The idea behind Rekordbox’s Cloud Library Sync is brilliant. Your whole music collection – cue points, loops, playlists – all synced to the cloud, accessible from any laptop, any CDJ, even your phone. Prepare a set at home, finish it on your studio laptop, walk into the venue, log in, it’s all there.
That’s the dream, anyway. The reality is quite different. After spending a lot of time with it in the studio, along with speaking to working DJs, developers, and students at the school, the same advice kept coming back: don’t go there yet.
Where Rekordbox Cloud falls short
These aren’t small problems – they’re the kind of issues that can really disrupt your workflow, cause you to lose track of your music, or worse, leave you scrambling at a gig. And they stem from the way Cloud Library Sync is built: two separate services running in parallel, with Dropbox handling your audio files and AlphaTheta’s own servers managing your metadata in the background.
What makes this harder is that adoption remains quite low, meaning anyone using it today is essentially still an early adopter. As AlphaTheta continues to figure out how this should work, the recommended workflows and workarounds keep shifting. Here are the biggest issues we found:
- The Dropbox integration is a mess – Cloud Library Sync runs on Dropbox combined with AlphaTheta’s own cloud. Rather than letting you use your own account simply, it’s built around a business Dropbox managed by AlphaTheta where you get a sub-account. If you already use Dropbox, they suggest folding your personal account into it – meaning your files now sit on their account. If you don’t, you sign up with Dropbox first and hand over access. AlphaTheta also discourages running the Dropbox desktop app alongside Rekordbox due to conflicts – all of this is something they should be managing, not you
- It’s too easy to break things – The biggest frustration for our students is the “move versus copy” option. Rekordbox originally let you move your music into cloud storage rather than copy it (meaning it vanished from everywhere else). AlphaTheta removed this on most plans, but it still appears during certain operations. Click the wrong thing and you’re in trouble. It’s also easy to create duplicates and hard to know which are safe to delete – and Mac users with iCloud Drive active are particularly at risk
- You can see your music but can’t play most of it – AlphaTheta recommends syncing only specific playlists to the cloud. But say you sync 100 tracks and your full library has 5,000 – when you log in from a CDJ, all 5,000 tracks appear, but only 100 of them are playable – the rest are greyed out. This happens because the audio files and the metadata sync separately. It’s a cluttered, confusing view that shouldn’t exist
- There are privacy concerns – Your entire library – audio and metadata – sits on third-party services you can’t fully examine or control. There’s nothing to suggest any misuse, but your music collection is personal, and if you’re not comfortable with that level of third-party access, you’re far from alone
- The workflow keeps changing – With almost every new Rekordbox release, something about the cloud changes: features get added or removed, and recommended approaches shift. These changes aren’t clearly announced either – you just discover them. If you’re relying on this for gigs, you can’t build a solid workflow on something that keeps moving
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Our Thoughts
We set out to write a full tutorial on Rekordbox Cloud Library Sync, but with these issues, it felt important to make this first. If you’re using Cloud Library Sync, we’d love to hear what’s working for you and what isn’t.
Our hope is that AlphaTheta takes this feedback onboard, because the underlying idea is a good one. Until things improve, our advice is to hold off for anything beyond experimentation. We’ll be the first to tell you when that changes.
Read this next: Rekordbox Auto Loop Bug & How To Fix It
Cloud issues aside, Rekordbox is a powerful platform and there’s a lot to learn. Our Rekordbox Made Easy course covers the software in depth, from setting up your library to getting the most from each feature. You can also find it inside our All-Access Pass, which gets you every course we’ve ever made (and everything we release in the future), for a single lifetime price.
Are you using Rekordbox Cloud Library Sync? How are you liking it? Tell us what is and isn’t working for you in the comments below.
Phil Morse
