The Lowdown
Rekord Buddy allows you to shuttle your Traktor collection into Pioneer’s Rekordbox, or conversely, send your complete Rekordbox data to Traktor, and achieves what it sets out to do admirably – assuming you use a Mac, that is.
First Impressions / Setting up
Rekord Buddy allows you to shuttle your Traktor collection into Pioneer’s Rekordbox, or conversely, send your complete rekordbox data to Traktor. What this means is all of your playlists, cue points and metadata become available whether you’re DJing on your portable Traktor S2 at a friend’s house party or on a pair of Pioneer CDJs at your weekly club residency. (Keep in mind that while Traktor is an all-in-one library and performance DJ program, rekordbox is software developed by Pioneer to let users prepare their tracks and create playlists, for ultimate use on CDJs or gear like the Pioneer XDJ-Aero.)
So Rekord Buddy has the potential to turn Traktor users into CDJ fanatics and vice versa, allowing for useful flexibility when it comes to DJing’s greatest bottom line: Playing music.
In Use
Here’s how it works. Let’s say you came up with an improvised routine at last night’s club gig that you want to replicate at your mate’s house party later on tonight. You punched in some cue points at the gig for a couple of songs that you have on a USB stick. You simply load that USB back to your laptop for the cue point changes to be saved in rekordbox. Once that’s done, you fire up Rekord Buddy, click Sync, and then all those cue points are stored and automatically show up when you load those songs in Traktor, ready to be used.
The same goes for Traktor users who want to get their hands dirty with some CDJs. Rekord Buddy syncs your Traktor collection with rekordbox to save you the hassle of having to redo all of your playlists and metadata. You then export this information to a USB along with your music, and you’re good to go on a pair of club decks with all cue points intact! It’s quick, it’s effective and it’s most definitely convenient.
While setting up Rekord Buddy is rather straightforward, there’s a quick walkthrough included with the app to make sure you get rekordbox and Traktor to work properly with it. After this, it’s a breeze to use every single time and in my testing, it was flawless.
Conclusion
If you’re a Traktor and Mac user who wants to start getting acquainted with CDJs and rekordbox this is the perfect little app to make that transition seamless. On the other hand, if you perform on CDJs regularly and would like to take your portable controller out for a spin using Traktor, rest assured that all the work you’ve put into prepping your songs will safely make the jump with you.
It’s not for PC, or for Serato, so it’s not a universal platform or software app by any means – but what it sets out to do, it does very well.
