little line bouncing back and forth at the top of the screen tells you when scanning is happening). Mixen is finding all of the audio files in the folders you set up, and creating “songs” or adding them to existing songs.

After that, Mixen will do a quick check of each folder for new audio files whenever it is started, or whenever iOS tells it a file was added to or removed from one of the folders you set up.

What is the “same” song

It would be lovely if DAW makers embedded metadata in files that said “Here’s the project this was mixed down from” so we could 100% perfectly tell when we’re seeing an audio file that came from the same project as another one. But they don’t. So we do it using some clever file-name matching, starting from the pattern Logic Pro and Garage Band use for audio files AirDropped from File > Share, which is project-name-or-revision plus date and time.

Generally that works well, but if it gets confused, you can always move audio files in and out of songs using the Files page off the main menu, or the detail page.