Does Recordbox dj work with cd drives?

Hmmm, not sure what you’re after. If you have an external CD/DVD player connected, and put media in to it with mp3/audio-files burnt as DATA, it should work as the computer will consider the drive as any other drive. Could be useful as backup, or if your hdd i full and you need to get your latest music with you until you have fixed your hdd issues. A USB stick would be to prefer and easier to use, but if an empty CD/DVD is all you have… use it 😉 .

If you want to play CD’s and are using software to control your CDJ’s, you will have to switch on to CD on the CDJ and let the CDJ do the playing as it’s supposed to do. If you don’t have CDJ’s you will have to rip your CD’s or get yourself a couple of CDJ’s to play CD’s.

You have a lot of options. Just pick the ones that fits your needs 🙂 .

Why on earth would you want to add CD-players to your laptop to play audio CDs through your DJ-software ???

Even Pioneer has started REMOVING their CD-playing capacity from some of their CDJ-controllers and call them XDJ-something.

In RekordBox (both regular and DJ) if you open explorer, it does NOT show the CD-ROM drive. In Serato you can load the tracks from the audio-CD (without tags of course) and play them (at least in prep mode, didn’t have a controller to hook up handy).
Mixvibes Cross shows the drive in the Files tab, but does not show content. I.e. can’t see the tracks so can’t load them. Traktor (2.6.7 is the last version I have) also shows the audio-CD and allows you to load tracks.