Terry_42

I totally understand you wanting to move away from iTunes. The reason why most DJs still use it are simple: iTunes does store your music away very nicely and in a way that it is easy to backup and recover if must be as you simply backup the media folder and iTunes Library.xml and your files and playlists are safe.
Secondly iTunes has a lot more features when it comes to “smart playlists”. Now especially Rekordbox and Serato are catching up with their smart crate features, but there are some that are still missing. If those feature are not needed by you, then you are fine just doing the playlists in your DJ software.
The next thing for us older DJs, we still have and are still getting CDs from labels for free. Hence we need to rip them to mp3s before we can play them. iTunes has a really good encoder (especially if you work on MacOS) and automatically fills in all the id3 tags you need. Filter it through MIK and you never need to edit a tag again.

Now such things can also be done by other software of course, but it is way harder and more cumbersome. I am totally on board with you, I am wanting to move away from iTunes too, but I have not found a solid alternative yet.

Hey and welcome, have fun!

Well MIK has more accurate key detection. Still no software is perfect, but MIK has an edge over Rekordbox and Serato in that regard. Also it can easily check the energy levels which is OKish and you can auto-tag mp3 tags easily.
Hence I like MIK a lot.

Also: The DDJ-RB + Rekordbox DJ is lightyears more advanced than any CDJ in production, so unless you want to downgrade or go back in time we discourage you to switch to CDJs from this setup. However the crappy displays in the overpriced CDJ2000 Nexus and Nexus2 will display key info that is in the mp3 key tag if setup correctly. So prolly wont work 50% of the time.

Numark, the Behringer is really really bad.

Hi and welcome!

I am in the industry very long and maybe I can help, but you need to elaborate a little more as I do not yet know what point you are going for.

I am not that into hardware samplers honestly. I use Ableton and/or Maschine and control that with a simply midi-pad controller.

Few of the best events 2 of my students put together was a “help each other” event.
They had a student on their college that got into financial trouble as his whole family died in a plane crash. So apart from a huge loss, he also was down financially.
So they made a charity event where all money income would go to him to support him through at least a year of college. The Dean chimed in, gave them the venue for free etc. etc. in the end they had over 500 attendees great fun event and got over 100k in donations, as also some companies chimed in that worked closely with the scientific staff.