DJ software for mixing your own music — a free alternative to Rekordbox and Serato.
Status: runs on Linux with the Pioneer DDJ-FLX4 controller today. Windows, macOS, and more controllers are on the way.
Your controller, drawn on screen. Click anything to learn what it does — or press it on the real thing and watch it light up here, without touching your decks. Controls Sholto doesn't use are left uncoloured, so you can see at a glance what's live.
Full guide: docs/README.md — everything on screen. Your controller is documented inside the app.
- Finds every track in your music folder — mp3, FLAC, WAV, AIFF, and M4A/AAC — and reads the artist, title, and other tags automatically.
- Shows everything in a sortable list: Artist · Track · BPM · Key · Time.
- Analyses each track once and remembers the result, so it's instant every time after.
- Search — press the spacebar and type. Sholto searches your tracks, crates, and tags all at once and shows the top few matches of each, so you can see everything you can jump to.
- Tags — label any track with words that matter to you ("peak time", "vocal", "drum & bass"), then filter the whole library down to a tag in one click.
- Crates — group tracks into crates (like playlists or record boxes) and jump to a crate's contents instantly. An All Tracks crate always holds everything; press Esc to get back to it.
- Automatic beat and tempo detection — Sholto finds the BPM and marks the downbeats so your beatgrid lines up.
- Key detection — every track gets its musical key (with the Camelot code) so you can mix in harmony.
- Stem separation — splits a track into its parts (vocals, drums, bass, and the rest) so you can drop out the vocal or bring back the beat, live.
- A small progress bar shows a track being analysed, and a check mark when it's ready.
- Two decks you can play, scrub, and mix independently.
- 3-band EQ on each deck (highs, mids, lows) — cut a band all the way to silence, like a hardware isolator.
- Filter knob per deck — sweep from a low-pass to a high-pass for that classic build-up-and-drop feel.
- Headphone cue — pre-listen a track in your headphones while the crowd still hears the other deck.
- Beat loops — set a loop on the beat and halve or double its length on the fly.
- Magnetic beat-snap — when both decks are playing and the beats drift close together, the jog wheel gently "holds" on the beat and both waveforms glow green; let go and the deck locks to the other one's grid. No button to arm — it just happens.
- Pick which speakers or headphones Sholto plays to, and it remembers your choice.
- Waveforms coloured by frequency — deep bass, mids, and highs each get their own colour, and the height shows how intense each moment is, so you can spot the intro, the build-up, the drop, and the breakdown at a glance.
- Beat-grid markers along the top, with the downbeats highlighted.
- A spinning vinyl disc per deck that turns in time with the track, its ring shading from green to red as the track plays out and flashing near the end.
- Stem chips under each disc (drums / vocals / instrumental) — lit when you can hear that part, hollow when it's muted.
- The deck dims red when its volume is all the way down.
- A range of colour themes to switch between in Settings.
Plug it in and it works. Click the controller icon in the top bar for a picture of your DDJ-FLX4 with every knob, pad and button explained, including the Shift combinations.
Adding support for another controller is straightforward — Sholto keeps each device's button layout in one place.
- Space — open search (type to find tracks, crates, and tags).
- ↑ / ↓ — move up and down the track list.
- 1 / 2 — load the highlighted track onto Deck 1 or Deck 2.
- Enter — open the actions menu for the highlighted track (add it to a crate, or tag it).
- P — play / pause Deck 1; hold Shift for Deck 2.
- G — open the beatgrid / tempo tuner on the playing deck; then ↑ / ↓ change the tempo and ← / → nudge the grid.
- M — drop a marker on the playing deck.
- Esc — close a menu, or clear a tag/crate filter to go back to All Tracks.
- F11 — toggle fullscreen.
Two ways to get Sholto — grab a ready-made binary, or build it yourself.
curl -fsSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/freedomfirst26/Sholto/main/get-sholto.sh | bashThat downloads the latest release into ~/sholto, installs the runtime tools it needs (ffmpeg, madmom, and a couple of system libraries — it will ask for your password once), and launches Sholto. Run the same command again later to update. Set SHOLTO_DIR=/somewhere to install elsewhere, or add --no-run to install without launching:
curl -fsSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/freedomfirst26/Sholto/main/get-sholto.sh | bash -s -- --no-runPrefer to see what you're running first? Download the script, read it, then bash get-sholto.sh.
The binary is self-contained — you don't need .NET installed. If you'd rather do it by hand, grab sholto-*-linux-x64.tar.gz from the Releases page, tar -xzf it, run bash install-deps.sh once, then ./Sholto.App.
git clone https://github.com/freedomfirst26/Sholto.git
cd Sholto
bash install.sh
dotnet run -c Release --project src/Sholto.Appinstall.sh sets up everything Sholto needs — including .NET and all the tools below — and is safe to re-run. It works on modern Ubuntu, Mint, Pop!_OS, and Debian.
On startup Sholto scans your music folder. Click a track to load it onto Deck 1, or press LOAD 2 on the controller to load it onto Deck 2.
install.sh installs all of this for you on Ubuntu / Mint / Pop!_OS / Debian. On another distro, install the equivalents:
Required
- .NET 10 — to build and run Sholto.
- ffmpeg — decodes your audio for the beat detector, and also decodes M4A/AAC files for playback.
- madmom (the
madmom-onnxbuild) — finds the beats and tempo. Sholto can't play a track until it has a beatgrid, so this one isn't optional. - A normal Linux desktop (X11 or Wayland) and a working sound system (PipeWire, PulseAudio, or ALSA).
Optional — Sholto runs fine without these, you just lose that one feature:
- demucs — stem separation (drums / vocals / bass / other). Without it, the stem chips and the hot-cue stem mutes are unavailable.
- allin1 — AI song-section detection (intro / build / drop / …). Without it, Sholto falls back to a simpler built-in guess.
Your controller — a Pioneer DDJ-FLX4 is picked up automatically when you plug it in; a green dot in the top bar means it's connected (red means reconnect the USB), and it reconnects on its own if it drops. You don't need one — everything works from the mouse and keyboard.
Sholto is under the Business Source License 1.1 — source-available, and free for the people it is built for.
- Individuals — free, including paid gigs. If you are a person (or a sole trader / single-member company you run yourself), you can use, modify, fork, and perform with Sholto for any purpose, at no cost. Forks you publish must keep the copyright notice and credit Sholto in their README.
- Organizations — paid. Any use by or on behalf of a company or other organization, and any bundling of Sholto into a product or hosted service, needs a commercial licence — any size. Email freedomfirst26@proton.me.
- It becomes Apache-2.0 on 2030-09-07. Each released version converts to the Apache License 2.0 on its Change Date, so nothing is locked away forever.
Buying a commercial licence? Read the non-commercial dependency warning in THIRD-PARTY-NOTICES.md first — madmom's beat-detection models are CC BY-NC-SA and need separate permission. Get in touch and we will sort it out.
"Sholto" and its logo are trademarks of the copyright holder and are not covered by the licence. Forks are welcome under a different name.
Contributions are welcome under the DCO — see CONTRIBUTING.md.