Keyboard shortcuts

Press ← or → to navigate between chapters

Press S or / to search in the book

Press ? to show this help

Press Esc to hide this help

Export to USB

Experimental. USB export hasn't been tried on a Pioneer or Engine DJ player yet. Check the stick on a player before you rely on it at a gig, and tell us how it went (see Feedback and logs).

openDJ can put your lists on a USB stick that Pioneer DJ players read, the way rekordbox's USB export does, or that Engine DJ players (Denon DJ Prime and SC, Numark, Rane) read, the way Engine DJ does: the music, its beat grid, cues, loops and waveforms, album art, and your playlists and folders. One stick can carry both.

Exporting

  1. Plug in a USB stick formatted FAT32 or exFAT.
  2. Pick a playlist, folder, smart list or stage in the tree on the left and choose File › Export › USB… (or right-click it and choose Export to USB…). A folder takes its lists and subfolders with it.
  3. Pick the stick under Drive (press Refresh if it isn't there yet).
  4. Pick which Players the stick is for:
    • All Pioneer DJ players writes both Pioneer libraries below; it's right for Pioneer gear unless you know you only need one.
    • CDJ-3000, NXS2 and older, XDJ-XZ, XDJ-RX3 read the Device Library (export.pdb).
    • CDJ-3000X, XDJ-AZ, OPUS-QUAD, OMNIS-DUO read OneLibrary (exportLibrary.db).
    • Denon DJ Prime and SC, Numark, Rane read the Engine DJ library (Engine Library/Database2/m.db). It's written the way Engine OS 4 and 5 read it.
    • Pioneer DJ and Engine DJ players writes all three, for a stick you take to any booth.
  5. Press Export. You can press Stop at any time; the stick then keeps the library it had.

Tracks that were never analysed are analysed first, so the first export of a big list takes a while. Music already on the stick isn't copied again.

What ends up on the stick

  • The audio, under Contents/Artist/Album/ on the stick, shared by the Pioneer and Engine DJ libraries.
  • Each track's analysis: beat grid, hot cues A–H with their names and colors, memory cues and loops, and the waveforms players draw (blue, RGB and three-band).
  • Title, artist, album, genre, label, key, BPM, rating, color, comment, year and play count. Keys are written the way openDJ shows them (Camelot or notes, from Settings › Analysis).
  • Album art.
  • The lists you exported, in their folders.

For Engine DJ players each track gets its beat grid, hot cues 1–8 with their names and colors, up to eight saved loops (loops on hot cue pads keep their pad; memory loops fill the rest), the overview waveform, the main cue (your first memory cue), key, BPM, rating and album art. The players draw the scrolling waveform from the music themselves.

Good to know

  • The stick's playlists are replaced. Each export writes the stick's library afresh with the lists you picked. To have several lists on one stick, put them in a folder and export the folder.
  • A stick Engine DJ already exported to is left alone: openDJ only replaces an Engine Library it wrote itself. Use another stick, or move the Engine Library folder off it first.
  • A stick rekordbox already exported to gets openDJ's library in the same place, in place of rekordbox's, so players never see two.
  • Hot cues past H are left out, as players have eight. The result says how many.
  • Tracks that can't be read (a missing file, say) are left out, and the result lists them.
  • Exporting the same lists again is quick: only new music is copied.

Credits

USB export stands on the work of others:

  • rbox by Dylan Jones (GPL-3.0) writes the Device Library, OneLibrary and the analysis files. While building on it we found three small bugs in its OneLibrary schema (a column name, a missing column and its foreign keys), which openDJ works around and has reported upstream.
  • Bake'n Deck by Masanari Higashi (MIT) worked out, and tested on real CDJs, how rekordbox encodes waveforms, cue colors, analysis folders and album art. openDJ follows it.
  • rbxport by Chris Le (GPL-2.0-or-later) documents the stick format in depth; openDJ checks its exports against that reference.
  • EngineX-OS (MIT) measured Engine DJ's library on Engine OS players: the m.db schema and how beat grids, waveforms, cues and loops are encoded. openDJ's Engine DJ export follows it.
  • rekordcrate (MPL-2.0) and the Deep Symmetry format notes were used to check openDJ's sticks.
  • EngineX OS (MIT) reads rekordbox sticks for Denon, Numark and Rane players, and its OpenProLink CDJ-3000 simulator loads them with the same reader. openDJ's tests read every export back with a port of that reader, which shares no code with rbox.