DJ Waveforms
The DJ performance surface for Ableton Live
DJ Waveforms turns a running Live set into DJ software: moving waveform decks, beat-exact transport, hot cues and loops, a library that preps your tracks and gets their keys and beatgrids right, a mixer, and full MIDI and keyboard control. Live stays the audio engine.
The Ableton forum starts asking for Serato-style scrolling waveforms. The thread is still open.
The Bridge, the official Serato and Ableton answer, is discontinued. Free Max for Live experiments come and go.
DJ Waveforms ships. Built by a DJ who got tired of waiting.
Ableton Live is the most capable audio engine a DJ can own. It has just never behaved like DJ software.
DJ Waveforms makes it behave like one.
The engine stays
Your set, your warps, your racks, your routing and recording. The app adds no audio processing of its own: everything you hear is Live. DJ Waveforms is how you play it, not what makes the sound, so you could quit it mid-set and the music would keep playing.
In sync, at any tempo
Every warped clip follows the one project tempo, so decks cannot drift apart and the classic hard problems of DJ software simply do not exist. Tempo stops being a constraint, too: halve a track, double it, take it somewhere no turntable could, and hear it locked to the other decks as you go. Bold tempo moves become a creative tool instead of a risk.
Your set stays yours
The app never saves a change into your project. Whatever it moves during playback is put back the moment you stop. The .als on disk stays exactly as you wrote it.
As much or as little as you need
Up to sixteen decks side by side, four built-in waveform styles with an editor to design your own, and panels you show or hide at will - bring up the mixer and library, or clear them away and give the waveforms the whole screen. Resize the decks, go compact, recolour the scroll; the surface settles into whatever the set in front of you asks for. Swipe, drag, or use the arrows.
More than waveforms
Cues, loops, sections, keys, beatgrids, library, mixer: the working surface of a DJ booth, driving Live directly. Every control maps to your hardware.
Hands on the waveform
Grab a wave and carry it; it lands back on the grid when you let go. Nudge a playing deck off the grid to match by ear, or fly across the whole track on the overview strip. Up to sixteen decks run side by side, each aligned to its clip's warp grid and coloured by what the music is doing.
Hot cues that survive everything
Eight per track, with names, colours and section tints. Cues are keyed to an audio fingerprint rather than a file path, so they survive moves, renames and re-warps. Cues you set in Serato years ago are read straight from the file tags and arrive ready to play.
Colour-map your track
Flag any hot cue as a section fill and the track becomes a map: intro, build, drop, outro, each painted in its cue's colour on the lane and on the overview strip. You can read the whole arrangement from across the booth.
A library with DJ brains
Every clip in your set, searchable and sortable: Camelot keys, BPM, energy, played marks, your own order. Tracks with no key tag get one detected from the audio, so harmonic mixing covers your whole library, not just the part you tagged. Match narrows the list to tracks that mix with the playing deck, by compatible key and tempo in range. Drag a row onto a deck and play.
A beatgrid editor, built in
When the grid is wrong, everything built on it goes wrong - so grids are fixable right on the deck, written as Live's own warp markers. Drag a kick under the playhead and tap 1.1.1 to set the downbeat; tap Align on a beat near the end and the exact BPM is derived from the audio between the two points. On a playing deck the same drag becomes a turntable-style glide: beatmatch by ear, release, and the correction is written into the grid.
Prep the whole set in one pass
Analyze walks your library before the gig: tempo, downbeat and musical key are read from the audio itself and cross-checked against your tags and Live's own grid. The detection is precise enough to put the beat lines on the kicks - and to catch the grids Live guessed wrong. Confident fixes stack behind a single Apply button; anything doubtful is flagged for your ears. Unwarped tracks are warped, gridded and set to Complex Pro the moment you drop them on a deck.
Loops, jumps and rolls
Grid-aligned loops from a quarter bar to 32, with halve and double on pads. Beat jumps slide an active loop along with you, and a momentary roll always lands back exactly where the track would have been.
The mixer you already built
Faders that follow Live's own measured curve, stereo VU meters, and knobs that find your rack macros by themselves - every one of them remappable to any parameter in the set. It drives Live's mixer and adds no processing of its own.
One pad, every knob
A snapshot captures every knob on a deck - EQ, filter, sends, macros - into one pad. Fire it instantly, on the launch grid, or as a tempo-synced glide over 1 to 32 beats; hold pads spring back when released. The MORPH knob blends the deck toward a snapshot by hand, and touching any knob mid-move hands it back to you.
Map anything
MIDI learn with an on-screen mapping mode: click a control, touch your hardware, done. Shift layers, soft takeover, per-control button modes, LED feedback. Serato-style keyboard shortcuts come mapped out of the box, and no controller is required at all.
Playing in three steps
Install DJ Waveforms
Download, open, done. macOS builds are signed and notarized. No account to create.
Add the bridge to Live
One click in the app installs the AbletonJS Control Surface - the same standard mechanism every hardware controller uses. Enable it once in Live's Link/Tempo/MIDI preferences and restart Live.
Open your set and mix
The app connects by itself - no template to install. Your audio tracks appear as decks, warped clips and all, and the mixer's knobs find your rack macros on their own. For a club-style strip, group Live's own EQ Three Rack with an Auto Filter and point two more knobs at your reverb and delay sends: six knobs, all stock. The manual has the recipe, and every gesture.
Try it as long as you like
Right now there are no limits at all. The app is a free open beta through September 15, 2026, with the trial pause switched off entirely - the full app, nothing timed, nothing withheld. From September 16 the trial is still the complete app: playback just pauses once after 15 minutes of continuous play, and the timer resets whenever your decks stop.The trial is the complete app - playback just pauses once after 15 minutes of continuous play, and the timer resets whenever your decks stop.
The full app, unlicensed and unlimited. Decide on your own schedule.
- No limits during the open beta - playback never pauses, nothing is switched off, through Sep 15, 2026
- Every feature included, MIDI too
- No account, no signup, no watermarks
- From Sep 16, 2026: playbackPlayback pauses briefly after 15 minutes of continuous play; the timer resets when all decks stop
The Windows build is unsigned at launch - SmartScreen will ask once: choose More info, then Run anyway.
Launch price through at least September 30, 2026 - then $79.One-time purchase. No subscription, ever.
- Perpetual license - pay once, keep it
- Free updates through 1.x
- Use on up to 3 computers - deactivate to move
- Activate once online, then works offline forever
- 14-day no-questions refund
Checkout opens at launch - secure checkout by Lemon Squeezy, VAT handled, your key arrives by email within minutes. License terms.
Student, broke, or between gigs? Email me - we will sort something out.
Asked and answered
+Is this a standalone DJ app?
No, and that is the point. DJ Waveforms needs Ableton Live running with your tracks as warped clips - it is the DJ head for the set you already have. Live keeps doing the audio: your warps, your racks, your routing, your recording.
+Does it modify my Live set or my audio files?
Never without you asking. It reads clips and warp data; for beat-exact launches it moves clip markers during playback and restores them on stop, swap and quit, so the .als on disk stays exactly yours. Hot cues live in the app's own data folder - not in your tags, not in your set. The one exception is deliberate: the beatgrid tools write warp markers when you tell them to fix a track's grid.
+Which Live versions and editions work?
Ableton Live 11 and 12. The app connects through a standard MIDI Remote Script - the same mechanism every control surface uses.
+Will it work with my MIDI controller?
Any class-compliant MIDI device. There is an on-screen mapping mode (click a control, touch your hardware), per-control button modes, soft takeover, and state-driven LED feedback. No controller is required at all - keyboard shortcuts ship by default and the mouse drives everything.
+Do I need internet at a gig?
No. The license activates once online and is cached forever after. Dead venue wifi, a dropped connection, or the license server being down never locks you out and never interrupts a set.
+What exactly does the trial limit?
Right now, nothing at all. The app is a free open beta through September 15, 2026 and the trial pause is switched off entirely, so playback runs as long as you do. From September 16, one thing:One thing: after 15 minutes of continuous playback, playback pauses once - with a warning a minute before. Press play to carry on. Stop all decks and the timer resets. Every feature is included, MIDI and all styles too, for as long as you want to evaluate.
+Windows says it "protected my PC". Is that normal?
Yes. The Windows build is unsigned at launch (a code-signing certificate is planned), so SmartScreen asks once per version: click More info, then Run anyway. The macOS build is signed and notarized by Apple.
+Can it import my rekordbox or Serato library?
It does not sync libraries into Live - it works with the clips in your set. It does read your existing Serato hot cues and key tags straight from the files, so tracks you prepped elsewhere arrive with their cues in place - and tracks with no key tag get one detected from the audio.
+Refunds, and moving between machines?
14-day no-questions refunds. A license activates on up to 3 computers; deactivating one in Settings frees the slot. Ran out of slots after a few OS reinstalls? Email support and it gets fixed.
Mix from the set you already have.
Download the free betatrial, open your Live set, and play it the way you always wanted to. If it clicks, it is $59 at launch$79, once.
MACOS + WINDOWS - ABLETON LIVE 11 + 12