Field manual
Every control on the page, in the order you meet it on screen. Azimuth runs entirely in your browser — your files are decoded on your own machine and never uploaded anywhere.
Browsers refuse to make sound until you click. Press Start audio once and the rig comes up.
Click Load a track… at the top of each deck. Tempo, key and waveform are analysed on load.
Hit Play on deck A, Sync on deck B, then move the crossfader between them.
Orientation
The page is a mixer: a deck down each side, the mixer between them. This guide follows that layout rather than grouping by importance, because that is how you will look things up mid-mix. Jump to any block.
Deck A and deck B are identical. Everything described once applies to both.
Deck A
Title · BPM · KeyWhat the track isOverview & waveformWhere you are in itPlatterScratch and nudgePitchTempo trimHot cues 1–4Jump pointsCue · Play · Sync · KeyTransportFilter · Echo · VerbEffectsLoops & padsIn, Out, Roll, Chop, BrakeAcross the top
Backlights every button on the rig, the way a hardware controller does — legends lit dimly when idle and burning when engaged. On by default.
Turn it off in bright daylight, or if you find the glow noisy. The setting is remembered in this browser.
Output level for everything, with a meter beside it. The meter reads the signal after the limiter, so it shows what is actually leaving the machine.
A limiter sits across the master permanently. Two decks at full level will always try to clip when they overlap, and it catches that.
Records the master output. Press again to stop and the take downloads immediately asazimuth-mix-<date>.webm, or .m4a on Safari.
What you record is what you heard, limiter included. Cueing in your headphones is not captured.
Not a button — an indicator. It appears whenever a deck is routed to your headphones, to tell you the output has split into master-left and cue-right. Seeheadphone cueing.
Deck — top row
The track title is the load button. Click it to open a file picker, and click it again later to swap the track. WAV, MP3, FLAC, M4A — anything your browser can decode.
Title and artist come from the file’s own tags, and so does the cover art. When a file has none, a pattern is generated from the title so the two platters still look different from each other.
Detected tempo, updated live as you move the pitch fader — so it always reads the tempo the deck is actually playing at, not the tempo of the file.
A dash instead of a number means detection failed on that track. Sync, the beat grid and beat loops all need a tempo, so none of them work until you have one.
Musical key, with its Camelot wheel number beside it. It turns green when the two decks are a safe blend — same number, or one step around the wheel.
Grey does not mean “do not mix”. It means the two keys clash on paper, which matters most when both tracks have strong melodic or vocal content.
Deck — displays
There are two, at different zoom levels, and they do different jobs. Both are split by frequency so you can read a track’s structure without listening to it.
Colours
Both decks use the same three colours on purpose — deck identity lives in the borders and accents. If each deck had its own palette you could not compare their bass at a glance, which is most of what the split is for.
Lows — Kick and sub, drawn as a saturated core at the centre line. This is the shape you beatmatch against.
Mids — Vocals, snares and the body of most instruments.
Highs — Hats, cymbals and air, as fine needles reaching the outer edge.
A breakdown shows as the orange dropping out while cyan continues. A drop shows as orange returning hard. That is the whole reason to split it.
The thin strip on top is the whole track, start to finish. Use it to read structure — where the intro ends, how long the breakdown runs, how far off the next drop is.
Tap anywhere to jump there. The faint rectangle sliding across it marks the slice the big waveform below is currently showing.
The larger strip shows twelve seconds with a fixed white playhead down the middle. Audio behind the playhead dims; audio ahead of it is what is coming.
Drag left or right to seek.
The vertical lines behind the audio are the beat grid, brighter every fourth beat so you can count bars. Amber markers are your hot cues, the red one is the main cue point, and a green band is a running loop.
Elapsed time on the left, time remaining on the right. The remaining figure is the one worth watching.
Deck — centre
The vinyl spins while the track plays, at roughly 33⅓ rpm. Drag it round to scratch — the audio follows your hand exactly, forwards or backwards, at whatever speed you move.
Let go and the track carries on from where you left it. A gentle nudge while playing pushes the track slightly ahead or behind, which is how you correct drift by ear.
Each platter captures its own touch independently, so on a touchscreen you can hold one deck with one hand and scratch the other at the same time. This is the thing a mouse cannot do, and the reason Azimuth exists.
The ring around the platter pulses on the beat. This button cycles which frequency band drives it: Low, Mid or High.
Leave it on L for most music — the kick is what you match to. Switch to Hfor a track with no kick, or during a breakdown where the hats are the only pulse left.
Deck — right of the platter
The tempo trim, running ±16% either side of the track’s own speed.
Drag up to speed the track up, down to slow it. The percentage below shows exactly where you are.
Double-tap the fader to snap back to centre — back to the track’s original tempo.
Nudge tempo by 0.1% a tap. Hold either one to repeat.
These exist because the fader spans 32% of tempo across a couple of hundred pixels — the 0.1% step that actually matters when two tracks are drifting is smaller than one pixel, and impossible to hit with a finger.
Deck — pad row
Four jump points per deck. Tap an unlit pad to drop a cue at the current position; it lights up in the deck’s colour. Tap a lit pad to jump straight there.
Right-click a lit pad to move it to the current position instead of jumping.
Set cues also appear as amber markers on both waveforms, so you can see what is coming.
Deck — main row
The main cue point — a parking space you can always get back to. It behaves as a CDJ does, which means it does three different things depending on the state of the deck:
Playing → stops and jumps back to the cue point.
Stopped, sitting on the cue → hold to preview from it, release to snap back.
Stopped, somewhere else → drops a new cue point right here.
That hold-to-preview is how you find the exact start of a phrase: park, hold, listen, release, adjust, repeat.
Play and pause. Lights green while running.
Matches this deck to the other one. It does two things: sets the pitch so the tempos match, and nudges the playhead so the beats land together. Tempo alone is not sync — two decks at identical BPM still slide past each other if the downbeats do not coincide.
Both decks need a detected tempo. If the two are more than 16% apart it refuses and tells you rather than pretending — half- and double-time detections are common, and a silent failure would just peg the fader.
With no analysed beat grid, phase alignment assumes beat one sits at 0:00. True of most electronic music, wrong for anything with an intro pickup. Treat it as a nudge into phase, then finish by ear on the platter.
Key lock. On (the default), the track keeps its original pitch however far you move the tempo fader. Off, it behaves like vinyl — faster is higher, slower is lower.
Key lock hands over to plain varispeed while you are scratching, because time-stretching a hand movement sounds wrong. It hands back when you let go.
Deck — knob row
Three knobs per deck. Drag up and down to move them, and double-tap any knob to reset it to the position that means “doing nothing”.
A single sweep with bypass at twelve o’clock. Turn left and a low-pass closes, stripping the highs until only muffled bass is left. Turn right and a high-pass opens, removing the bass and leaving thin, airy tops.
Resonance rises toward both extremes, so the sweep sings rather than just dulling.
Double-tap returns it to centre. This is the most-used control on the deck — sweeping the bass out of the outgoing track is the bread-and-butter transition.
A tempo-synced delay, timed to a dotted eighth — the classic trailing echo. Feedback rises as you turn it up, so higher settings repeat for longer.
It follows the deck’s current tempo automatically. Double-tap to zero.
Reverb send. Useful for washing out the end of a phrase before you cut. Double-tap to zero.
Echo and reverb both tap the signal before the channel fader, so their tails keep ringing after you have pulled the deck down.
Deck — bottom two rows
Making a loop
Manual loop. Tap In where you want it to start, then Out where it should end. The loop begins immediately and shows as a green band on both waveforms.
Beat loops. Tap one to loop that many beats from where you are; tap the same pad again to release. Needs a detected tempo.
Halve or double the running loop, anchored to its start point. Tightening a 4-beat loop down to 1 beat as you approach the drop is a standard build.
Rolls and stopping
One button, cycling what the four pads below do. Loop is beat loops.Roll makes them momentary rolls — 1/8, 1/4, 1/2 and 1 beat.Chop turns them into a sampler.
Tap any pad while the pads read Chop and the bar under the playhead is cut into four slices, one per pad. Tap a pad to fire its slice; right-click or long-press any pad to re-chop from wherever the track is now.
Each slice sits at its own fixed spot around your head, spread right around the circle, so finger-drumming the chops scatters them in 3D instead of stacking them in the middle.
Slices come back out of the turntable itself — only the bar you asked for is copied, so chopping a six-minute track costs two seconds of audio, not a second copy of the track. They follow the channel fader and crossfader, and they clear when you load a new track.
Hold a roll pad and the deck stutters on that fraction of a beat. Release and the playhead jumps to where the track would have got to if the roll had never happened.
That is the whole trick: the phrase stays on the grid, so you can stutter into a drop and still land exactly on it.
Kills the motor. The track slows to a halt like a turntable losing power — the classic full stop at the end of a set or into a breakdown.
Mixer — top
Three knobs per deck, in two columns: A on the left, B on the right, each labelled with its deck. Centre is flat.
Turning up adds a modest boost. Turning fully down kills the band completelyrather than merely cutting it — which is what makes the classic bass-swap possible: dropLow A to nothing as you bring Low B up, and the two tracks never fight over the same low end.
Double-tap any EQ knob to return it to flat.
Mixer — centre
One per deck, flanking the meters. These are independent of the crossfader and multiply with it, exactly as on a real mixer — pull a line fader down and that deck is silent wherever the crossfader happens to sit.
No double-tap reset on these two. There is no “correct” volume to snap back to, so it would only ever be a way to lose your level by accident.
Per-deck level, amber for A and cyan for B. Keep them out of the top segments so the master limiter has room to work.
Mixer — below the faders
How you listen to the next track before the room does — the thing that makes it possible to find the beat and set up a mix in advance.
Routes that deck to your headphones. It works with the channel fader all the way down, which is the entire point — you can beatmatch a track that is completely silent to the room.
You hear the deck’s full channel: EQ, filter and effects included, so what you audition is what will arrive.
You need a headphone splitter
Browsers cannot reliably send audio to a second output device, so Azimuth splits the single output instead: your master goes to the left ear, the cued deck to the right. A cheap 3.5 mm splitter, headphones in one side and speakers in the other, and you have proper monitoring. The Split L/R chip appears in the top bar whenever this is active.
Nothing cued, nothing changes
The split only engages while a deck is actually cued. With both cue buttons off your output stays full stereo, so leaving it armed can never quietly collapse your mix to mono.
Mixer — the round display
The part no other DJ tool has. Each deck sits at a position in the space around your head, not merely somewhere between two speakers.
You are the mark in the middle, facing up. Each deck is a coloured dot. Drag a dot to move that deck — the angle sets the direction the sound comes from, the distance from the centre sets how far away it feels.
You grab whichever dot is nearer your finger. Drag it past the outer ring and the deck sits well behind you.
The dashed ring in the middle is a snap zone: release inside it and the deck returns to dead ahead and close, which is plain, neutral stereo. Getting back to normal is a jab at the centre rather than a hunt for one exact pixel.
An eight-bar automated move, and the signature trick. The outgoing deck spirals away and round behind you while the incoming one arrives from the front, and the crossfader rides along with them.
A crossfade in three dimensions rather than one. It runs from whichever side the crossfader is currently favouring.
Wear headphones
Positioning is binaural — it works by recreating the tiny timing and tonal differences between your two ears. Over speakers most of that collapses. On headphones a track genuinely sounds like it is behind and to your left.
Mixer — bottom
Deck A at the left, deck B at the right, both at once in the middle. Slide between them to make the mix.
Double-tap to snap back to the centre.
It multiplies with the line faders rather than overriding them. If a deck is silent with the crossfader hard over to its side, check that channel’s line fader first.
Without touching the screen
Every knob and fader also takes the keyboard once focused: ↑ ↓ to move it, Shift for a finer step on faders, and Home to reset anything that has a home position.
Topbar · ⌨ MIDI
Every on-screen control is already a plain command underneath, so a controller is just another thing that sends them. Nothing a mapping can do is beyond what a mouse can do.
Open ⌨ MIDI, allow access, then tap Learn beside an action and move the knob or hit the pad you want on it. It binds on the way down, so a pad learns from its press rather than its release.
Mappings are saved in this browser and come back next time. ⇅ reverses a fader or knob that runs the wrong way; ✕ forgets one binding, Clear all forgets the lot.
Transport, cue, sync, key lock and brake; the pitch fader and a pitch-bend encoder; EQ, trim, filter, echo, spin, reverb and the channel fader; beat loops, rolls, loop in/out and ÷2/×2; the four hot cues and the four chop pads; spatial angle, distance and the sweep between decks; crossfader, curve, master and record.
No default map ships. Controllers disagree about note numbers, CC numbers and channels badly enough that a guessed mapping is worse than none.
Chrome, Edge and Opera only. Web MIDI does not exist in Safari or Firefox, and there is no polyfill worth shipping — the panel says so rather than failing quietly. Lights and motorised faders do not light up yet either: sending state back to a controller needs a device profile, not a learned map.
Worth knowing
Things that will surprise you if nobody says them first.
Reloading loses everything. Tracks, cue points, loops and knob positions are held in memory only. There is no saved session yet, so do not refresh mid-set.
The beat grid assumes beat one at 0:00. It is a constant-tempo grid, not an analysed one. Accurate for most electronic music, wrong for anything with an intro pickup, a live drummer, or tempo drift. Sync gets you close; your ears and the platter finish it.
Tempo detection fails on some tracks. When the BPM reads as a dash, sync, beat loops and the beat grid are unavailable for that deck. You can still mix it by ear with the pitch fader.
Two loaded tracks use real memory. Roughly 160 MB per deck. A browser tab’s budget is far smaller than your machine’s RAM, and phones are stricter still — if things get unstable, load shorter files.
Lossless recording stops at 20 minutes. The compressed format is the default and has no such limit. The lossless path holds raw audio in memory, where an hour would be over a gigabyte and would take the tab down with it.
Nothing is uploaded, ever. Files are decoded in your browser and never leave the machine. That is also why there is no library: close the tab and Azimuth forgets your music entirely.