A few weeks ago, I gave Pioneer rekordbox® a spin during a few sets I did at The Nightbell in Asheville, where they’ve got a pair of Nexus 2000s in the booth. I found the software to be quite intuitive to use. Very fast analyzing hundreds of tracks and easy to build playlists. It also syncs with iTunes, but for some reason, I’m having a bit of a struggle since my iTunes folder is on an external thumb drive and not an internal folder on the laptop. I haven’t seemed to be able to get it to recognize updates to the iTunes file or playback tracks from the iTunes folder. I had to simply create genre-based playlists under the playlists tool and then analyze all tracks on the thumb drive again. Kind of off and hoping someone might be able to help.

On the reverse, the LAN connection with sync and the ability to drag and drop tracks to each deck is genius. We found it extremely useful, but there was this odd situation of jumping back to the last track played every time I dragged a new track in. I had to make sure that when I dragged the track to each deck, the track intended to be next stayed active by playing it for a few seconds and then pressing cue. I was told by a friend that works for Pioneer DJ about the Auto Cue feature, which alleviates this problem. I think it was already on Auto Cue, so I’m not sure I was doing it right. I have yet to fully investigate how to prevent re-loading of a prior track instead of loading the new track before I’ve pressed play.

Given that it’s free, it’s worth a shot to download it and see if it’s right for you. With this software, Pioneer is taking it to Serato and Traktor Pro, given that the software itself can be used for mixing with a controller. You will have to register a user account to operate it though. We think Pioneer wants to start tracking what music you’ve got in your library, so there are some new controls they are introducing to do that in this software.