You have just hit the proverbial nail on the head. I have stated a few times that I consider this to become the biggest problem with digital DJ-in the upcoming decade, unless something is done to correct it (and you never know what is happening behind the scenes already, right?).
I believe that all your information (at least the common stuff that has no bearing on program specific features) should travel with the track, not stay behind in a (proprietary) database. So if you set cue points, loops, beat markers and such for a track on whatever platform you use (Traktor, Serato, VDJ, RekordBox, Engine, any of the iPad apps) it should be stored with the track and be available when you load the track in any of the other programs.
Doesn’t work that way (yet?!).
How it does work though:
- You do your thing in Traktor
- I actually think you can then load your tracks into RekordBox as well (since they both don’t move tracks someplace different (like iTunes always wants to do) and run RekordBox. So no need to copy actual music files to another place for use in RekordBox.
- You can set playlists in RekordBox and just export whatever tracks/playlists and even CDJ setting to USB sticks.
You will however NOT be able to use the cues, loops and such you set in Traktor in RekordBox or the other way around.
So, keeping things in sync could be a bit tricky and at least a lot of manual labor.
Major point for you again: I think you can let both Traktor and RekordBox use the same folder for their music files. They will just both make databases of the added info elsewhere. If I am wrong about that I hope another reader can correct me here.
It may be wise to set the analysis features of RekordBox so that stuff that you already did in Traktor (BPM and Key info for example) are not re-analyzed in RekordBox. You’d want RB to use just the info that is already in the tags right.
Greetinx,
C.
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