Making the transition from Traktor to Rekordbox

Frankly, going RekordBox DJ for the sake of playing in clubs is, imho, betting on a losing horse.

The first and foremost question to answer is: What is your (desired) workflow. Then you go and find the software that most closely matches that workflow (100% is utopia). Everything else follows from there.

So, the question Traktor or RekordBox should not be dictated by “long run maybe club gear use”. I think Traktor supports HID for CDJs as well. So you can just show up at a club, hook up your laptop and use the CDJs as controllers for Traktor. No need for new software.

If you feel Traktor (no longer) matches your workflow, you should still establish what it is you need in your software to get closer to matching that workflow. And then you have to look at the Main 6 (well 5 as you already tried Traktor), Serato, VDJ, RekordBox DJ, Mixvibes Cross, DJay Pro (MAC only) to see which fits closest. Most if not all of these will allow you to use CDJs as controllers through HID-control.

I might end up rambling a bit, so I’ll make my point first: no need to go all in, you should give it a go if you are curious – the latest version of rekordbox is mappable to other controllers and an S4 is common enough that I’m sure someone else has done the hard work for you already, so just download the demo version thats free for 30 days and see how it fits. In the greater scheme of things the differences between what you’ll get with that setup, and the “real” pioneer setup really are minor. (You won’t have jogwheel support, but take it as a chance to work on your pitchfader technique, or just cheat with sync during the experiment. There’s nothing magic or completely foreign about Pioneer jogs anyway, so what you’ve previously done with Traktor and S4 jogs will transfer fine if you do decide its the way to go).

ok, now the rambling bit… some of it undoubtedly applies only to me, but just sharing views on the format wars as asked.

In my “career”, I’ve been from CDs to vinyl to CDs to Traktor+DVS to Traktor+Controller and am currently mostly on USB (on denon 3900s when I can, but in public mostly various Pioneer models), but thinking of breaking out the Traktor again. Considering you’re talking about the XDJ-RX, am I right in assuming you are thinking more in terms of USBs rather than the whole Rekordbox-as-dj-software thing and maybe considering a move away from pc-based DJing? [Just another note in reference to my advice above, you actually get less from a regular Pioneer and rekordbox setup than you do from the software version, so its not like you’re missing out on much by checking it out that way, and the differences between a mapped version and the hardware version ie which button to press, are things that you could pick up during soundcheck or a short practice anyway].

While @Vintages advice is solid, I’ll disagree with his premise a bit – Pioneer is the club standard unfortunately and they aren’t going to be displaced overnight. I’m not saying he’s out right wrong either, but just that they are a very safe bet, especially if you are not the headliner being able to conform to them is a great asset.

Not to mention how much easier life is when your DJ “rig” is two USBs and your headphones… haha and the 2nd USB is actually a spare. No more bags to carry, no more jostling for space in the booth, finding power points, having to try to inconspicuously plug stuff in or out of the mixer during other people’s sets. No issues when the club hasn’t updated its firmware on the mixer, or they just did and you don’t have the latest driver. No gain staging between controller and house mixer, no soundcheck required. No spare USB cables, no remembering to turn off wireless, no wobbly controllers up on stands. No need to lurk about to the very end to pack gear or keep checking that your $2000 investment doesn’t grow legs and leave before you. No (personal) panic when some fool decides its clever to douse the DJ and booth in champagne. And those mysterious crashes that eventually will happen you get to blame on other people’s gear.

Digital has its place of course, but before getting into that I guess a few caveats and downsides to USBs, probly the first of which should be the confession that I’m not actually using rekordbox either anymore. For the way I’ve been playing recently, it didn’t seem to bring that much to the table, and while there are a few obvious merits, the extra step of running stuff through yet another piece of software seems a bit of a hassle for relatively minimal gain. I mostly buy music in .flac format, so there’s already a bit of a process involved in converting my setlist to .wav (I don’t know if recent rekordbox will do this conversion now – I know it was updated to at least play flacs at some point, but sorta meaningless if CDJs belligerently won’t play them – if so, it would actually be a strong motivator to get me to have another look). After purchasing, a track will also have to be quite special to get played more than 2 or 3 times, and frequently only once… I’ll come back and pop it into a set months or years later, but by then I’ll have forgotten why I have those cue points set in various places, or will want to change them anyway. Mostly I make loops on the fly too and in my prep or while cueing up I can usually pick up if there’s a key clash – if I were playing other genres, I could see key information being a bit more useful though. I also tend to have fairly well-defined setlists prepared anyway – these days “reading the floor” is more a case of deciding how many tracks to skip than deciding on what to play next entirely off the cuff. If I sense things are going in an entirely inappropriate direction, I’ll just flip to another folder that was prepared for a different night. Anyway the point of this paragraph is just to point out that my approach to prep might be quite different from other people’s – if I were just starting out in clubs and less experienced, doing a showcase or mixtape, or still being a resident dj with a core of frequently played tracks, I’d probably recommend a slightly different approach! In my case the other issue of course is that if I’m going to properly prepare tracks, do I do it for Traktor, or Rekordbox or Engine (for my beloved Denons), none of which I can do on my standard linux operating system. If the industry couldn’t agree on a standard beatgrid/cue/tag format, at least the could publish their specs and some of us would quite happily do their work of writing translators for them!

Anyway back to USBs – one of my “issues” is that I’ll probably end up having 10 copies of the same favourite track in different party-specific folders, but then have trouble finding or figuring out which party I played that other one-off track at when I depart from my planned list. Using rekordbox with folders by genre and playlists re-using the source files and possibly some tags or even ratings would likely be a more sensible way to go. USBs also end up constantly full, so there’s before every set something irrelevant to the night gets deleted which is fine until a few weeks later when you go looking for it. Point for pc-based, and while we’re there, when you’re searching for something, you can’t beat pc!

So finally on to the subject at hand: Traktor vs Rekordbox… As a platform, I’d say Traktor is quite significantly ahead still. Rekordbox has a few nifty features though, and with the install-base in thousands of clubs could quite easily become THE platform. IMHO Native Instruments made a really bad move in moving to such a closed platform in order to sell more hardware… As Vintage pointed out the higher model CDJs and some of the mixers are still Traktor compatible though, but remains to be seen how long that holds true. The “2” after Traktor has been there for quite a long time though – considering the work that went into the stems addition and the screens-on-controllers, I’m not holding my breath for an imminent release, but also find it interesting that those weren’t a reason to increment the version number – as if they still have something in mind that will be more deserving of the jump.

And that brings us to why I think Traktor is still the more interesting platform – stems and remix decks. They are not for everyone though – and thats also a large part of why I moved off Traktor, basically it felt like I had this complete overkill system, when most of what I was doing could be done on CDJs anyway, without all the hassle noted above, and not only that, the pc was a bit of a crutch and I was ending up a bit of a lazy DJ and spending way to much time using eyes rather than ears – and adding random effects because you could and you might as well do something, rather than that they were really needed. Anyway, I digress… Traktor seems to be pushing the DJ as Producer angle a bit more and if you see yourself going there, might be worth sticking with the platform a bit more, or if the stems file format catches on you might even find yourself moving in that direction unplanned. (I think the format is going to stay a bit niche though, unfortunately the industry is more likely to try to use it to wring more dollars out of us than promote it on its own merits). As stems is an open format though, Pioneer of course is free to use it, but as they are more hardware based, I don’t see how they really can until the next generation rolls through and even then it will take a while to displace their installed base which remains their biggest strength. Pioneer have of course put out their sample player too now though, so there is some evidence that they have thought in terms of multitrack play, but not sure to what extent that will be incorporated back into the rekordbox ecosystem or if its going to stay as a standalone concept. Being Pioneer it is of course absurdly priced though and while those are nice filters, I think a Traktor remix deck will do just fine…

Anyway, after my 2 (hundred?) cents worth, considering the low barrier to entry, again I’ll say that you might be doing yourself a disfavor by not having a passing familiarity with rekordbox and least getting the manager installed and figuring out how to set up playlists and exporting to USB now rather than when you suddenly land a big gig. At the same time don’t believe the hype – as long as you’re dealing with static platters your abilities will apply just fine… no denying that 2000’s are nice to play on, but they are really no different to a 350 in the most significant ways, (and then your S4 is already “better”). You don’t have to use every possible feature either – otherwise we’d be in here telling you that you had to buy a 2000, a 2000 nexus, a nexus 2 , and XDJ1000 and just in case a 900 too!

The big advantage of the XDJ-RX is you don’t need it connected to a laptop so comparing all the different dj software is pretty irrelevant – you would prep your tracks in recordbox, then export them to a usb drive.

DJ Vintage is right though – if the only reason you want to change is for possible future club play then there’s no real need.
If you can mix on your S4 it shouldn’t take long to pick up anything else.