[citation needed] Ralf Hütter stated in interviews that he regarded The Mix as a type of "live" album, as it captured the results of the band's continual digital improvisations in their Kling Klang studio.

"[4] During this period, the band was converting their Kling Klang studio to digital, transferring its sound library from 24-track analogue tape to disc, which factored into the album's creation.

[3] The prolonged production period for the album led band members Wolfgang Flür and, later, Bartos to leave the group before its release.

[14] While Andrew Harrison of Select awarded the album five stars out of five, his opinion was that "Hütter and Schneider threw themselves into techno as if they'd invented it (which they had), but updating Kraftwerk was always rather pointless, as their music has never dated at all".

[13] Chris Power of Drowned in Sound called it the band's "most idiosyncratic release", observing, "At its lowest ebb, crushingly, The Mix deals in an excruciating neutering of its source material ... its other sins being ones of redundancy rather than active damage."

However, he singled out elements of "Autobahn" as what the album "could have been if Kraftwerk had elected to really work these tracks over in a radical way, rather than essentially updating them to dance music's early-Nineties industry standard".