xwax /is/ meant for end-users, but right at the beginning it only had actual live professional use in mind. I was literally DJ'ing in clubs at the time and I wanted the digital equivalent of playing vinyl records.

I was collaborating with a friend on the early versions, to see if it could be commercialised to provide a "house" system for radio studios and clubs (much like the house provides CDJs or turntables). Today that's superseded by DJs bringing their own laptops, of course.

I don't know much about Mixxx these days; that project was always much better set up to grow through a range of contributors (eg. with its scripting engine). But I think it's technical architecture is probably quite different.

Whereas, xwax was designed from day 1 with the idea it was a realtime system with very tight latencies, taking input from one audio interface and responding to it on another. That was fun on Linux (and FreeBSD!) systems of the early 2000s.

From what I’ve read on Wikipedia, mixxx apparently uses the xwax source code. As does PiDeck. It would be really interesting to know what else uses it.

It's something I have seen before! Seeing xwax reduced to very small hardware is interesting. Thanks for sharing here.

It was magical and very exciting seeing these things emerge!