It hasn’t been officially announced, but it appears that along with Beatport compatibility, the Pioneer DJ CDJ-3000 players now also have onboard analysis for music files that have not previously been analysed in Rekordbox.
Video demo
Watch as I demo this new feature, long asked-for by CDJ users.
Our community member Brian, upon seeing the units analyse freshly downloaded tracks from Beatport, tested to see if it would do the same with “raw” MP3s on a USB, and told us it would – and upon testing, we saw that Brian was indeed correct.
Watch the video (I deliberately chose two totally different genres and BPMs of tracks to give the units some work to do when I hit “sync”) and you’ll see the waveforms populating as the tracks are analysed, and also sync correctly adjusting their BPMs for a beatmix.
There are still DJs who only play this way – just music on a USB, no Rekordbox prep at all – and this will obviously help them. But who hasn’t had a USB shoved in their hand with a hot new track on it, literally at a gig? If that’s you, well – now Rekordbox can handle such files in a much more modern way (in the same way, it has to be said, that Denon DJ’s players have been able to do for years).
It doesn’t seem to be adding musical key information, and won’t bulk analyse files, but maybe these things are coming – we’ve reached out to Pioneer DJ for comment and will update this article when we have more.
What does this mean?
Well, first it is still much better to analyse your files in Rekordbox first and export properly to USB, but as I said – some DJs don’t. (Want to polish up your Rekordbox skills? Check out our best-selling course.)
But secondly, it does further confirm what we already know – namely, that the CDJ-3000s are a fundamental break from the tech of the previous players, in that they’ve basically got “computers inside”.
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This means the pace of development is being dictated by what features Pioneer DJ wishes to add and when, rather than by what’s possible. All of this points, hopefully, to more exciting stuff to come!
Meanwhile though, do test it for yourself if you get a chance, and let us know your experiences.
Phil Morse
