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Cue point calculator.
Work out where the cue goes so the drop lands exactly where you want it — 32 bars after you press play, not roughly a minute. Drop a track and it reads the tempo, the first downbeat and the structure, proposes a full set of pads, and exports them as a Rekordbox XML so they land on the record.
Drop a track and get its cue points
WAV, AIFF, FLAC, MP3 or M4A. It finds the tempo, the first downbeat and the structure in this tab, then works the cues out from them. Nothing is uploaded.
The idea
A cue point is a launch point, not a bookmark.
Everybody sets cues at the interesting bits. The interesting bits are not where the cue goes.
You can see the drop. It is the loudest thing on the waveform and you do not need a pad to find it. What you cannot see is the point thirty-two bars earlier — the place you have to press play for the drop to arrive on the phrase you have planned it for, in the record that is already running.
That is the whole calculation: cue = the moment you want, minus the lead you want, snapped to a bar. It is trivial arithmetic and almost nobody does it, which is why so many transitions are a scramble of pitch-riding in the last eight bars.
Doing it in advance changes what the mix feels like. You are not listening for a moment to react to; you know the drop is coming in exactly a minute and you spend that minute on the EQ instead.
| Lead | 120 BPM | 128 BPM | 140 BPM | 174 BPM | What it is for |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 8 bars | 16.0s | 15.0s | 13.7s | 11.0s | A cut or a quick swap. Not really a blend. |
| 16 bars | 32.0s | 30.0s | 27.4s | 22.1s | The working default for faster styles, where 32 bars is a long time to hold two records. |
| 32 bars | 64.0s | 60.0s | 54.9s | 44.1s | The club default. A minute at 128, which is enough to be deliberate about it. |
| 64 bars | 128s | 120s | 110s | 88s | A long blend. Needs an intro and an outro that can carry two full minutes. |
The set
What a good cue set looks like
Eight pads, and a way of using them that survives a bad night.
Eight is a small number and the temptation is to fill it with landmarks — every drop, every breakdown, the vocal, the riser. That is a map, and a map is something you read, which is the one thing you have no time for in the middle of a mix.
A set that works is mostly launch points, ordered the way you would play them, so the pad you want is the one to the right of the pad you just hit. The proposal here follows that: start, mix in, breakdown, drop, second drop, mix out. Move any of them a bar at a time, rename them to whatever you actually call them, and delete the ones you would never press.
| Pad | What it is | Why it earns a pad |
|---|---|---|
| A · Start | The first downbeat. | So the record starts on a beat rather than on whatever silence the file begins with. The one cue everybody sets by hand on every track. |
| B · Mix in | A calculated lead before the first drop. | The only cue on the list you cannot see on a waveform, and the one the page exists for. |
| C · Breakdown | Where the kick leaves. | The place you mix out of when the next record is a bigger one, and the place you cut to when the floor needs a break. |
| D · Drop | Where the kick comes back. | For a needle-drop into the loudest part when you have misjudged the room. |
| E · Second drop | The one after the second breakdown. | Skipped on records that only have one, rather than padded out with a duplicate. |
| F · Mix out | The outro, or the last 32 bars. | Where you start bringing the next one in, so the end of the record is not a surprise. |
Getting them onto the record
The Rekordbox export, and what it carries.
A cue point on a web page is a number you have to type in at three in the morning.
Rekordbox's XML format has a TEMPO element and a POSITION_MARK element, and Rekordbox honours both. So the export here is not a list of times — it is a track that arrives already gridded, with the tempo, the first downbeat and up to eight hot cues on it. Everything past the eighth is written as a memory cue rather than dropped.
The one thing it needs from you is the folder. A browser is told a dropped file's name and nothing else, and Rekordbox matches on the full path, so without it the import arrives as a missing file. Paste the folder and it lands on the record.
The same writer is behind the playlist converter, which will do a whole folder at once if what you want is a gridded playlist rather than a cued track.
Without a file
It still works on the numbers alone
Type a tempo and you get the whole phrase ladder from bar one — every 8, 16 or 32-bar boundary as a timecode — plus the same calculation against any moment you type in seconds. That is enough to set cues by hand in software that will not import anything, and it is the answer if you are planning rather than preparing.
What the file buys you is the tempo being right, the first downbeat being found, and the drops being where the tool says they are. The phrase counter is the page for checking all three by ear before you trust a cue set built on them.
Frequently asked
Common questions
Where should I set cue points on a track?+
The one everybody sets is the first downbeat, so the record starts on a beat instead of on a second of silence. After that the useful ones are not landmarks, they are launch points: a cue placed a fixed number of bars before the drop, so pressing play there puts the drop exactly where you want it. That is what this page calculates. A breakdown cue and a mix-out cue near the outro round out a set that fits on the eight pads.
How many bars before the drop should the cue go?+
Thirty-two is the club default, because it is a phrase of phrases and it gives you a minute at 128 BPM (60 seconds) to get the levels right, work the EQ and let the room notice. Sixteen is the quicker one for busier styles — 22 seconds at 174. Sixty-four is a long blend and needs an intro that can carry it. Whatever you pick, the number that matters is that it is a whole number of phrases.
What is the difference between a hot cue and a memory cue?+
A hot cue sits on a performance pad — press it and the track jumps there instantly, mid-set. A memory cue is a marker: the player can seek to it and it shows on the waveform, but it does not have a pad. There are eight hot cue slots per bank and effectively unlimited memory cues, so the rule of thumb is that anything you might hit under pressure gets a pad and everything else gets a marker. This tool fills the eight pads in playing order and writes the rest as memory cues rather than dropping them.
Will the cues actually import into Rekordbox?+
Yes, with one condition: Rekordbox matches a track by its full file path, and a browser is never told where a dropped file lives. Paste the folder the track sits in and the XML lands straight on the record — grid, tempo and cues. Leave it blank and Rekordbox will import the track as a missing file, which you can relocate but which is more work than pasting a path. The XML also carries a real beat grid, so the track arrives already gridded rather than needing analysis.
Does this work with Serato or Traktor?+
Not as a file — Serato writes its cues into tags inside the audio file itself and Traktor keeps them in its own collection database, neither of which is a format you can hand somebody a download of. The plain text and CSV exports are for those: eight lines with the timecode, the bar and the name, which is quicker to type in than working them out again.
Why do the cue times snap to a bar?+
Because a cue a beat early is the most expensive kind of wrong. The mix sounds fine for eight bars and then arrives a beat out at exactly the moment the room is paying attention. Snapping every answer to the bar makes that failure impossible from this side, and it means the number you read is the number a beat-gridded player will jump to.
Does it upload my track?+
No. The file is decoded and analysed in this browser tab and there is no upload endpoint behind the page. Nothing about the track, its name or its audio leaves the machine.
Explore
Phrase counter · DJ metronome · Beatmatch trainer · Transition timer · Beats to time · Playlist to Rekordbox XML · Tracklist maker · Waveform generator · Hot cue · Memory cue · All tools
Build the set these cues are for
DJ terms on this page: Hot cue · Memory cue · Beatgrid · Phrase · Bar · Quantize · Needle drop · Drop · Full glossary