A Mac app from Munich’s universities.

Algoriddim dates itself to 2006. “Algoriddim, founded in 2006, creates world-class music and video applications,” its company page says, and its first website, at algoriddim.net, bears that out. An archived “Team” page from September 2006 lists three people: Karim Morsy, a student at the Technical University of Munich and at Munich’s University of Music and Performing Arts, and Christoph Teschner and Federico Tessmann, both students at the Technical University. The page does not use the word “founders,” so we describe them as the team the company listed in its first year.

Their product was djay, introduced on that site as “the new groundbreaking audio application for Mac OS X.” It put two virtual, interactive turntables on the screen, ran on both Intel and PowerPC Macs, and could stream a mix over a local network to other copies of djay. English Wikipedia, citing the VersionTracker download site, says djay was first released as freeware in June 2006 and went on sale in November 2007.

By then the team had become a company. An archived “About” page from 2008 described “algoriddim GmbH” — the lowercase was its own — as “a German-based software development company that specializes in developing high quality music and multimedia applications for the Mac,” selling djay for €39.99. Its release for djay 2.0, dated November 19, 2007, carried the dateline Starnberg, the lakeside town south-west of Munich, and announced a redesigned interface and audio engine with an Automix mode, a sampler and a live microphone. Today the company’s imprint places Algoriddim GmbH in Munich.

Turntables on glass.

Algoriddim’s reputation was made on Apple’s touch screens. djay for the iPad arrived in December 2010 and an iPhone version followed in March 2011, English Wikipedia says, citing MacRumors and Mashable. Within months the iPad app had won an Apple Design Award: TUAW’s list of the 2011 winners named “djay by algoriddim” alongside Osmos and Our Choice in the iPad category.

It has won twice more. In 2016 djay Pro was among the Apple Design Award winners, MacStories reported, listing the iOS version; the company describes that award as covering djay Pro for Mac and iPad. In 2024 Apple named djay the winner in a new Spatial Computing category, for its version on the Apple Vision Pro headset, calling it “an entirely new way to interact with music in a spatial environment.” The company also says its chief executive, Karim Morsy, presented on stage at Apple’s October 2016 event introducing the MacBook Pro with Touch Bar, and that it made a (PRODUCT)RED edition of djay with Apple for World AIDS Day in 2015.

The app has spread well beyond the Mac. English Wikipedia lists versions for Windows, iOS, Android, visionOS and Meta’s Quest headsets; djay for Quest went on sale in November 2024 for $19.99, the company announced from Munich, describing djay as having “over 70 million downloads,” a figure we give as its own. The same release claims firsts for the company — DJing on mobile devices in 2010, streaming services in 2014 and real-time stem separation, which it calls Neural Mix, in 2020. Streaming has been the volatile part: Spotify support was withdrawn in July 2020 and returned in 2025, English Wikipedia says, citing Digital DJ Tips.

Outside the giants.

Two groups dominate DJ equipment. Pioneer DJ left Pioneer Corporation in 2014; its parent, AlphaTheta, has been owned since 2020 by the Japanese holding company Noritsu, according to English Wikipedia. inMusic Brands, of Cumberland, Rhode Island, owns Numark, Denon DJ and Rane, which it bought in 2016.

The makers here work around that pair. Reloop is a brand of Global Distribution GmbH & Co. KG of Münster, Germany, its imprint says. Ecler was founded in Barcelona in 1965 and, by its own account, was acquired by the Fordahl Capital group in 2014; it labels its products “Made in Barcelona.” Mixars calls itself an independent subsidiary of Italy’s RCF Group, run from Valsamoggia, near Bologna.

Two are older names that stopped. Rodec, of Belgium, says its production paused in 2014 and that it returned in 2022 under Tom De Ridder, its chief executive since 2021; its website names TDR Media BV of Leuven. Vestax, the Tokyo company founded by Hidesato Shiino in 1977, entered bankruptcy proceedings in December 2014, Teikoku Databank reported.

One has joined a giant. Stanton, the American phono-cartridge name built up by Walter Stanton, passed to Gibson in 2011 and to inMusic in 2020, according to English Wikipedia; its website now calls it part of “the inMusic family of brands.”

Algoriddim, the Munich maker of the djay app, makes software, not hardware; it says partners including Reloop and Pioneer DJ build controllers for it.

This guide sets out what can be checked about each brand — who founded it, who owns it, and what it says about where its products are made — and marks clearly what rests only on the company’s own word.

Software first, hardware by partners.

Algoriddim is a software company, and the question of where its products are made has an unusual answer: it makes no hardware of its own. The controllers sold for djay are built by partners and, it says, “co-branded and designed to seamlessly integrate” with its apps. Its current list includes the Reloop Buddy, which it describes as “designed exclusively for djay,” the DDJ-FLX2 developed with AlphaTheta, the parent of Pioneer DJ, and controllers from Numark and Hercules. The partnerships go back a long way: an archived 2008 release announced djay 2.1 “supporting Vestax DJ MIDI controllers.” The website also credits the time-stretching and metering technology in its products to zplane.development.

On ownership, the record is short. The imprint names Algoriddim GmbH of Munich, with Karim Morsy as managing director, and he is quoted as chief executive in its 2024 releases. The company does not publish its shareholders, and the sources we checked record no sale. On that evidence, one of the three people on its 2006 team still runs it.

Its name has had company online. In djay’s early years the algoriddim.com address carried a different website, a database of Jamaican reggae rhythms, or riddims, kept by a radio host; Algoriddim’s own site had moved there by the end of 2010. The lowercase styling is its own: archived footers from 2007 and 2010 read “algoriddim GmbH,” Apple’s newsroom still listed the developer that way in 2024, and the app is always “djay.” Today’s footer capitalises the company name.

For a design guide, Algoriddim shows a brand built on an interface rather than an object — two turntables and a mixer drawn on a screen. Compare Serato, another DJ software maker, and Reloop, which builds controllers for djay. For this guide we use vinyl black, a deep indigo and a signal cyan with a sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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