Improve your experience with USBs as a DJ

While using software to DJ is possible in some circumstances, in most cases if you are DJing professionally at clubs or music events you'll be expected to play on Pioneer/Alpha Theta gear using USBs.

With that in mind I thought I'd put down some of the information I've discovered through my time DJing to help other people have a smooth and enjoyable experience.

Format

So the first thing you'll need to understand is how the format of your USBs will affect compatability with equipment.

While the newer Pioneer equipment supports FAT, exFAT, FAT32 and HFS+, older equipment such as CDJ-2000, XDJ-RX1/2 and several other older platforms only support FAT and FAT32, FAT is very limited so FAT32, which tops out at 2TB is, in my opinion the best choice. Having turned up to a few gigs and had my USBs not work, I personally vowed never to use anything but FAT32 until the older kit stops showing up at gigs and frankly that will be a while. Luckily the CDJ 2000 Nexus has had failrly recent updates, as did the RX2 and both now support exFAT, very often the older software is loaded, so do yourself a favour and stick with the best compatability.

Now if you are using Mac, that's pretty easy you just need to select FAT32 when you format your USBs.

If however, you are using windows and you have USBs over 32GB the only options for formatting in FAT32 is an external utility to do the format. There are a few however the ones I've used and found to be good are :

• EaseUS Partition Manager has a free trial that is easy to use.

• FAT32 Format is a simple utility and doesn't require install, also it's free, it's my personal preference.

Rekordbox

For this I won't go into a lot of aspects of dealing with Rekordbox in this post I'll just discuss those things related to USB use.

You can create playlists in a lot of diferent ways, from intelligent playlists, simple playlists etc. Most importantly you need to choose your source of truth, the place that you will make all your changes, that will affect how syn works and how easy it is to keep everything up to date.

So here is my simple process, I always create all changes and playlists in the main library n my machine then sync them to the USBs using the sync function. I also keep all my USBs the same, which for me isn't an issue I have about 2000 which takes about 27GB, my USBs are all 64GB so I have plenty of space.

I carry 2 USBs all the time in teh same case as my headphones so if one fails I have a backup.

The other thing to note is that if you make a change on a USB it will be replicated into teh library when you sync it so be careful of changes you make to USBs such as deleting cue points. If you make changes you don't want reflected in your main library you are better off formatting that USB and resyncing it from scratch.