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How to Speed Up Rekordbox Exports

#djing

Let’s face it Rekordbox is slow. Here’s some of my checklists and gotcha’s to speed up my export workflow.

  1. Disable track previews

I noticed that performance takes a huge hit when track previews must render in the table during export. I imagine it might have something to do with having to analyze and then render track waveforms continuously causing chugging and slowness.

Right click on the table header and uncheck the Previews option

Figure 1: Disabling previews in rekordbox

  1. Ensure your USB speed is high

Double check what the write speed of your USB is. Apparently (🙄) the main reason for sluggishness in the application is the ability to write to small files; I’m assuming there is maybe an analysis file for each track or something that’s stored in the “PIONEER” folder on disk.

File tree for internals of the Rekordbox formatted USB showing the folders Artwork, CDJ MPK rekordbox and USBANLZ. The files DEVSETTING.DAT DJMMYSETTING.DAT, djprofile.nxs, MYSETTING.DAT and MYSETTING2.DAT

Figure 2: Inside of the Rekordbox PIONEER file on a USB

What’s the write speed of your USB? I’ve use SanDisk Extreme series which is apparently near mid to high end of the line.

  1. Check your USB adapters if applicable

Now this one blew me away because its so insidious. A cynic might suppose that the pursuit of growing bottom line at Apple has grown to such dire levels in lieu of new product ideas that the fastest growing market is the ever necessary “Adapters & Dongles” category. Now, I put this on myself because:

a. when ordering some random technology from Amazon who really knows what you're getting; and 
b. I should have thought deeper as to why USB ports are different colours and whether that had to do with the day-long transfer speeds I was getting in - blame the user!

Anyway, because the CDJ requires USB-A I needed to use a USB-A to C converter to connect to the Macbook for export. Verify if you’re using a USB 3.0 enabled adapters (i.e., “The blue ones inside”) otherwise your export speeds will be dismal!

  1. Delete Video Files In Rekordbox

This is just me being stupid I guess, but somehow there were video files in my Rekordbox instance. Not only can’t these sync to modern CDJs, but they can be hundreds of Megabytes to even Gigabytes in size - wasting times in the syncing progress - UGH!

A rekordbox file table with a video file in a cell titled 2manydjz

Figure 3: Video files in Rekordbox. Stop. I’m not a VDJ.

A filter window on Rekordbox with Video selected

Figure 4: Filter for Videos on Rekordbox

… More to come