Pioneer DJ has announced a new Rekordbox software subscription plan, called Rekordbox Professional, in conjunction with Dropbox. The plan brings, for the first time anywhere, unlimited cloud storage for DJ music and performance data, at a fixed subscription rate.
It is designed to help working DJs avoid the worry and hassle of losing USBs or laptops, offering easy backup and download of music and performance data, as well as helping with set preparation across multiple devices.
The plan has the following features:
- “Cloud unlimited” – You can store your whole music library in the cloud, with unlimited storage. The storage is provided by Dropbox, and you can use your existing Dropbox account if you have one – the new subscription replaces both your Dropbox subscription and your current Rekordbox subscription
- Auto upload – You can set your Rekordbox software to auto upload new music you add to the cloud, to save you having to remember to do it, thus helping you to stay in sync across all devices
- Library sync on up to eight devices – This works across Mac, Windows, iOS, Android, ie anywhere you run any Rekordbox software or app. You can sync your whole library or just part to any device, to help you work on your music on the road, at your studio computer, on your touring and backup laptops, and so on
- Device Library Backup – You can copy the current state of your library on any device to the cloud, as a backup or to use on other devices
This plan also included everything in the existing Rekordbox Creative Plan, such as the edit window, DVS support, video support and so on, and so should be seen as a cloud add-on to that plan.
The price is €29.99/month or €299 a year. More info at the Rekordbox website.
Is it worth it?
The Creative Plan is currently €14.99/month or €149 a year. A Dropbox account with a large (but not unlimited) amount of storage is €11.99/month or €119 a year. So to buy both “separately” would cost you a little less than this subscription.
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But, this subscription offers unlimited Dropbox for music. You can still use the same Dropbox account for anything else in your life, too – although we guess the “unlimited” bit would only apply to music files. Rekordbox can actually work with Dropbox already, but this is a development of how Rekordbox currently works with Dropbox, and simplifies and improves things.
The question is, how important is it to have a synced Rekordbox library for you to use across devices, and to be able to quickly recover not just your music but your library and DJ information, too, in the event of a laptop fail, losing a USB drive, etc? For semi-pro and pro DJs, this may be well worth the cost of the extra €15/month over the existing Creative plan.
What we’d really like to see
This would really come alive with the addition of a username/login directly on networked Pioneer DJ gear. If you could walk up to a CDJ set-up, say, and put in your Rekordbox username and password, and immediately have access to all your music in the cloud, that would be a real leap forward.
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If you could also via the same method be logged in to any streaming subscriptions, that’s when we’d see cloud music – both “owned” and subscribed to – really coming to life. I wonder if the CDJ-3000s, for instance, have the computing ability built in to do that?
As it stands, this feels like a necessary step in the right direction from Pioneer DJ for the inevitable arrival of ubiquitous cloud music – but we think it will appeal only to a relatively small number of DJs as it stands.
Phil Morse
