Transferring playlists (and hotcues) to laptop (rekordbox 6)

I have a desktop and a laptop, both macs.

I'm using the latest Rekord box 6.5.2

All my music already sits in dropbox and that is synced to both machines but the drives/folders where dropbox resides is different on each machine.

I do most of my home DJing and library management on my desktop.

I want to be able to select a few playlists and transfer them along with the track data for those tracks to the laptop.

I exported my collection from my desktop and saved to dropbox.
Then on my laptop, I set the xml location in preferences and it appeared in the browser.

If I try to drag one of the playlists across, it ends up empty with a warning that it couldn't find the tracks. But if select the files in the playlist and choose relocate, it says the files are already in the library.

Is there a way to make this work so I can import playlists and import/update track info for the tracks in the playlist.

Thanks!

Tom Burnell August 03, 2021 10:46 Answered

Official comment

Hey Tom,

That's a bit of a tangle... there are a couple of ways to synchronize a rekordbox library -- from easiest to most difficult:

- The rekordbox Creative plan Cloud Sync feature; this automatically keeps each computer up-to-date using the cloud server for database and Dropbox for the files.

- An external hard drive; keep your music and database on an external drive, connect it to whichever computer you want to use and it's always in sync.

- Pick one computer as the master and backup the database, then restore on the other. It's a one-way sync, but allows you to take the data to the other computer. Can work with different folder paths, but not ideal.

Don't try and use the XML import, you're just going to make a mess (as you've noticed with the warning about files existing in the collection).

Pulse August 03, 2021 20:01

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Date Votes

3 comments

- The unofficial / unsupported Dropbox / Google Drive sync; basically, you manually move your rekordbox database to a folder within the cloud sync folders, and modify the rekordbox settings files on each computer to point to that location. This requires that you have the same paths for the user profiles on each machine.

I'm using this approach at the moment. I copied the Pioneer folder to my dropbox and then symlinked it back to my user folder.

It seems to be working ok - I'm trying not to open it on more than 1 machine at a time to avoid conflicts. Presumably which ever instance closes last saves over the previous one.

One thing that is a bit odd is that the rekord box has a folder with many many little files - which seems to be a good way to maintain meta data atomically - ie it could be changed on either machine - but it seems like there is a large (several hundred mb) master db file that is saved on exit where the metadata is stored. Curious how it's architected and wonder if it could better support multiple instances editing at the time to reduce conflicts.

Anything I need to cautious about this approach?

Tom Burnell September 16, 2021 11:09 0 votes

Sorry, we can't give any details as to the how or why, but just know that what you're trying to do is 100% unsupported, so the entire thing is "at your own risk" and should be taken with much caution. Make sure you have a backup to avoid losing anything!

Pulse September 16, 2021 16:50 0 votes