Do I need Rekordbox to play music on CDJs?

1 minute read

Technically speaking, you don’t have to use Rekordbox to use USB drives on a CDJ, however … I wouldn’t rely on it to work.
You might run into some unexpected problems!

You see, CDJs are basically glorified “MP3” players that support a variety of file formats.
The CDJ analyzes the music file, but this slow and often not correct.

Also, don’t expect any DJ specific features to work, like:

Accurate tempo information
And thus Master Tempo and Beat Sync won’t work properly
Accurate Beat grid
And thus don’t expect a bar to start on the first beat
And don’t expect Quantize to work
Accurate song key information
Detection is often wrong/non-existent and not in Camelot notation
Fast loading of songs
Analyzing can take a couple of seconds.
Loaded the wrong track? loading in another one takes also a couple of seconds
Lack of artwork and other tag information
Extra information like artist info, album info, album art, key, MyTags etc that you can register in Rekordbox lacks
Lack of Track Matching and Related Tracks
Lack of Hot Cues
Unless you program them in during your gig
Lack of Cue Points
Unless you program them in during your gig
Extensive support for file formats
Rekordbox checks and converts files into a format that CDJs can use
No list of specs (like tempo and key info)
Analyzing is done by track, not for a series of tracks.
It’s not possible to see the tempo information or key for multiple tracks at the same time.
No organizing tracks in playlists