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Serato crate reader.
Open a .crate and see what is in it. Drop the whole _Serato_ folder and the library database comes with it, which is what turns a list of filenames into a list of tracks — then take it to Rekordbox, an M3U8 or a spreadsheet.
Drop your _Serato_ folder
Or just the crates from _Serato_/Subcrates. Drop the whole folder and the library database comes with it, which is what turns a list of filenames into a list of tracks. Nothing is uploaded.
It sits at the root of whichever drive your music is on — including a USB stick.
What is actually in the file
A crate is four bytes, a length, and a payload.
Nobody documents this format, which is why every tool that reads it either guesses or gives up.
Serato writes crates, the library database and its smart-crate rules in one container: a flat run of chunks, each a four-character tag, a 32-bit length, and that many bytes. No header, no magic number, no index. A crate file starts straight in on a vrsn chunk and ends when the bytes run out.
The first letter of each tag is its type, which is the only reason a general reader is possible: o means the payload is more chunks, u a 32-bit number, b a single byte, and t, p and v mean text.
And that text is UTF-16 big-endian with no byte-order mark, which is the trap. Every other DJ file on disk is UTF-8, so a reader that assumes gets H\0o\0u\0s\0e and concludes the file is corrupt. It is not corrupt; it is sixteen-bit and back to front relative to almost everything else a modern program reads.
The two files
Why the whole folder is the answer
One holds where your tracks are. The other holds what they are.
| File | What it holds | On its own |
|---|---|---|
| _Serato_/Subcrates/*.crate | An ordered list of file paths, relative to the drive root. Plus the columns you had showing and the sort order. | Filenames. Useful for rebuilding a playlist, useless for reading it. |
| _Serato_/database V2 | One entry per track in the library: title, artist, album, genre, tempo, key, length, bitrate, sample rate, colour, added date, and about thirty booleans about play state. | Your whole library with no playlists in it. |
| _Serato_/neworder.pref | The order the crates appear in the sidebar. | Nothing this page needs, and it is skipped. |
The join is on the file path, case-insensitively and with both slash flavours normalised — a library that has been open on Windows and on a Mac has a mix of the two in it. Where the path misses and the filename is unique in the database, the filename is used instead.
Moving out
What comes across, and what does not
Not a migration, and not a comparison of one program against another. Just your crates, in a format something else reads.
The export writes what Serato stored. Titles, artists, albums, genres, labels, tempos, keys and lengths all survive into a Rekordbox XML or a CSV, and the crate structure becomes playlists.
What does not survive is anything Serato keeps in its own private frames inside the audio files themselves: cue points, loops, the beat grid and the waveform overview. Those live in a GEOB tag written into each MP3 or AIFF, in a layout Serato has never published, and nothing outside Serato reads them. Any tool claiming to move your cues across is either reverse-engineering that or guessing.
The tempo and key do come across, which is most of the analysis time — and if you want beat grids as well, the playlist converter will read them off the audio and write real ones into the XML.
Frequently asked
Common questions
What is a .crate file?+
A crate is Serato's playlist. It lives in _Serato_/Subcrates on whichever drive your music is on, and it contains an ordered list of file paths, the columns you had visible, and how the crate was sorted. That is all. There is no artist, no title, no tempo and no key in a crate file — which is why every crate reader that shows you nothing but filenames is not broken, it is just reading the only thing that is there.
Then where does Serato keep the tempo and the key?+
In a separate file called "database V2" in the same _Serato_ folder — one entry for every track Serato has ever seen, with the title, artist, album, tempo, key, length, bitrate, colour label and play state. Drop the whole _Serato_ folder onto this page and the crates are joined against it on the file path, which turns a list of filenames into a real track list.
Where is the _Serato_ folder?+
At the root of every drive that holds music Serato knows about — including USB sticks, which each carry their own copy. On a Mac that is /Users/you/Music/_Serato_ for the internal library plus one per external drive; on Windows it is under Music as well. It is a hidden folder on some setups: press Cmd-Shift-. in Finder or turn on hidden items in Explorer.
Why do my crate names have %% in them?+
Serato has no folders on disk — nesting is encoded in the filename. A crate called "House%%Deep House.crate" is Deep House inside House. This page resolves that back into a tree, which is also why a crate you thought was called something short shows up here with its parents in front of it.
Can I get my Serato crates into Rekordbox?+
Yes, and this is the main reason people open a crate. Export as Rekordbox XML and every crate becomes a playlist, with the nesting flattened into the playlist name. In Rekordbox, Preferences → Advanced → Database, point "Imported Library" at the XML. If you dropped the whole _Serato_ folder rather than just the crates, the tempo and key come across too, so Rekordbox has less to analyse.
Does this send my library anywhere?+
No. Everything is parsed in this browser tab and there is no server behind the page. A library index is a fairly personal document — it lists every file path on your machine — and it should not be uploaded to a website to be read. Open the network panel and watch it stay empty.
Some tracks say "not in the database". What does that mean?+
The crate references a file that Serato's own database has no entry for. It usually means the file was moved or deleted after being added to the crate, or that the crate came off a different drive from the database you dropped. They are listed rather than hidden, because a crate that has quietly lost nine tracks is exactly the thing you want to find out about before the gig rather than during it.
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