How to Turn Your Rekordbox Crate Into a Set-Ready Track List

You've been digging for years. Multiple crates, years of listening sessions, tracks you bought because you loved them and tracks you bought because you thought you might need them someday. Somewhere in Rekordbox right now is a set that would genuinely work — and you have no reliable way of finding it. You've got a gig in two weeks and a collection so full that scrolling it feels less like preparing and more like searching.

This isn't a supply problem. You have plenty of tracks. It's a search problem — you don't know which of the tracks you already own work together, and Rekordbox was never built to tell you. If you're starting from nothing — an empty crate, no back catalogue, just a gig and a blank page — our DJ set planning guide is the right place to start. This piece is for the opposite problem: not too little, too much, with no way to tell the gig-ready tracks from the ones you'll never touch again.

Getting your collection out of Rekordbox

The starting point is an export, not a manual re-entry. In Rekordbox, go to File > Export Collection to pull your entire library as a single XML file, or right-click a specific playlist and export just that one if you'd rather bring in a smaller, pre-sorted chunk first. Either way, the file is the same format — a collection block listing every track, and a playlist tree underneath it recording how you've organised them into crates.

Bring in the whole thing rather than a single playlist if you can. A narrow export only shows you what you already thought to put in that playlist — exactly the blind spot you're trying to fix. The track you forgot you had, sitting in a crate you haven't opened in years, is the kind of find this workflow exists to surface.

Not everything in Rekordbox survives the trip. Title, artist, remixer and label carry over cleanly, as do BPM and key exactly as Rekordbox has them tagged, your genre field, star ratings, play counts, and — usefully — the playlist names each track belonged to, so your existing crates keep their shape once they land in Mixgraph and stay filterable by that original name. What doesn't make the trip: Rekordbox's colour tags (however you've been using them — energy coding, gig-readiness, whatever your own system is), My Tag categories, and cue points or memory cues. Those stay in Rekordbox, on your own copy of the file. Mixgraph isn't trying to replace your prep software — it's answering a question Rekordbox never could: which of these tracks actually work together.

What happens when you import it

Once the XML is in, every track gets checked against the Mixgraph catalogue automatically — you're not manually confirming matches one by one. Tracks that match land as in catalogue: they inherit the full six-dimension read Mixgraph already has for that track — harmonic, rhythmic, energy, groove, mood and vocal — and every chemistry reading involving them is as accurate as it is for any track in the wider Mixgraph catalogue.

Tracks that don't match land as not in catalogue, and it's easy to read that as a downgrade. It isn't. An unmatched track still gets chemistry — Mixgraph reads its BPM and key straight from what you exported and builds a harmonic and rhythmic picture from that alone, at a lower confidence than a fully analysed track. It won't have a groove or mood read, because there's no audio for Mixgraph to analyse. But it still shows up in suggestions, still slots into a flow, still gets a chemistry reading against its neighbours — badged honestly as “BPM + key” so you always know which kind of read you're looking at. Nothing you own gets left out of the picture. It just gets chemistry from what's actually available for it.

A catalogue-only tool would throw out most of what you've spent years building — the last thing a big, established collection can afford. Two-tier chemistry means the white label you bought in 2019 and the bootleg edit a friend gave you sit in the same flow as tracks from the wider catalogue, none of them demoted to a separate spreadsheet just because nobody else has catalogued them.

This is the exact fix for the frustration that got you here — scrolling a crate, trying to remember what actually goes with what. Library import is a Pro feature: bring in your Rekordbox export once, and Mixgraph builds the picture for your whole collection. Matched tracks get full six-dimension chemistry. Unmatched tracks still get chemistry from BPM and key, at an honestly lower confidence. Both types land in the same place — ready to drag straight into Flow Builder together, no manual re-entry, no separate spreadsheet tracking what you think might work.

Auditing what's actually gig-ready

Import gets everything into one place. It doesn't tell you what to play in two weeks. That's a separate pass, done deliberately, not by scrolling until something looks right.

Filter down to the genre and BPM window the gig calls for first — that alone usually cuts a sprawling collection down to something you can hold in your head. Say you're playing a warm-up slot for a tech house night: filter to tech house and house, roughly 120–124 BPM, and you might land on somewhere around eighty or ninety candidates. That's still too many to sequence, but it's a shortlist, not a collection, and it's small enough to triage properly.

Inside that shortlist, three tiers do different jobs:

• Full chemistry, high reading. In-catalogue tracks with strong harmonic and rhythmic links to other tracks on your shortlist. These are safe to sequence into tight transitions without a second thought — the six-dimension read backs it up.
• Basic chemistry, still strong. Not-in-catalogue tracks whose BPM and key line up well with their neighbours. Genuinely usable — give it a listen to confirm the groove and mood actually sit right, since that part isn't read yet.
• Dead weight. Wrong genre for this specific gig, hasn't been touched in years, or no analysis and no strong BPM/key read either. Cut these before you sequence, not mid-build when you're trying to hold an energy arc together and a weak link keeps forcing its way back into consideration.

For the middle tier — the basic-chemistry tracks you're not fully sure of — the Score My Transition tool is worth running against the specific pair you're unsure about before you commit it into a flow. It's a lightweight gut-check on one transition at a time, which is exactly the scale of doubt a “BPM + key”-badged track usually raises: not “is this track any good,” but “does this specific join actually hold.”

Once you've cut the dead weight, check the shortlist against how many tracks the gig needs. The Set Length Calculator gives you a real number for the slot length you're playing, buffer included, so you're not guessing whether eighty filtered candidates are three times what you need or barely enough.

From a filtered list to a shape

Sequencing is a separate skill from filtering, and it's easy to jump straight from shortlist to drag-and-drop without doing it. Alphabetical-by-artist isn't sequencing, and neither is BPM-ascending — ordering everything from slowest to fastest only ever moves a set in one direction, which is rarely what the slot needs. A warm-up wants to build steadily toward whoever follows you. A peak-time slot wants somewhere to arrive and somewhere to land afterward. A closing set is managing a descent the whole way through. Same shortlist, three completely different orders.

Before you start dragging tracks into an order, name the shape you're building toward. The Energy Arc Planner gives you five to choose from — Journey, Peak, Build, Steady, Cooldown — and visualises what each one looks like across your slot length before you've placed a single track. Picking the shape first means every ordering decision after it is answering a specific question — “does this track move me toward the peak I've planned for minute 60” — instead of the vague, unanswerable “does this feel right here.”

This is also where the matched/unmatched split from earlier stops mattering quite so much. A basic-chemistry track with a strong BPM and key read can hold a spot in the arc just as well as a full-chemistry one — the shape cares about energy direction and harmonic movement, and both track types carry a real reading on both. What the shape needs from every track is a clear job: rising, holding, or easing. If a track in your shortlist doesn't have an obvious job in the arc you've picked, it's not ready to place yet, whichever tier it came from.

Building the track list in Flow Builder

With a filtered, audited shortlist and a chosen shape, the actual build is quick — most of the thinking happened in the two steps before this one. Flow Builder reads “My library” alongside the catalogue in the picker, so matched and unmatched tracks from your import sit in the same search rather than two separate places you have to check.

Pick a Formation that fits the gig length before you start dragging tracks in — a Warm-Up Flow is built around 8 slots for a 30–45 minute set, a Club Flow around 12 for a standard 60–90 minute slot, a Peak Time Flow stretches to 16 for 90–120 minutes of main room energy, and a Marathon Flow runs 20 slots for anything over two hours. Starting from the right Formation means the slot count is already roughly right before you've placed a track, instead of discovering at track 24 that you've built a set twice as long as the gig.

Drag your anchor track in first — probably one of the full-chemistry tracks from your audit, something you already know you want to play — and build outward from there. As you place each track, watch the chemistry into its neighbours: that's the same read you triaged on during the audit, just now applied slot by slot instead of across the whole shortlist at once.

If you're on Pro, use slot alternatives for the moments in your triage where you genuinely couldn't decide between two tracks doing the same job — a primary plus up to two real alternatives, each with its own chemistry read against the tracks either side of that slot, so a dud on the night doesn't strand the whole set. That's a better use of a near-tie than leaving both tracks half-considered in your shortlist and hoping you remember to swap one in at the booth.

Keeping the crate current after the gig

Digging never really stops, and neither should the import. Once your collection is imported, new digging folds back into the same place — re-run the import whenever you've added a meaningful batch of new tracks, and Mixgraph matches the new ones against the catalogue the same way it did the first time. You're not starting over each time; you're topping up a picture that already exists.

The unmatched list is more than a chemistry compromise, too. It's a running record of the tracks you own that Mixgraph doesn't have a full read on yet — which is useful information in itself. A track you keep reaching for that stays badged “BPM + key” every time you sequence it is a reasonable candidate to request into the wider catalogue, so it gets the full analysis and stops being the one track in your set you're relying on a lighter read for.

And sometimes the audit itself is the useful part. If filtering your crate for a specific gig turns up a genuine gap — no usable peak-time tracks in the genre you need, or a style you thought you had covered and don't — that's worth knowing two weeks out rather than discovering it the night before. Our mixing guide has genre-specific pages covering BPM ranges, harmonic tendencies and typical transition techniques for exactly this kind of research, so a gap in your crate turns into a shopping list instead of a problem you find out about at the booth.

A crate you've dug for years deserves better than a scroll and a guess. Export your collection, run it through Library Import to sort matched from unmatched, audit what's actually gig-ready, pick a shape with the Energy Arc Planner, and build the real thing in Flow Builder. The collection was always there. This is what finally knowing it looks like.