Flash Drives

Basically you should view your USB stick as you would your record crate or CD case in the old days. Meaning you pick about twice the amount of tracks you’d need for the night from your full collection. You’d base your choice on the kind of gig and your plan for the night (including some plan B tracks).

For RB I’d advise the same. Make one or more playlist for the gig (including mini-playlists if you adopted that tip from DDJT) and just create a USB-stick with only those playlists and tracks on it.

You should be able to quickly navigate to and through the playlists to find your music.

Be sure to check all the necessary fields to index on when exporting to USB-stick, like BPM, genre, key (if relevant, etc.

It also pays to determine what CDJ settings you prefer (continuous play/single play, cue behavior and such) and set those in RB. Export those settings as well. When you show up to the club you can simply load the preferences and the entire unit is set the way you want.

Hope that helps some.

WAV quality tracks are about 35-50 MB each (highest quality possible). You’d need about 40 tracks per hour. Long gig = 6 hours.

6 times 40 = 240 tracks. 240 times 50 = 12.000 MB = 12 GB (roughly). That still fits on a 16GB USB-stick which I seem to recall is a size accepted by all CDJs with USB port.

Move everything to 320MP3 and you can put the same amount of music easily on a 4GB USB-stick which will most certainly fit.

I’d bring 3 sticks (identical). While more modern CDJs have a link feature so you can use one stick for 2 (or even 4) players, this is not always implemented. Older CDJs don’t have this feature in which case you need one USB stick per player. Clearly you’d want (at least) one spare, hence three of them.

As suggested here, don’t bring too much music to a gig (unless you are a mobile DJ, in which case bringing a separate request collection is probably in order). Twice the amount you’ll actually need should give you plenty of room to move.
In that case you don’t have to swap USB-sticks at all.