AlphaTheta has today opened Rekordbox 7 to public beta. Rekordbox 7, while instantly familiar in look and feel to anyone who has used the previous version, nonetheless has a lot of changes, big and small.
Having spent just a few minutes playing with it this afternoon, here are the biggest things that we spotted. This list is certainly not complete, so please tell us what you find and we’ll add to it as we go! (By the way, notable on the loading page is that the software is referred to as AlphaTheta Rekordbox 7 and not Pioneer DJ Rekordbox 7 – Make of that what you will…):
What’s New In Rekordbox 7
- Auto Cue Point Analysis – Taking a leaf out of Mixed In Key’s book, this adds hot cues/memory cues to your tracks automatically. The analysis takes awhile, but when it’s finished you have (hopefully) usable cues without having to add them manually. There is a control panel where you can specify the number and type of cues and other information to get them close to something you can use
- Related Tracks Playlists now more priminent – This is essentially be the software version of the track filter feature on standalone DJ gear, where you can specify criteria to filter your tunes by in order to choose something suitable to play next. The usuals are there like BPM and Key, but there are lots of other useful options as well. And you can save your favourite searches to appear in the library tree area too
- Collection Radar – This is a similar thing but with an online cloud database. Effectively it suggests tracks to play next based upon what other DJs play, and/or other AI criteria as yet undocumented. There’s a similar thing already in VirtualDJ software. And here you can tell it to suggest tunes from your streaming service too. Again there is a panel that lets you set up the criteria it uses here. This is something completely new and looks like it could be a lot of fun, especially for casual DJ sets
- Dual player improvements – While Export mode has always had two decks if required, now they can be linked for simultaneous playback with a new button, making planning transitions easier
- A completely overhauled preferences panel – I never liked the Rekordbox preferences panel, feeling it was overly cluttered. And now it’s been redesigned with a new navigation, larger fonts and a generally much neater look
Other points
So just a few words on other things we noticed:
- The fonts are tidier and overall it looks cleaner
- It appeared snappier to me – looks like it is Silicon Mac native now
Phil Morse
