I'm re-posting this because my original post from yesterday seems to have been mysteriously deleted.
I'm setting up a new laptop to use just for bringing to gigs. At home I manage my Rekordbox collection and practice on a different personal home computer.
When I plug my synced DJ USB stick into the new computer, none of my playlists or collection show up. It just shows that Sync With My Tag dialog which asks if I want to delete all my My Tags (which obviously I decline). I expected that I could just plug in the USB stick in any computer with Rekordbox, just like you can with CDJs, and it should be able to pull up your collection, playlists, tags, etc just as they were when they were synced.
So I did some research and it seems like the only way for it to work is to actually move my Master Database off of my home computer and to the DJ USB stick. That doesn't make sense - if the USB works perfectly fine on CDJs without needing the Master Database, then why would Rekordbox require it?
This system poses a lot of problems for DJs. If any DJ with a USB prepared for Rekordbox/CDJs wants to come play on my controller, if they plug in their USB to my computer it will be useless because they hadn't put their Master Database on their USB. Furthermore, if I lose my USB stick then I lose my entire database. And apparently I can't have a backup USB stick because the software forces me to have only one database.
Can someone explain this logic to me? What is this difference between the Master Database and everything synced to my USB stick that makes the use between CDJs and computers fundamentally incompatible? How are the synced USB and Master Database not totally redundant? (And then what is the whole use of the XML collection file?) Either I'm completely missing something, or this whole system is severely redundant and poorly designed. Let's hope it's the former.
Thank you.
*Update - What a nightmare - I tried to move my master database back from the USB to my home computer and it kept giving me an error that it could not be moved. So I had to restore the database from a backup and now my artwork for every song plus the beat grids are missing. How do I rebuild my collection to fix the missing album covers? Importing the files back into the playlists doesn't work.
