Pre-Rekordbox CDJ local track analysis firmware versions

Hi, thanks for the reassurance.

I do appreciate the purpose and direction of Rekordbox, and I understand the players have always been capable of doing the analysis locally, as indeed they did for many years.

The issue I (and some others) have currently, is that if there are any issues with the files exported by rekordbox, or if there is a need to play files that have not been exported from rekordbox, the current versions of all the players will refuse to do any local analysis, and the user will be stuck with no waveform at all, only an overview waveform, which only forms as the track is played at normal speed.

If there is a secret option somewhere to enable local analysis, whether that data is saved to the file or not, this would certainly be what I am looking for.

However my understanding of the current firmware versions, is that the local analysis is effectively disabled, and the player will only retrieve the data from rekordbox or display nothing, except the overview waveform - which the player will not generate while the track is paused, making it effectively redundant as the user is only interested in the waveform ahead of the playhead, not behind it.

Please let me know if this feature can be enabled manually, or if a specific firmware version can be installed that enables it, I would be happy to accept additional loads on the cpu, provided the audio playback is unaffected, which is certainly how the previous models behaved - I never had any lag issues at all as far as I can remember, although hardware crashes were possible, and could be related to this process, generally speaking it never happened.

If no such option exists however, please let me know which models and versions would still be capable of this, presumably these firmware versions would not be able to read rekordbox data, and would have to generate the information on track load every time, this is still a preferable alternative.

The use case primarily being backup units, as currently there is no alternative to a rekordbox failure, you simply have to deal with not having any waveforms.

Thanks again

Unfortunately what you're asking for is not currently available on Pioneer DJ players.

I'd certainly appreciate hearing why you're wanting to use CDJs but hesitant to use rekordbox to prepare the music which will be played on them.

Hi, I can certainly explain why:

on multiple occasions, myself and others I know, have arrived at an event, having exported tracks to USB, connected the USB to the player, and have not had the waveforms display on some or all tracks.

I appreciate there may have been legitimate reasons why the waveforms are not displaying, in terms of the way they were exported or whatever, however this makes no difference in the moment, as you don't have the opportunity to debug or re-export your collection when you are expected to play within 10-15 minutes, this was certainly more common in the earlier versions of RB, so while there may have been some improvements, the refusal for the player to mitigate this risk, means that the only way to truly mitigate it, would be for the artist or venue to carry older versions of the CDJs that would still generate the waveforms.

This is also excluding all the times when tracks could not be exported from RB, either because of an error (my log file is has maybe 100 tracks which will play fine on the laptop but for some reason cannot be exported), or because the track was never loaded into RB, and was just on a USB stick that someone happened to have on them, this would certainly be the case if an artist loses their USB, but has tracks that could be downloaded from a cloud source (again only in an emergency), but would then be required to have RB already installed on that machine, and would still have to export from through RB.

If you could let me know when RB was first launched, that would probably indicate the last year of fireware that would still support this.

If by some miracle I could find a pair of CDJ2000s for example, that hadn't had their firmware updated since the release of RB, I would have this functionality available.

If the players could be manually instructed to generate the waveforms in an emergency, I would have no need to go through this process of finding older players that would.

I'm also assuming that even if the older firmware versions were available, it would not be possible to rollback a player to a previous version, perhaps making older players more valuable than they otherwise might have been.

As an aside, how does the player handle tracks that are loaded from streaming services? does the streaming service have to provide the data that RB would export with the file? or does the player generate the information for material from those sources afterall?

Thanks again