Do I need Rekordbox to play music on CDJs?

Technically speaking, you don’t have to use Rekordbox to use USB drives on a CDJ, however … I wouldn’t rely on it to work.
You might run into some unexpected problems!

You see, CDJs are basically glorified “MP3” players that support a variety of file formats.
The CDJ analyzes the music file, but this slow and often not correct.

Also, don’t expect any DJ specific features to work, like:

• Accurate tempo information
  And thus Master Tempo and Beat Sync won’t work properly
• Accurate Beat grid
  And thus don’t expect a bar to start on the first beat
  And don’t expect Quantize to work
• Accurate song key information
  Detection is often wrong/non-existent and not in Camelot notation
• Fast loading of songs
  Analyzing can take a couple of seconds.
  Loaded the wrong track? loading in another one takes also a couple of seconds
• Lack of artwork and other tag information
  Extra information like artist info, album info, album art, key, MyTags etc that you can register in Rekordbox lacks
• Lack of Track Matching and Related Tracks
• Lack of Hot Cues
  Unless you program them in during your gig
• Lack of Cue Points
  Unless you program them in during your gig
• Extensive support for file formats
  Rekordbox checks and converts files into a format that CDJs can use
• No list of specs (like tempo and key info)
  Analyzing is done by track, not for a series of tracks.
  It’s not possible to see the tempo information or key for multiple tracks at the same time.
• No organizing tracks in playlists

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