My Major Gripes with Rekordbox

Rekordbox as a platform for supposedly managing your DJ/Recordbox collection has a few glaring misses, in my view which make the length of time it takes to prepare a set, about three times as long as it should be.

1) Due to the lack of file format compatibility on most of the Pioneer equipment (such as FLAC or ALAC for example) most DJs who deal with anything other than MP3 are forced to keep two libraries of their music.

The painful process consists of having to copy all of your FLAC and playlists manually out of my main music management software (iTunes, Jriver, Foobar, whatever) into a folder in another location, converting only the lossless tracks to AIFF and then manually dragging the contents of the folder into empty playlists in the Rekordbox Export window.

Whilst this process sounds simple in theory, it quickly gets out of hand as the size of the library grows and later on when it comes to adding new tracks to the existing playlists.

Why is there no folder monitor feature in Rekordbox which can track a directory and auto import music? If that existed, we could at least manually generate m3u's of our sets and then import a playlist via rekordbox.

2) This one would save EVERYBODY time and effort. You already tell rekordbox which devices you intend to play your exported music on. So why not include a transcoder/converter which converts the music you are exporting to a supported file format (e.g. from FLAC to AIFF). In my example: I own an XDJ RX and have to convert all of my Flac files to AIFF manually before importing to rekordbox. If the software could address this for you upon exporting, it would be so helpful.

3) If you and another DJ are recording a set, using both of your own USB sticks (one plugged into each deck) after the mix, the history inside rekordbox only shows you a list of tracks played by the one stick. Not both. This makes tagging mix track lists a nightmare. Why not do like Traktor does and include a simple xml of the history??

If everybody used iTunes and only dealt with MP3's, I’m sure rekordbox would be the perfect piece of software but unfortunately, technology has moved on and Rekordbox needs to keep up with the times.

Please take these feature requests into consideration, or let me know where I can submit these officially for review.

Cheers.

P.s I am aware that I can play any file format in Performance mode using a laptop and I see this written as a response by admins and forum users all the time (which I feel is a very lazy response) BUT the beauty of Pioneer DJ equipment (especially the XDJ RX which I own) is that you only need a single USB stick to DJ in a more organic method of just you and the controller, no laptop.

chief December 16, 2018 14:05 Answered

Official comment

@Sample > Thanks for your feedback.

The choice of music format is entirely up to you, the DJ. Our hardware is constantly changing to accept a wider variety of formats as the generations evolve, and formats become more widespread / standardized. Unfortunately some lower-tier units will not support all file formats due to the cost of using more advanced chipsets to decode and manage the data from those formats. The reason a transcoder has not been included in rekordbox is twofold; one, as you say, would require additional storage space, thereby multiplying the space required to house your music collection - not something all DJs want to have happen. The other reason is if the conversion process occurred on export, it would be time consuming, and with DJs who use low-quality USB drives with low write speeds, they already complain about the amount of time it can take to export. Adding a conversion step to the process would only compound this export time.

As for the history, the player can't store the history of a track played from a different device because it doesn't know if the track on that other device came from the same collection or not. If you want to avoid that problem, play from one device.

And PS: The answer we give to use rekordbox DJ to play all file formats is not lazy, it's a legitimate answer to "how do I do this"? I'm sorry if that doesn't suit your needs, but there are other work-arounds as you noted yourself.

Pulse December 16, 2018 19:59

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The reply to my message was way too quick for me to believe this has been appropriately considered. Either that or its quite a commonly reported issue and you have had to respond to something similar before.

Its not just "some lower tier units" - The latest Nexus 2000 mkII is the only professional unit to play FLAC natively. The Raspberry pi can decode FLAC and thats a £20 computer.

So what you are saying is: If you don't use lossy MP3's then Pioneer equipment isnt for you?

You are telling me that Pioneer didn't include a transcoder to save me space on my computer? Whilst that is VERY thoughtful of them, storage space these days is cheap and only getting cheaper. Nonetheless. The transcode option does not have to be mandatory, you should be able to enable/disable it as you choose. Further to that, we are having to duplicate our entire libraries anyway doing all of this manually.

More and more people are moving to lossless and this is only going to become a more popular request.

chief December 16, 2018 20:21 0 votes

Thanks for your consideration that I'm boilerplating the responses here. This is a topic that has come up before, but there's no simple solution for it, nor is there a "one size fits all" answer as every DJ has different needs.

I'm glad to hear that a device with a processor can handle decoding of a FLAC file, but perhaps you weren't aware that Pioneer DJ hardware is not processor-based and all the chipsets used are selected for their application, rather than simply throwing arbitrary code at a microprocessor / CPU, meaning you can't compare a CDJ-2000NXS2 to a Raz Pi.

I'm not telling you to use MP3s at all, but thanks for reading my whole response.

Not just on your computer, but also on your export device. Yes, storage is getting cheaper and larger, and perhaps in future updates we'll change the way things work to take advantage of that, but for now, I'll direct you to search the forums for the number of complaints of users who are filling their hard drives and having to move to larger drives, or those who are still using 32GB flash drives for exporting.

Again, I thank you for your feedback.

Pulse December 16, 2018 20:46 0 votes

Don't take it personally.

I search this forum from time to time looking for answers to my own questions others have asked on here and the majority of the time questions like "Can I do this..." are followed by an answer of "No, Rekordbox cannot do that". By the moderator.

It feels like issues and feature suggestions raised here just get shut down immediately without so much as making it up the ladder for discussion, let alone added to the dev road map.

This software is pretty amateur in comparison to others and all we are doing is highlighting areas of potential improvement. There are a lot of other minor issues which have not been patched since its release. No ability to export all playlists as file. Individual playlist exports cut off part of the name... I could go on.

I would have thought a company of Pioneers size would have the capacity to hire a suitably sized and tooled development team.

chief December 16, 2018 21:30 0 votes

Almost all suggestions are passed along, many with recommendations by our DJ team on how it should be implemented, or additional tweaks. Many comments are closed or not even commented on, but they are all evaluated and passed to the product teams. Some of them are fantastic, others are ... well, not. There are many which have been on the list as critical since day one, while other simple "low hanging fruit" get added or fixed in a matter of weeks, but that doesn't mean the important ones will never get done - sometimes it takes a lot more than the user thinks to implement. A perfect example of that is mixed-media playlists.

And they do have a sizeable team working on rekordbox, as it's the core of the Pioneer DJ ecosystem.

Pulse December 16, 2018 21:38 1 vote