Preparing studio mixes using Mixmeister has the following benefits;
1. You can create and edit mixes in advance, tweak and enhance the transitions, try out ideas and playback until you’re happy.
2. Save mixes to an external file or burn to CD for playback during a set (if you have a 4/5/6 hour bar residency you’ll need a break at some point). Dropping in a pre-prepared mix for 30 mins is no sin.
3. From doing 1. you will likely develop a style which you can then aim to duplicate in live sets.
4. From doing 1. you will also improve your understanding of the common structure of the music.
5. You can create mashups, sections, samples for use in your live sets.
6. You can print out your playlist.
7. You don’t need any additional hardware.
The downsides;
1. The type of live effects offered by Traktor are much harder to implement in Mixmeister.
2. Mixmeister creates .mxm in the same folder for every tune in your library when it analyses them. These should really be stored elsewhere.
3. Creating, playing back and tweaking will mean you listen far more closely to what’s going on. You may find yourself editing for hours on end to get something just right. The reality being that most people will be oblivious to the effort you put in.
4. I would personally not want to use it as a live tool. It’s too “heads down”.
5. Mixmeister slowly alters the pitch so A matches B at the point of transition. Unless you correct this you can end up using a pre-prepared set that you then want to mix out of but are faced with a slowly increasing or decreasing BPM.
